Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Jason Schreier on EVERYTHING WB Games Did Wrong - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

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Today's stories include even more updates on WB Games and Wonder Woman. The Nemesis System patent expiring in 2036 and 10 games are taking up all the money. We'll have all this and more because this is Kind of Funny Games Daily. Welcome gamers. This is Kind of Funny Games Daily for Wednesday, February 26, 2025. I'm the nitro rifle, Andy Cortez, and I'm joined by The Lock, Roger. Roger, Roger. Happy to be here. Good morning, Roger. Big day. Big day. Big day. A lot of news. A lot of things we got to get to.

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talk shows. Today after Kind of Funny Games Daily, you'll get the games cast where the topic is, very much on topic. How would we save WB games? And the stream afterwards, really big stuff. We're returning to Bless's Dark Souls play through. On the big set. On the big set. Very excited about that.

Snowmike Michael be here. You know what? I don't want to admit that I'll miss him, but I miss him a little bit, Roger. Just a little bit? Just a little bit. I miss the guy. If you're a kind of funny member, you'll get today's Gregway, and you can get Alien versus Predator in review this afternoon.

we're talking about Predator 2 Anybody You want some candy? God, what a movie What a disaster that movie Can't we just talk about that Thank you to our Patreon producers Delaney Twining, Carl Jacobs

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The Roper Report It's time for some news We have five stories today a baker's dozen. And we had five stories, but before we get into the actual real stuff, Greg Miller, come on to this head. Come join us.

CEO, Greg Miller. Yeah. CEO, Greg Miller. Hello, everybody. It's me, Greg Miller. How are you guys doing? He's not getting a $23 billion bonus or whatever. I'm not, unless you go to patreon.com.

That's kind of funny right now. Money where your mouth is. Imagine the last 24 hours for Greg Miller, the biggest DC comics fan, you all know. All right? I get to hang out. I get to see my friends. I get to come to work.

Be great. And then guess what? Jason Schreier comes in. He rips away my heart and soul. He says WB. Games getting rid of monolith, getting rid of this Wonder Woman game, right?

A whole bunch of other shakeups over there. That leads to me running away from Tim Getty's. I'm supposed to be working on these split fiction videos with him, right? Run away from that. Run out here. Do a games cast where I just rant and rave and whatever. Then I'm like, I can finally put it behind me. I can start healing.

But then you're like, we should do a great gamescast today where we save WB games. I'm like, yes, we should. we're going to do that. And I'm like, well, I'll have that morning block, that 10 to 11 to do email, to plan the show, to have a great time. Wake up, Ben says something. I push him out of the way. I look at my phone as I do as I do as a day.

Go to blue sky. And what do I find in my DMs? Daddy, I'm hungry, Ben. Open blue sky and my DMs and I find a DM from the one, the only. Jason Schreier who says, hey, could I come on Games Daily to talk to you and answer some of your all's questions about this WB thing? And I said, yes, because we were wrong or because there's something. He's like, no, no. I'm like, okay, great, great, great.

So please welcome to the show, the one, the only Bloomberg's. Jason Schreier. Hello. Hello, Jason. I like that I get one of these, like, square boxes. Like, what was that, like, 80s? Was there a show or a movie where, like, their people were in these little square things? Brady Bunch? I mean, Hollywood squares, but they were in person.

No, it was like a sci-fi show where, like, the people were, like, captured in these little squares. I don't know. Phantom Zone Superman. I'm thinking of that Michael Jackson video where they're doing that thing. You know, they're looking left in a way. That was a very different. Black or black. You're black.

You know it. Anyway, Jason, welcome to this. I don't know why you wanted to be. That's a different song. Is it? I thought it was. You're saying who's bad. You're black.

Who's bad? You know it? You know. So how does black or white go? It doesn't matter if you're black or white. Is that the one where it turned into a panther or two in the middle of it? I'll never forget. Fox premiered that on just.

regular TV and I was eating this cake my mom made. Jason, how are you? Did you know that Michael Jackson stole a song from Weird Al and he, Weird Al came up with this great hit called Eat It and then Weird Al. And then Michael Jackson was like, oh, I'm going to take that and make beat it. Don't go start on the Beatles either. Jason, how are you, of course, breaking news left and right. How you feeling? Yeah, man. I was in the middle of an interview with someone yesterday and happened to see on my phone, like getting a couple texts that were like, hey, uh, one of Brothers just shut down monolith and canceled Wonder Woman.

And I was like, sorry, person of interviewing, can we reschedule this? So I literally, I like had to cut off the middle of the interview, rescheduled it for today. And then I rescheduled it again because I was like, I'm going to cut on games daily and talk to these guys about Warner Brothers. Because yeah, there's a lot of stuff that I feel like, um, maybe context that people should have or clarity about the situation that people don't have. I mean, just to give you an example. And this is just like one of many things that I've been thinking of. A lot of people are like, oh, fucking David Zazlov ruining everything. Like I can't believe Zazov is doing more tax cuts, blowing up his games business.

But like, Zazlava has nothing to do with this. This is the result. What happened yesterday and what has happened recently is a result of decisions that have been made since long before Zazov took over. Like when Zazlap took over in April 2022, which is when he became CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, Monolith by that point had already gone four and a half years without releasing a game and lost all of its leadership group. So this stuff has done to do with Zazlov. It's kind of this history. You have to look at the last decade of Warner Brothers to understand why and how a lot of this stuff has been happening.

Do you think, so I understand that. Is it still right to just blame leadership in general for WB interactive, right? Is the reason Monolith isn't getting anything out is because everybody's getting in the way of it? Yeah. So, okay, so I think maybe the best way to do this is we can kind of go studio by studio, but I also, I want to answer any questions you guys have because I knew you had some lingering questions. I was watching your show yesterday.

I hope you brought a PowerPoint. I have a PowerPoint. It's like, so we're going to make the next destiny. It's going to be destiny. Wait, oh shit, different PowerPoint. So Warner Brothers Interactive for about 10 years from 2015 on. It was run by a guy named David Hadad who Warner Brothers announced. Last month that he's going to be stepping down because shit has hit the fan.

But for about 10 years, David Dad ran that studio. And when he took over WB Interactive in the Games Division, he inherited this thriving publisher. Arkham Knight had just come out or was about to come out. They were really firing on all cylinders. Mortal Kombat was doing really well. They had a lot of stuff going for them. And over the last decade, they've gone in the complete opposite direction. And we've seen a lot of these studios flounder.

Now three of them are shut down. We've seen a lot of these game franchises go nowhere. We've seen companies like Rock City going, making games that nobody wanted. We've seen companies like WB, Montreal, kind of struggling to get pitches off the ground. And it's really just been a disastrous few years. And the only reason I think that Haddad kind of survived 10 years is because Hogwarts Legacy came out and did such big number. It was such an anomaly that it saved his job for a couple more years. But yeah, I mean, his tenure has not been great.

And a lot of people I've spoken to have worked with him describe it as like this kind of classic executive indecision and refusal to make calls because making calls means exposing yourself to risk. And if you make calls and expose yourself to risk, then you lose your cushy job and it's better to stay seated. And this is also under the landscape of Warner Brothers having all these, this corporate turmoil. So Warner Brothers was AT&T in time Warner merged, and then that didn't work out. And then Warner Brothers got split out under discovery.

And this whole time, there were rumors that the Games Division was for sale. So it's really just a mess from the top on down. And I imagine it was very difficult for any executives to succeed in that situation. But yes, a lot of people point the finger. And I think it's fair to at Haddad for everything that has happened and everything that happened yesterday. Had you heard the same rumor that they were trying to sell off these things, but not the IP? and then license him back and yet da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, that was all public.

I mean, that was never going to happen. Like, nobody is going to buy. Like, why would anyone buy Rocksteady just to then have to pay, like, to license the Batman IP from Warner? Like, it makes no sense because by buying a studio, it's not just that you're dishing out money, however many hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the studio. You then have to pay all those salaries. And I saw this being discussed yesterday when people were like,

why didn't Warner Brothers just sell Monolith instead of shutting it down? It says no one wants to buy an expensive studio in Seattle, pay those salaries, and then have to start from scratcher on a new IP or license Wonder Woman and pay those fees. The math doesn't make sense there. So yes, Warner Brothers was always kind of like in this intractable position. They were never going to sell other than I think they sold one mobile playdemic. It was their mobile division. But the rest of it, I mean, no, they were never going to sell it.

Is it just a situation, Jason, where, these people making these decisions don't really want to be in this business. It just feels like it's, it seems like a lot of people up top that you were mentioning that are too scared to make the, to make the call or to take a risk like that. It feels like they're kind of not in the, I guess, right line of business. It's like they came from a different division. They're like, oh, I don't know shit about games. I'm not really willing to make a call on any of this.

I think part of, so, Haddad and his crew, I mean, some of the, them came from other businesses. He had been at, I believe he was at Vivendi before, Warner Brothers, and before that, he just kind of bounced around toy and entertainment companies and before that Harvard Business School. I think the MBA approach is very much to just kind of avoid making decisions as much as possible. Because yeah, I mean, when you maintain the status quo, especially in a position of like corporate turmoil where you want to be in your chair when all of the dust is settled and like you want to be in making that sweet, sweet executive money for as long as possible, making risky calls and putting big money into things can make you a target. You have to be the person who's like

justifying to your bosses why you decided to greenlight this whatever and give them $100 million to do whatever. Of course, if you don't make calls, you're still burning through tons and tons of money because you're just paying people salaries to like do very little or do nothing and accomplish nothing, but that is seen as less risky than actually making the calls. And that's just one part of this, right? There's also a lot of trend chasing. There's also a lot of just kind of lack of vision, I would say, for a games division and what that would look like. So yeah, I mean, let me get into Monolith, right? Because Monolith is the big story of this week. Monolith just shut down. That is like the big story here. I want to talk about exactly what happened to Monolith, because I think

there's some context that maybe not everybody has. So Monolith has been around for 30 years, 31 years, and I believe it lasted until yesterday, making a whole lot of cult classic games, fear, no one lives forever. But really, in 2014, they had their breakout hit, which is a middle earth shadow of Morador, and that was by far their most successful game. It was critically acclaimed. I think it was nominated, nominated for Game in the Year. That game did really well. They made a sequel, Shadow of War, which didn't do quite as well because people were not fans of the loop boxes. That's a whole other story. I remember that?

God, I forgot all about that being a part of that. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, talk about trend chasing, right? Loot boxes are cool. Let's stick them in this game that, like, has no need for loopboxes. It was very strange. And they removed them like six months later. They were like, oh, shit, this is a bad idea.

We're just going to pull them out. So after Shadow of War, they decide we don't want to do another one. So instead, we want to do a new IP. And the whole leadership group gets together. They start working on this new IP. It's codenamed legacy. The idea is it's going to be like a procedural narrative sort of thing, kind of experimenting with some of the ideas they explored with the nemesis system

and that procedural story generation. And they spent about three years working on this. And during this time, and here is where you get the crux of the like refusal to make decisions. During this time, it's kind of clear to people at Warner Brothers in Burbank and their HQ that like this game isn't going to happen because Warner Brothers as an institution is not interested in new IP. They want to have their game studios working on their big franchises, superhero games, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, etc. Mortal Kombat. But here Monolith is spending all this time trying to make a new IP. And there's a lot of just kind of like, it's almost like a standoff

between the two parties where like Warner Brothers knows they're not going to allow this to happen. Monolith has a lot of sway and a lot of clout because you have these guys who have been working on these games for a while, had a lot of success with the, with the Middle Earth games. And so they feel like they have the autonomy and the clout to be able to do what they want. There are some attempts here and there to kind of like squeeze IPs into this legacy, this game that they're making. Doesn't quite work out. And it really, you know what IPs they were trying to put in?

Do you know what IPs they were trying to put in? I don't know exactly. I mean, I think they tried like on paper experimenting with as many as they like all of them. I mean, just trying to figure out like, can we go out? this onto it. It didn't work. Again, we're talking about three years here. So it went through a lot of different iterations. This was a new IP. New IP always takes a long time. But people there, I mean, they were excited about it looking beautiful and having cool procedural narrative ideas. I don't know if it would have ever worked, but that's what they were doing, right? Cut to you,

2021. I believe it was the spring of that year, maybe like March, April, something like that. But around then, finally word comes down, hey, this is not going to happen. And it's kind of, it was a lot of stringing people along. A lot of different people at different levels were told, like maybe there's a chance of this. Maybe not. Is this going to happen? I don't know. Quick digression here. I don't know about you guys, but I recently, like within the past few years, I've had some experience kind of pitching things to Hollywood executives, people at the the Hollywood streaming networks and whatnot. We have not had that experience.

Gary Witton comes in and complains a lot, but that's about it. That's all I know. I don't know if you guys are out there pitching a kind of funny show. We should be. Greg pitched to John Drake's small Wado. Yeah. Or what if Wado was small video game off the girl. Okay.

Well, Drake, he's the one to go to. He'll green light everything. Yeah. So what happens when you're pitching Hollywood, it's really bizarre. It's they do this thing called the Hollywood know, which is like they say in on these meetings in these rooms. They're like, I fucking love it. Like, this is awesome. Let's keep chatting.

Can't wait to work with you. And then you just never hear from them again. And that I feel like is a lot of what that culture was kind of very much in place in Burbank at WB Games. Because there was a lot of just kind of, especially in this monolith project, a lot of like just months and months and months of dragging things out or like meetings. It was described to me as like people at a high level would go to these meetings with people at Warner and they would leave the room and just like say to each other like what just happened in that meeting. Like was anything actually decided or figured out or was it all just like platitudes? And that's kind of what this is like. What is like working with this regime at Warner.

And it was very frustrating for a lot of people. So anyway, cut to April 2021. Legacy is canceled. and Monolith's leadership team, the entire leadership team, quits every single director. I put this on Blue Sky. Maybe you can screen cap this.

But I put this on Blue Sky. It'll break it's amazing formatting of all of us, but yeah, we can't. Yeah, right? But make another box. It's easy. I'll just do that real quick. You got small water down there.

Put a web browser on Bear, you're killing it, Barry. We know we're throwing a lot of it. That's Barry. All right. Yeah, Bear, killing it. Hold your phone up to your camera, Barry. So Monolith's entire leadership team, if you look at the Moby Games for Shadow of War, you'll see this leadership group.

It's seven people, they're directors. All seven of those people left the studio when Legacy was canceled. I believe six, five or six of them would then go on to start a new company called Cliffhanger Games, which is under EA, and they are currently working on the Black Panther game for EA. Oh, okay. So this is also a other game, I'm sure we'll never see. Wow. let's I'll save that for a future

I see in two weeks I have no idea what's going on but but okay so so they all leave right and so this is also around the time so like mid 2001 this is also around the time when monolith is given

Wonder Woman like basically the decision is made and I don't know exactly who made the call but it's very clear that Warner Brothers isn't interested in new IP and So Monolith winds up taking Wonder Woman and deciding we're going to make a Wonder Woman game. And by the way, if you look at the timing of this, so this is spring 2021, the Wonder Woman game is announced in December of 2021. You guys might remember, I mentioned on Kind of Finding Games Daily, I think around game awards time a few months ago, I was like when Wonder Woman was announced, like that was nothing. Like literally, I mean, if you look at the timeline here, they start working on this game or they take over this game in April,

June-ish of 2021, they announced it six months later, which I think was that probably happened for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons was like, hey, like Warner, we need to light a fire because we need to actually get something shipped here because Monolith hasn't actually shipped anything in four years now and they are starting from scratch. But here's the thing that happens also is that in addition to having to start from scratch on this, on this Wonder Woman project, which, by the way, I think, well, I'll get into the kind of the tech of it all in a sense. But in addition to having to start from scratch on this Wonder Woman project and just basically start a new game, they also no longer have their studio leadership. So they also have to rebuild their studio.

And then it's not just the directors, too, like a bunch of other people under them wind up going to Cliffanger 2 and leaving Monolith. And Monolith is essentially eviscerated at this point. And they have to spend a lot of time rebuilding. And there are a lot of good people remaining there. A lot of people speak really highly of this guy David Hewitt who took over as the studio head of Monolith. and I believe was still there up until the end. But still, I mean, under any circumstances, like rebuilding a studio to that extent alone can take years,

but trying to do that while making a game is like next to it impossible. Like imagine if tomorrow all of Kind of Funnies leadership quit. I mean, maybe that would be good. But like, imagine having to like work on projects while trying to rebuild your studio and like rebuild your company at the same time. It is crazy. And that's what they had to do. It was in a possible situation.

By the way, we're still in the timeline. We're still 2021. So again, a year before Zazlav even took over, a year before WB Discovery even happened. So when you mentioned them showing off that little tiny trailer at Game Awards, that's like the most extreme form of, you know, whenever people always complain, why are you showing this so early?

It's like, well, people do this for recruiting and to try to get new, but this is like the most extreme form of that where it's like, we don't have anybody here, really. Yeah, it was like, we need to recruit. desperately. Also, we need to have something announced because that'll help us. A lot of times if a game studio has something announced, like it can help prevent cancellation a little bit. Obviously didn't in this case, but certainly gave them a little more time than they might have if the game was never announced or something like that. So yeah, and then so there's also this tech issue,

which I won't get into the specifics in part because I don't actually know them all. But like, my understanding is that there was a debate. Are we going to stick with our like internal studio tech? or we're going to use Unreal Engine, and they wound up sticking with the internal studio tech. But the loss of some of their kind of engineering talent that had been around for years and years and helped make that tech made it a lot trickier to do that, even though I'm sure it also had its advantages when you have like a tech that has really good tools or a good editor or whatever else it is. You want to stick with that. But yeah, that would lead to some problems over the next few years as well. So yeah, so they're working on this game, trying to rebuild

studio at the same time really, really difficult, and they go through a lot. And then the game is essentially rebooted. They switch directors. I believe this is like beginning of last year or end of 2023. So close to the time when Greg Miller, insider extraordinaire, said that he heard that it was in trouble. And do you have any idea of how, I know you said it was rebooted, but do you Do you know, like, a percentage of how much in development the game was before it got rebooted? Yeah. I mean, it's hard. None of this is linear, right?

And it's always kind of like an amorphous thing. But I will say the main thing that was rebooted from my understanding is that the nemesis system, they had been playing around with this idea originally that Wonder Woman would have a nemesis system where, like, you'd befriend people. And then they, it's like the nemesis system in reverse where, like, they become your allies. And they were playing around with how to make that work, which is like very in theme with Wonder Woman. so on. And it wasn't coming together. They rebooted it.

They were working on a Wonder Man. Well, kindness, kindness is woke. Yeah. And then they rebooted it to be more of a kind of god of or style, more traditional action, adventure game. But by then, I mean, it was kind of too late, especially because last year was so bad for the Warner Brothers organization. last year Suicide Squad was a humongous flop.

They wrote off $200 million because of that. Multiverses and quiddish champions also both flopped, wrote off another $100 million because of that. Last year was so bad that that is essentially what led to Warner Brothers ousting Haddad and then everything that has just happened. And so, yeah, that's kind of what led us to today. I had been hearing for a while for at least the last couple of months that Wonder Woman was almost certainly getting canceled.

I alluded to it in the story that I ran a few weeks ago about Warner Brothers and like Haddad's regime. I think I said a couple times in that in that article that the fate of that game was in question. In fact, J.B. Perrette, who I'll get to in a second, but he's the big boss of the games division. He had been saying that like we're going to focus on these big franchises and one of them, the main ones are, I think it's Harry Potter Given Thrones, Mortal Kombat, and then DC. But DC specifically Batman, he would mention. So he would be like, we're open to other ideas, but like specifically focus on. So very clear that like, and Rock City is doing a new Batman game. I reported that a couple of weeks ago, but very, very early.

What about Captain Boomerang? Like, no, no, no, Batman. Yeah, right? It's very, I mean, if you look at how we got here, it's all very wild. Like the fact, man, suicide squad, I could go on forever about that game. And the fact that you take a studio that is renowned and acclaimed for making. making these single player narrative action adventure games and put them on a multiplayer live shooter. That alone is just like such a like unfathomable misstep.

But also going with the suicide squad is just crazy. Why do they keep trying? Stop. It's really here. Talk about it was in the bag. You made Batman. You made the Arkham series. Just make these kind of games.

I think if it had the slip knot guy from the movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jason, I want to ask, I know we're talking about. monolith, but player first games, right? Like, that was something that them closing down, we heard about multiverses, of course, ending support, right?

But then them buying the studio seven months ago and then shutting it down, do you have any information on that? Or what was the, you know, the idea behind that? Yeah. I'm trying to think. I mean, I've heard a couple of things secondhand that I don't feel super comfortable sharing publicly yet, but I will say that in a situation. That's a journalist.

I don't know. I often say things on this show and then they get aggregated. No, I will say that in a case like that, like when you have a studio acquisition that is kind of tied to the release of a game, sometimes the studio has some leverage in cases like that where it's kind of like, hey, if you want this to be a long-term relationship, if you want us to keep working on this game, assuming it's a success, let's put a ring on it. If you want it, then put a ring on it and let's make this a long-term relationship, that sort of thing. And I imagine that something similar happened here, but I'm not 100% sure. But I do know that, like, them buying player first was a bet that multiverse's was going to be a success, which they really thought it would be. It'd be paying it out, Roger. Yeah.

Snake eyes on that bet. Yeah, man. But I want to get to, I want to talk about the current kind of regime. So, well, hold on. I want to stop you because you got a lot in the tank here. You want to talk about the other studios. I got questions about WB Montreal. all you have all this up your sleeve yeah i will get to that in a second then what i want to do i want to do

i think we should do the ad break here is all i'm saying remind everybody of course we can only do cool stuff like this live i can do the i can advertise for warner brothers here warrothers it's a great place to work sounds like it pad your resume for three more months before it's all over we couldn't do stuff like this have jason run in here on our cool video wall without your support uh we are kind of funny we're all about live talk shows and if you love that we'd love you to pick up a kind of funny membership either on on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny, YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny games, Apple or Spotify, to get all of our shows ad-free, and of course get your daily dose of me, Greg Miller,

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We're officially switching this into the kind of funny games cast. Oh, wow. Okay. So if you've made it into this games cast long enough on your podcast feed saying, oh, they uploaded games daily. We didn't. We just are like, Jason's too good. We'll do games daily after this in the place of a kind of funny games cast.

So this is your games cast. Games daily will happen after this. I digress. Jason, back to you. I just sabotage the entire structure. No, you made it. I don't know if you heard earlier when we were just ranting and raving about the cake

my mom served me or Michael Jackson's It's hard to derail this. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. You're killing it, Jason. Thank you so much for doing this with us. Sure, yeah. So let me just finish a thought real quick

and then I'll open it up to you guys to ask other questions or about the other studios, whatever. So Hadad is gone. So in his place is this guy named J.B. Perrette, who is the head of games and streaming. And he, I think he's going to kind of slow down the search for a successor to be like the new president of W.B. Games. And I think he's going to take over and step in. And this is part of him being like, we need to return to profitability after an awful year. We're making these cuts. We're canceling this game. We're going to try to get refocused on all this other stuff. And from a kind of, I talked to him once. I talked to Perrette a few weeks ago. He strikes me as a smart guy, as a guy who knows what he's talking about. He talked a little bit when I was talking to him about like how game development is a nonlinear process. And he's understood.

that and he understands that and I was like holy shit like you're saying something that like most studio heads like it took them 20 years ago if you realized it at all you've been doing this for a year and hold on time out I love how smart you are and I love how smart we are but so many people what is a non-linear process when it comes to games what does that actually mean meaning that like meaning that like you would think that it's kind of like I don't know like writing a book or writing a script or you just kind of like do things in order and they happen and you can kind of like holistically look at that as opposed to game development where you might have fits and you might work on features only to find that they're not actually fun and you have to like completely throw them out and they completely change how things work or like you build a level and then the combat system changes and so you have to redesign your entire level to account for the new combat system that sort of stuff where it's just all constantly changing all the time um it's like us I mean yeah it's not like you could argue that like that is one of the reasons game to level and it's so expensive and maybe that's a problem but that's a whole other different.

kind of funny games daily anyway this guy jb who took over he came in made this fucking shitty awful call to like cut a bunch of jobs which is part of his like mandate to restore profitability yada yada yada um but i do think there's like a little bit of ray of hope i mean i guess we'll see how he does taking over the role now i've heard good things from people around him people say he like asks the right questions people are certainly higher on him than they were on hadad i think a lot of people all across the org, studio heads all across WB are not exactly crying to see Hadad Go to see a regime change there. I think there was a lot of frustration towards him.

And I do think there is like a vision of the future for W Games that looks pretty good. It just might take a few years before we actually get there. Do you think they get enough time to get there? Yeah, because like I don't see them doing this only to then just like double back and cost. I guess you never really know. But like I think Zazlov like as early as like recently as a year ago

was being like Hogwarts legacy. Holy shit, this is the future. Like I think they are interested in doubling down on games and really just kind of they see games as a place of growth. And their strategy for doing that is to double down on the big franchises, which seems like a smart one. I guess we'll see what happens. I mean, Hogwarts legacy was such an anomaly that if they're

expecting all their other games to hit that level they're in for a rude awakening oh but when is an executive board ever had misplaced you know sales expectations yeah even like Hogwarts legacy too there's no way that it meets those same levels of expectations because the hunger for like a new harry potter game is so not there anymore it's been satiated but yeah we'll see we'll see yeah that was i kept on bringing up that point yesterday in the games cast it's like that's the best and worst thing that could have happened to wb games i think like it obviously made a shitload of money and 30 plus million copies. It was 30 million copies as of October of last year.

So who knows where it's at now. But like now everybody thinks up top that like every game can do that. Now all of our stuff can do that. It's like no, man. Like Harry Potter is, the people buying Harry Potter are the people that are also playing free to play Call of Duty and Fortnite. And those like there's such a massive fan base there that isn't necessarily going

out to buy Uncharted 4. Now we're back to Matt Piscitella, right? Exactly. Talking about this 40% that play, you know, this one game. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's, uh, I, I get the sense that someone like Perred is smart enough to recognize that that's not going to happen, but I think their standards are going to be pretty high. Like, these are all going to be big investments that they expect to be billion-dollar franchises or billion-dollar games.

Like, I don't think they are going to settle for like a game that sells two million copies. So we'll see what that looks like. Okay. So that's the executive team. That's the monolith stuff. One thing I was wondering yesterday, you know, you'd heard rumors that this Wonder Woman game would be canceled forever. Had they also been expecting the studio closure? Was this news to everyone yesterday?

Complete shock and surprise to everyone. I mean, it makes sense if you think about it. Like, here's a studio that is not really the same people that it was eight years ago when they released the last game, hasn't released a game in that long, would have to start from scratch on a new thing or be a support studio, which, I mean, what is. there to support at this point. You already have WB Montreal essentially being a support studio. So like it doesn't really make sense from a, obviously it's awful from a human level,

but if you're looking at it just on paper, like from a sociopath executive level who has to make these decisions, it doesn't really make sense to keep them around if you're canceling the game. But no, as far as like I, so I had heard not forever ago, really it was only within the last month or two, maybe two months ago that I started hearing Wonder Woman was almost certainly going to get canceled.

But no, as far as I know, like, everybody was shocked that the studio was closed, especially a studio with a name with that kind of legacy attached to it. Sure, sure. So then talk to me about W.B. Montreal. You say they're basically a support studio. Where are we at with them? Where do you want to talk about their journey? Yeah, man.

So it's a long one. I mean, they have been around for a long time since like 2010 or something like that. They came out with Arkham Origins, which I think some people appreciate, even though it was always kind of the black sheep of the Arkham games, the one that Rock City didn't want to talk about. Like, and just wanted to focus on their own trilogy. Here's the Arkham Trilogy.

Another game. And then they had a bunch of false starts. So like after Origins, they were working on two games. They were working on a suicide squad game and a Damien Wayne game. And then both of those were canceled one after another. And then they were, they had this new mandate of like,

do a service game and also reinvent. Batman, like do a Batman game without Batman. Eventually the service stuff was kind of stripped out of that, and that is what became Gotham Knights. That's a game that I think had a trouble development, as they all do. Do you know around, for all this reasons? Do you have any idea of like timeline-wise what these mandates were given out and then maybe like pulled out of, hey, we're not doing that service stuff?

Are we talking like 2019, 2018-ish? So that game started development in Gotham Knights in 2017, and that's when the mandate from Haddad and team was they used to word you'd this word this phrase called digitally powered which was like before games as a service became the big term that was it it was like how are we going to like equip these games with long term revenue plans and digital content drops and blah blah it sounds way more fun to their credit games as a service sounds very corporate yeah yeah it does but when you say digitally powered to like people who were at warner at the time they like get a shutter They're like that brings back awful memories.

And yeah, so I don't know exactly when it was kind of like when Gotham Knights ditched that. It was a couple of years into development where it was like, hey, this is no longer the plan. Like we're going to switch gears on this one. But that was a period of like big game as a service stuff, which another thing, by the way, a lot of people have talked about how like in recent years people like Zazlov and J.B. Perret are talking all about games as a service. But the games and service mandate started long, long before that. and this is more executives just kind of like saying what shareholders want to hear because if you look at their current slate of games um they're not games as a hoggwards too is not going to be like a game as a service like batman from russit is not going to be a game as a service wonder woman wasn't going to be a game as a service so um the the concerns this is not a company that is like going all in on game as a service they're going all in on those big franchises but is that because they touch the stove like they fuck around and find out kind of thing like they saw how the industry was going they saw how the industry was going they saw

I mean, with the suicide squad, what happened? No, I think they still believe that there's, like, room for success. Like, I was talking to, I've talked to executives there who talk about how, like, the, there may be a, or there is, like, they can envision a world where, like, you are playing in Hogwarts with your friends and you go hang out with your buddies in Hogwarts and you're all wizards together and taking classes together. And there's, there's like, they have these kind of fantasies in their heads about games, is a service that might work.

It's just that these particular projects that are currently in development, I'm sure they have a game of service at some point somewhere, but those are not them. They're also focusing on mobile, by the way. They're doing a lot of stuff in mobile

that they hope will hit in a way that some of their other mobile games did not. I cannot imagine the amount of times metaverse was thrown around at any of these meetings when you talk and you go with your friends to classes at Hogwarts.

Like that sounds like... I'm late for my 930 potions class. Yeah, that sounds like such a... like directive of we also need to be in this sphere. That's so sad. It's so funny. It's so funny. But it's also, I mean, you can see that working, right? Like Hogwarts MMO. I remember there were Hogwarts like muds back in the day that were incredibly popular. People role playing in the Hogwarts universe. It's, it's, it's an appealing proposition for a lot of people, I think. Yeah, I, that sounds really good, but then I also think about that could just be a Fortnite mode. You know what I mean? I feel like that's

the inevitable place where we're going to go. Like, have you heard anything about that? Like, I know that James Gunn talked about how he wants to collaborate more with Fortnite in the future. Is that something that's on the table as maybe an alternative to what they're doing or what they were doing? I don't know. I can't imagine it's a significant part of their revenue if it is. So then for W.V. Montreal, obviously, Gotham Knights doesn't do well. Where does that leave them?

Yeah. So they wound up in this kind of a morphist position, sort of like what happened to monolith that I was mentioning earlier where it was kind of this back and forth of like meeting after meeting and them trying to pitch things and never really getting a no but not getting a yes either or it would be like yeah we're really excited about this um uh so are you going to give us a budget or a timeline no just like keep working on that like keep doing what you're doing like those are the conversations that people would have which i imagine was infuriating for a lot of people um yeah so w mimiatriol after gotham nights um their original vision was like hey we know this isn't perfect but we have all this

tech we have this team together we have this chemistry why do we do like a miles morales style like 1.5 gotham nights game that really just kind of like takes out of that stuff and like makes it a lot better and that was canceled after the performance of gotham nights uh so that was that was that was acts yeah sad it's it's it's really sad because like companies these days maybe because budgets are so high just don't give teams the opportunity to kind of learn for mistakes and make the kind of the, I don't know, the Mass Effect 2 or the Uncharted 2 or the Assassin's Creed 2, like the game that really

builds on the foundation and makes something really great. Instead, we keep reliving this cycle, right, where it's like all these former AAA devs leave the big company to go start their own thing and they bit off away, bite off more than they can chew, they make a game that isn't, is maybe a 7, and then yeah, they get closed, their funding gets taken away, or absurd venture buys their entire studio,

I don't know. Andy, you keep raising your hand. Well, I wanted to bring up just the development of Gotham Knights, and it kind of reminds me of like the story of Vailgard where it was going to be a games as a service game and they had to sort of reinvent it and make it a single player RPG where like when we talk that this game was to be a game to service are we talking destiny style and was there a whole lot of we have to reboot this project happening with Gotham Nights no Jagged age they had to reboot a lot of things and this

they did not because if you look at the structure of this game I mean it's already when I say service I mean the idea was like in Gotham Nights you would still be teaming up with their friends multiplayer. It would be the same sort of game. It's just like for the year after development or the years after development, we would be releasing new boss packs and like stuff for you to do. It was just kind of like an ongoing content plan. So it's not like they drastically change the game as far as I know. It sounds digitally powerful to me. And with that like the the way Gotham Knights had structured, it definitely is built to kind of have that. They just didn't do it. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, exactly. And then so yeah, so after Gotham Knights,

1.5 was canceled. They wound up pitching a Constantine game before realizing after months of pitching that like Burbank was never going to say yes to that and just kept dragging them along. They wound up, I think Burbank, the people in WB, when I say Burbank, that essentially means WB games corporate. I think they said like, hey, do, why don't you do something about on the Flash or Joker? And they picked the Flash and wound up working on that, but then that didn't happen. There was a lot of, I think there was a belief from W. in Burbank that like WB games Montreal had kind of they couldn't be trusted to make new games after Gotham Knights was such a failure and that they should become a support studio and while some of these pitches were going on a lot of the people from Montreal got put on Wonder Woman and even some other games throughout the org and so they essentially were turned into a support studio for WB but Burbank didn't want to say that to the company like they didn't want to say like hey we're going to make you a support studio so instead they kept dangling like this idea that they could pitch something and I believe the current state of things

is that they're pitching a new Game of Thrones game. So we'll see if that happens. It would be fun to see. Who's pitching the Superman game over there, Jason? What the hell? I feel like there has never been a Superman game. Like maybe ages ago there was like a pitch deck of one. But I've never heard anything concrete about a Superman game actually happening there.

Why would you? He's kind of overrated. All right, everybody. He's also like almost impossible to, to design around, you know, because he's just way too overpowered and we already played crackdown. Yeah. And like, you know, Superman 64

like flying through rings, like how can you top that? I remember hearing that like Rocksteady was adamantly opposed and was like, we will never make a Superman game like we fucking hate Superman. What are we idiots? Yeah. That's incredible.

That's fair. That's fair enough. That's fair enough. Greg, do you remember years ago? I think we were at the J.W and the rumors of, oh man, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to blow up your spot here. Sorry in advance.

But there were rumors about Superman floating around that being tied to Rock City. And I ran into you and I was like, hey man, like, sorry, Rock City's not making Superman. And you were like, oh, I know they're making suicides God. I was like, wait a minute. You know more than you're letting on, Greg Miller. You're not, you're keeping some insider info to yourself. Jason, I have so many secrets.

I don't even tell you. how could you not tell me? This is why I'm always so quick when people are like, fucking games journalist, I'm like, I'm not. I'm not. I'm somewhere in between. I'm a pundit, a critic and entertainer or whatever. You're a CEO.

You know how much. Oh, yeah, I'm a dirtbag CEO. Shareholders, I got to satisfy the shareholders. So much of what kind of funny does is infotainment. I don't know what you want to call it, right? But it is the idea that there's wrestling K-fabe all the time. So, yeah, no, when I was wearing the Superman's shirt, psyched at ETH.

Like, I knew that Rocksteady was not making a Superman game. But I'm so, the one thing you and I need to talk sometime privately, like we did at Dice, about like, I have a multiple source. There was a Superman game in development in the past. Decade now. I'm old. You know what I mean? I'm talking about, I think I was at IGN when I originally heard this.

And I, from two different people that I have full trust and belief in, but I've never heard anyone talk about it. Which studio? I can't say that. I don't want to say that publicly. Okay. I'll tell you. We'll discuss.

Yeah, exactly. Greg, I think we have lunch. I think we have lunch plans at GDC. We can discuss. Yeah, we do.

But I had to move them because of this demo. I'll tell you later, man. We'll figure that. I'll tell my wife what to tell you about the Superman game. When you tell her with problems, I'll be back to it. Perfect.

Perfect. Uh, Jason, I know we only have you for about 10 more minutes before your heart out. Yes. What else do you need to cover? What else do you need to tell? I have to get on a call with the person who I had to interrupt yesterday.

Tell them we appreciate their sacrifice. We appreciate them doing this for us. I will. What do you, what else is there to say about WB games right now and where they're at? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, so, so Mottolith is no more, player first is no more, WB, San Diego is no more. So they're definitely consolidating.

I think it's, it's, I think they're, man, with the, Overall industry vibes, there's no sense of security about anything or anyone. But I do think that like Rocksteady and W.Montreal and Avalanche, obviously, some of these studios are in more secure places now as a result. Like the big cut just happened. I can't imagine there will be more cuts in the next year or so. But again, you never know what the games industry. But like, as of right now, it seems like this is their big, drastic move.

and now they're going to see what the fruits of like this new strategy look like over the next couple of years. So there are reasons to be bullish about like the remaining lineup. But it's just so tragic and so sad that like all these people who worked at Monolith, some of whom had been and have now not shipped a game in eight years and will not ship one for who knows how much longer because of this. And it's just so sad and tragic that all of these people are just kind of like swallowed into this corporate like drama. Grinder. Just like net net like casualties of that. And yeah, it's just sad like having having the wrong people in charge or people in charge

who like don't make decisions or don't have a strong vision. It can just be so cataclysmic. And it's a hard job, man. It's like I was having drinks to someone at dice. It was like, have you ever thought about things from a publisher's perspective from the perspective of someone who do us who has to go through the spreadsheet and make the job cuts? And I was like, first of all, I'm a lot more sympathetic for the people who lose their jobs and have to worry about how to feed their families. But sure, I do have a little bit of sympathy for that position. It's a tough position I'm in.

But that's why you're paid a million dollars a year to do it is because you are trusted to run things in that role. And so having the wrong people in charge, having the wrong people in charge for a really long time can just be so cataclysmic in so many ways. I know how tough it is. Because we, you know, Greg had to counterpick GTA6 on our fantasy critic league. You know what I mean? Tough decisions. Tough decisions out there. That is tough, especially because when it gets delayed, you're going to be like, damn.

No, that's what I want. I counterpicked it. I counterpicked it. I don't want it. A better example is when Kevin comes over and he's like, hey, can we refill the K-Garator? And I'm like, oh, how much is it? I don't know if I want. Of course, Andy and Roger, you have computers.

I'd love to get super chats involved. over here. CJ splits on, yeah, no, it's already gone, I can't see it. Oh, there it is. Bander, S.N. I'm sorry. He said, anything about TT games? We didn't cover that. Jason, what's going on with TT games? Obviously, I know Arthur Parsons and a whole bunch of them left. They went and made that Funko game that was not great.

And I don't hear anything about the Lego franchise anymore from them. Yeah, they actually are one of the few studios in the umbrella that has a game coming in the near future. They do have a Lego game coming. I believe it's for next year. I could be misremembering. It's either later this year or next year, I think next year. but yeah there is a new lego game coming i won't blow up their spot and say what it is but yes there's a new like a game coming imminently there's also by the way there's like that harry potter definitive

edition with dLC thing that is coming as well um so there are a couple of things there's also that game of thrones like weird mobile game that has like everybody in it yeah we were all mentioning that casualty yeah um yeah jesus uh jesus suddlesworth has a super chat asking about on this rumored Batman Beyond game. Is it true? What can we... I haven't even heard that rumor. What is the rumor exactly?

PlayStation exclusive Batman Beyond game. Part of the strategy to stay afloat. PlayStation would have to drop a bag. That doesn't sound like a rumor. That sounds like... That's him pitching. That sounds like people on Reddit really hoping. Listen, Jesus, know your place.

I mean, I know that... I've said before I reported a couple weeks ago, Rock City is making a Batman game. returning to their roots. I don't know exactly what it is. It's still pretty early days. I was going to say, did they know what it is yet at this point? Yeah, it's still, it's like kind of, it's early. It's early days on that. But I worry a little bit about that because they're going to run into a similar problem that Monolith did where they've lost a lot of leadership. And so Sefton Hill and Jamie, Seth, or, uh, uh, uh, Sefton and Jamie, the, uh, founders of Rockstar, Jamie Walker and

Sefton Hill, the two founders of Rocksteady left and formed a new studio called Hundred Star and they've recruited some of their former colleagues. So there was some talent train there, which by the way, under Huddod's leadership, like we saw the directors of monolith leave, founders of Rocksteady leave, a bunch of leadership in Montreal leave, like a lot of attrition at the level of people that had to work with. Ringing endorsements. What the plan was over there. I know it's very early on Jason and any of the James Gunn sort of, you know, conversations that we mentioned yesterday. Do you know, do you have any information as to how James Gunn would try to be involved in

any WB games development in any of what is happening with Rock Sedy or WB games? Or is he even involved? Because like, yeah, because like when he was talking about stuff, it seemed like he was just kind of on the outset. Like they'd be like, oh, would you want to do a Marvel Rivals thing? It's like, yeah, maybe. Like, it didn't seem like he was that involved with the whole process. I think that was, well, I don't know.

I mean, I get the feeling that that's more about the headlines and the stories than it is what's actually happening on the ground. But I don't know. It would be happening with very narrow group of people. So it's possibly just hasn't trickled down to me. But I imagine it's more like gun coming in and being like, hey, like story people. Like here's what we're doing. Let's make sure that this is all canon or whatever. And let's make sure this all kind of sinks together.

But this idea, it's always been a kind of flight of fancy to be like, we're going to have the. DCverse and they're all going to be connected, the movies and the games, and that's never going to happen. The timelines are all just like completely, completely different. But if they introduce the multiverse, then it works. And it's just that, you know, all over a little. Yeah, exactly. That's what you need, man. We need more multiverse.

Everything in Fortnite. Exactly. Oh, gosh. Do you have any, uh, anything to talk about regarding the nemesis system? Oh, yeah. I always have something to talk about. What do you mean regarding the, like, uh, the future plans, Padden. I know, you know, we've seen many, you know, we've seen many people.

people report that the nebis system is padded until 2036. I was going to say it's coming up right in our next show, Games Daily. I mean, that's a new story about the year when it expires. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think that stuff is overblown because, like, I don't know. A lot of that is tech and you're not going to recreate it somewhere else. But also, like, I don't really think many game developers are out there being like, we want to copy exactly what the nemesis system does.

Like a lot of people have been playing around with procedural storytelling in different ways, but like with or without a patent, I can't imagine a ton of AAA studios being like, we are going to make this exact same thing. And if they do something different, that may be like experiments with similar ideas, but feels different than it wouldn't violate the patent. So I don't know. I think that has been, that story has been pretty overblown, is my gut. It's a weird thing to patent a video game. It really is. Yeah. It is.

But man, if we have more time, I would go on and on. about the patent trolling that led to the creation of essentially led to Bobby Codick taking over Activition. Actually, go read Play Nice. I was going to say, I do know this from Play Nice, of course. I read it with my ears. Oh, wow. Me too. Very good.

As one does. As one does. But, yeah, patent trolling was Ralph Bayer, who was the creator of the Magnumox Odyssey, was like a notorious patent troll and won all these patent lawsuits for like patenting sports games, essentially. It's a pretty crazy part of video game history. there it is. Play nice, the rise,

fallen future of Blizzard Entertainment Jason's latest book. I also told Jason that I signed up for like my third Bloomberg subscription. Oh nice. I was like, I was just like, no,

no, no, I have like two other running ones. I still think it. I got to look at Rocket Money to tell me how to like which one to cancel. But yeah, I had to sign up for a third one yesterday. I had to get that article.

Can I just say you don't, I tweet gift links to all of my articles on Blue Sky. Not on, I said tweet, but like I don't you're shorter anymore. Blue Sky is I post, gift links all my. my articles. You can just read them for free there. You don't have to subscribe. Subscribe if you don't

want to subscribe to Bloomberg. But I appreciate it, Andy. Yeah, well, you're the go, Jason. I'm going to tell my bosses that I got three subscriptions all from one person. Of course. Um, well, Jason, that's going to do it for us here. Thank you so much for all of your time and all of your patience with us. Sorry, it took so long to get to your portion of it. We had to talk about, you know, some Michael Jackson songs. It's very weird. And I don't want you to leave empty handed, Jason. I know you're always looking for scoops. You're looking for threads to tug on, all right? I don't. I don't don't know if you've heard about stars in the bank. All right. Now, we have a very successful game show here called Kind of Funny Game Showdown. And I do have stars in the bank, which will

allow me to steal three stars from Tim. It's a developing storyline. I haven't seen Bloomberg cover it. You know, so I'm just putting it out there. VGC's always knocking on my door. Jordan Midler always trying to get an interview. I'm like, I'm a chasing man, Midler. Get out of here. So just something to you think about. Jason, you can ignore all that. Send me the tips. Send Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mike at Bloomberg.

Got it. And we'll check it out. Thank you, Jason Schreier. Thank you. This has been the kind of funny games cast. It has been. For February 26th, 2025.

We appreciate all of y'all. We will see you on Games Daily after this.