On one hand, it's painful to see one of my favourite developers being shut down, but on the other hand - this wasn't really the Monolith it once was. I don't think anyone who worked on Blood, NOLF, or F.E.A.R. was still there. From what I've heard even key people who worked on Middle-earth games left due to WB's (mis)management.

I am actually surprised that WB didn't put Rocksteady out of its misery.

Another reminder of the evolving landscape of the gaming industry, where strategic decisions have effects on both developers and players. The recent wave of layoffs across the gaming industry is concerning. We should support the talented individuals affected by these changes and look forward to their future projects. My best wishes to the people impacted by this news

Strategic decisions? Are they getting advice from Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf? Most of these decisions are stupid six ways from Sunday!

Go grab the statement, dust it off, and give it another read. Their words. Nitpick all you want

I really want to see Condemned and NOLF games, and with this will surely be more complicated :(

I don't think anything changes really. Monolith didn't have a say in the matter ever since WB acquired them.

While I enjoyed the Shadow of games, they definitely were not lore accurate and were just their own thing (power fantasy in the LotR-verse). The good thing is the story also basically ended with Shadow of War for Talion and although there was still a possibility to continue the story through DLC character Eltarial, the story does basically end with Talion's story being over and the LotR trilogy bringing the end of Sauron and the evil forces of Middle Earth.

Monolith shutting down also makes sense imo. They did make a commercially successful game with the Shadow of series but they have been in dev hell for a long time with the Wonder Woman game and didnt produce anything else in the meantime to warrant their survival. Say what you will about Montreal and Rocksteady making the flops Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad, they do also produce some good games and still also produced something sellable. Pretty sure rumors of a Wonder Woman game started back after Shadow of War was released in 2017 and its been silence for a really long time.

I feel WB is likely going to go the route Disney is going by just loaning their IPs out to other studios to make video game son their behalf. Much less risk and WB has far better IPs than Disney to make video games imo (Mortal Kombat and DC are obvious but imagine a Scooby Doo investigative game by Level-5 for example). Video games are also getting insanely expensive to produce now so just loaning out franchises for a fee is making money at a much lower risk.

To better clarify this, the base game FEAR had the SecuROM removed properly. The two expansions (Extraction Point & Perseus Mandate) only had SecuROM partially removed. The disc check was removed in all of them but the SecuROM in the expansions is still partly running and will block the game from running if it detects a "debugger" program running. Eg, if you try and start the expansions with Process Monitor running, then SecuROM will throw up a DRM error. The link in the error message mentions "Virtual drives" (ie, it's still trying to detect the difference between genuine CD-ROM's vs mounted ISO's of ripped games appearing to be virtual CD-ROM drives and assumes all "debuggers" are the latter) is obviously related to the disc check DRM function.

It's neither "dormant" (files included but unused) nor fully active, but some awkward thing in between. Reading between the lines, it's one of those games where GOG obviously couldn't get a clean DRM-Free source directly from the dev / pubs, but rather had to crack it themselves, did that fine for the base game, but the only NoCD's they could find for the expansions weren't very good ones.

Yep. 8 years of being paid and absolutely nothing to show for it. No business can be viable with such a model and it's honestly a wonder it didn't happen sooner. It's just trimming the fat at that point.

Yeah, but do we really know it's their fault? Or was it more of EA-Bioware style "we're doing this... oh, wait, actually we're doing that... oh, wait, we changed our minds again"? I mean, for one thing while the WW game was in development James Gunn took over DC movies and declared he wants video games from now on to be part of the same cinematic universe that won't even really start untill later this year. I can't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if that caused some Veilguard style "back to square one" moment.

True, we can't know for sure. Could have been a self fulfilling prophecy by mismanagement from above, but from what I could find, when they dropped the first WW trailer (December 2021), basically no work had been done on the game yet. That leaves 3 years for actual development, which doesn't leave that much space for "resets".

Meh. Does it matter, really? I'm sure someone else will still make good games.

Game studios come and go. Where is Looking Glass Studios? At least their games remain.

when ss2 came out i was really confused why hl1 was so popular compared.

I'm not.

It's b/c regular FPS's (without all that RPG stuff) sell well and immersive sims often do not outsell FPS's. Imm-sims are too niche, history shows us.

Plus, HL1 is a masterpiece of a FPS.

If immersive-sims very sold well - well, Looking Glass, Arkane Austin, Ion Storm and Eidos Montreal would still exist.