The video game industry generates more revenue than the movie, TV and music industries combined, but you wouldn't know that by the crazy rash of layoffs in the past few years; for an industry that's making so much money, the people in charge seem unwilling to pay anyone.
Warner Bros. Discovery is one of the latest major publishers to downsize; the other week, they shuttered Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego, per Bloomberg. Monolith was working on a high-profile Wonder Woman game. It's canceled.
What does the publisher do now? Here's what they said in a statement, per Nerdist: "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."
So in order to focus on big properties like DC they shut down the studio making the Wonder Woman game; that checks out as long as you don't think about it for even two seconds. But the mention of Game of Thrones as one of the big brands they want to focus on is interesting. According to Metro, WB Games Montréal has been working on a pitch for a Game of Thrones game, presumably for consoles.
Will it ever see the light of day? I doubt it. Game of Thrones video games have come out before, but they've mostly been mobile affairs, like the upcoming Game of Thrones: Kingsroad. We got some choose-your-own-adventure-style story-based games from Telltale in the mid-2000s, when the show was at the center of pop culture, and those were received reasonably well, but there's never been a huge, epic, story-driven console spectacular set in the Seven Kingdoms.
And I have a hard time believing there will be. Warner Bros. can say it wants to focus on franchises like Game of Thrones, but if they were going to put out a Game of Thrones game, don't you think they would have made more of a thing of it when the show was at the height of its popularity? With Warner Bros. closing studios left and right, it's hard to imagine them getting their situation together well enough to go forward with a Game of Thrones game of the sort that would actually make fans happy.
But hey, anything's possible. The mobile game Game of Thrones: Kingsroad comes out later this year.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.