Warner Bros. is canceling its planned Wonder Woman game and shutting down three studios: Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier.

Schreier broke the news on Bluesky today, followed by the release of a full report on Bloomberg. Shortly after Schreier’s post, WB confirmed the shut downs to Kotaku in a statement:

We have had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises -– Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones. After careful consideration, we are closing three of our development studios – Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego. This is a strategic change in direction and not a reflection of these teams or the talent that consists within them.

The development of Monolith’s Wonder Woman videogame will not move forward. Our hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities. This is another tough decision, as we recognize Monolith’s storied history of delivering epic fan experiences through amazing games. We greatly admire the passion of the three teams and thank every employee for their contributions. As difficult as today is, we remain focused on and excited about getting back to producing high-quality games for our passionate fans and developed by our world class studios and getting our Games business back to profitability and growth in 2025 and beyond.

Earlier this year, another Bloomberg report suggested Wonder Woman was in trouble after rebooting and switching directors in early 2024. This came amid larger struggles at the company’s gaming division, including layoffs at Rocksteady, the lukewarm reception to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and the shutdown of MultiVersus.

And even more recently, WB Games has appeared to undergo a restructuring of sorts, as long-time games head David Haddad announced his departure from the company, and rumors circulated that the division might be sold off.

Specifically, this move represents a blow to WB’s DC universe-connected gaming efforts. Notably, just yesterday, James Gunn and Peter Safran said in a presentation that it would be “a couple of years” before the first DCU video game.

With this closure, the games industry loses three incredibly storied studios. Monolith Productions, which had been working on Wonder Woman, was founded in 1994 and acquired by WB in 2004. It’s best-known for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War, the former of which pioneered the lauded Nemesis system that WB successfully patented in 2021.

Player First Games, a newer studio established in 2019, was responsible for MultiVersus. The game was well-received critically and saw launch success, but underperformed relative to WB’s expectations. WB San Diego, similarly, is a newer studio established in 2019 with a focus on mobile, free-to-play games.

These shutdowns continue a trend going back roughly three years of increasing games industry layoffs, project cancellations, and studio closures. In 2023 alone, it’s estimated that over 10,000 game developers were laid off. That number shot up to over 14,000 in 2024, and while 2025 has seen numerous closures, the exact number of impacted individuals is hazier due to fewer companies reporting these layoffs and shutdowns, or specific numbers affected.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Mecha Break recently launched into a new round of open beta play on Steam, and quickly dethroned some titans in the process. Even though it’s just a glimpse of the final experience, Mecha Break’s demo is bumping elbows with the likes of Marvel Rivals, Grand Theft Auto V, Apex Legends, and Naraka Bladepoint. So why’s it got such a bad rating on Steam?

The open beta launch pulled in over 300,000 players on Steam, deseating Marvel Rivals and hitting a top-four place in the most played games on Valve’s platform. Even right now, at the time of writing this, Amazing Seasun Games’ mecha battler has the fourth-highest concurrent players per SteamDB, though it falls behind Rivals’ 24-hour peak.

Popularity doesn’t naturally incur positivity; Apex Legends has a ‘Mixed’ overall rating on Steam, as does Delta Force, and both have substantially more recent players than many other games on the PC platform. Yet Mecha Break’s demo is sitting at ‘Mostly Negative’ right now, with over 6,500 reviews.

Taking a look through the reviews, there are a few discernible complaints. The most easily addressed are the server issues. With hundreds of thousands of players flocking to the open beta, which apparently overwhelmed the servers. Amazing Seasun responded, saying the studio has addressed the problem and is issuing several batches of “Ultimate Maintenance Boxes” to players as compensation.

Those boxes are a constant, and longer-term, point of concern among players though. Individual mechs are unlocked through the store or battle pass, as well as cosmetic purchases. There’s also a loot box mechanic for mods, which come with mild upsides and downsides, that has players worried about long-term balance and time investment.

It seems that while many aspects of Mecha Break can be unlocked for free, it will take at least some time to do so. “Outside of missions, the match to match reward of currency is very low. In order to unlock the entire roster you’ll likely have to play hundreds of games to get there,” one reviewer said.

Another repeat critique across several reviews is the anti-cheat measures. Mecha Break uses the kernel level anti-cheat Anti-Cheat Expert, or ACE. These often allow for greater access to users’ machines, in exchange for monitoring for more extensive cheating options. Usually, players aren’t too happy about anti-cheats like this. The anti-cheat is also apprently causing problems for Linux desktop users, per GamingOnLinux.

Tack on some extra customization woes, like spending currency to re-customize your in-game pilot, and the negative reviews paint a fairly stark picture of frustration over currencies and grinding for unlocks. Mecha Break is set to be a free-to-play game, so some of those do end up coming with the territory. And interestingly, there does seem to be a counter-movement of positive reviews, though it’s still lagging behind the negative ones by raw numbers.

At the very least, while there are some gameplay concerns, those sentiments seem to be broadly positive compared to the out-of-combat critiques. Most of the positive reviews and even many of the negative reviews praise the actual mecha battles, as well as the pilot and mecha customization options, which include a bunch of cosmetics and paints to create, say, your very own Evangelion Unit-02 or Gundam Heavyarms.

We’ll see if Amazing Seasun works to address the negative responses leading into the full release sometime later this year.

Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.