Earlier this year, Warner Bros shut down three studios, Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and Warner Bros San Diego Studios. We knew what two out of those three teams was working on, and a new report from Sacred Symbols podcast host, Colin Moriarty, seems to reveal what the third was working on.
The San Diego Warner Bros team was the only studio out of the closures that had yet to release a game at all. It opened in 2019, and at the time Warner Bros said it would be working on mobile games with its San Diego studio. That would later change over the course of the studio’s life, however.
According to Moriarty, the game that the San Diego team was working on was a Mario Kart-like racer, that would’ve brought together characters from across Warner Bros IP library, similarly to how MultiVersus brought together characters from various Warner Bros. franchises.
Warner Bros had the Super Smash Bros.-like in MultiVersus, so it’s next step was to make the Mario Kart-like, with what would have been called “WB Racers,” Moriarty claims per a source that spoke to him.
We never got to hear anything about this game though, and San Diego was shut down before it got the chance to actually get it out the door. A point that developers who worked at the San Diego studio took great issue with, especially since they saw MultiVersus launch twice, according to Moriarty.
“There was quite a bit of animosity internally, with people who worked on the game who felt that it was unfair that their sister team, Player First got to launch MultiVersus twice when they never got a shot to launch at all after all of that work,” said Moriarty.
Source – [Sacred Symbols via VGC]