Today, February 25, it was announced Warner Bros. is shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and Warner Bros. Games San Diego, as well as canceling Monolith’s Wonder Woman game. This follows multiple stories of turnover at the company, including the shutdown of crossover fighter Multiversus and the bombing of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Warner Bros. has been struggling on several fronts in recent years, including trouble in its television and film arms. Following Warner’s mishandling of so much talent and so many otherwise reliable franchises, the creatives who made great games like the Middle-earth series have now been caught in the crossfire. One deeply frustrating wrinkle in this is that one of Monolith Productions’ greatest claims to fame has been patented by the same company that just shut down the studio.
2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was one of the best surprises of that year. One of the most notable parts of the Lord of the Rings spin-off was the Nemesis system, a clever mechanic that married gameplay and narrative in a way that few games have ever been able to pull off. In short, the Nemesis system tracks your encounters with different Uruk foes throughout the game, and enemies that you face in a fight can be promoted in Sauron’s army, gaining power and rank. What made it so fascinating was that it created micronarratives throughout the game. Instead of facing generic enemies until you hit the credits, you could be facing rivals that grew as you progressed throughout the game. All of this made the experience feel like an emergent, self-authored revenge story reactive to how you played. Monolith further iterated on it in the sequel Shadow of War. In a perfect world, this kind of mechanic would have been copied a dozen times over until teams integrated it into so many games we got tired of seeing it. However, Warner Bros. had other plans.
After the runaway success of Shadow of Mordor, WB started mobilizing to patent the Nemesis system so no one else could use it in 2015 then proceeded to only make use of it one more time with Shadow of War despite plenty of opportunities to integrate it into series like Batman. If that sounds baffling to you, it is.
The video game industry is no stranger to competitive litigation. Namco infamously patented interactive loading screens up until it expired in 2015, and Nintendo was just trying to patent some really broad Tears of the Kingdom mechanics shortly after the open-world Switch adventure launched in 2023. Hell, even The Pokemon Company is suing Palworld developer Pocketpair on the grounds of patent infringement. However, given Warner Bros. has done nothing with it, the patenting of the Nemesis system was especially wasteful. After Warner Bros. took several years to build a winning case, it finally secured the patent in 2021, which will last until 2035. Now the studio that was responsible for what could have been a revolutionary system in narrative design has been shut down and the project that it spent years working on that would have used it won’t see the light of day.
While it’s hardly the most important thing that’s happened today, it’s a sad reminder that when corporations own your work, it could disappear with a snap of a finger, no matter how brilliant it is. My heart goes out to folks affected by these studio shutdowns, and it especially goes out to those whose creativity is being locked away in a vault that Warner Bros. may never open up again.
