Update July 19th 7:45AM: A NetherRealm spokesperson told us that there are currently no plans to shutter Mortal Kombat Mobile and Injustice 2.
However, the studio says it's made the decision to "sunset" Mortal Kombat: Onslaught "in the coming months", thanking players who've stuck with the game for this long. Original story follows below.
Original story: Mortal Kombat and Injustice developer NetherRealm has apparently closed down its entire mobile team, leaving an unknown number of employees without work.
According to QA analyst Tony Lazzara, NetherRealm's mobile team was "shut down" recently. Lazzara doesn't give a reason for the shutdown, nor does he state how many employees have been affected by this shutdown.
While Lazzara's report seems to be the only one claiming a full team shutdown, his account is corroborated by at least three other NetherRealm employees, all of whom are now looking for work. Another employee didn't directly say they were laid off, but did share a link to recently-posted jobs in the gaming industry.
Naturally, since NetherRealm hasn't made an official statement about these layoffs, we don't know whether the future of the studio's mobile games is safe or not, but it's probably reasonable to assume games like Mortal Kombat Mobile and Injustice 2 could be in jeopardy.
If that's the case, the timing of this decision seems a little strange given that Mortal Kombat Mobile received a major new update just yesterday, and it's one that seems to have gone down pretty well with fans of the game, too.
Warner Bros' gaming division is in a strange place at the moment. On the one hand, sales of February's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were a huge disappointment, with WB chalking up a loss to the tune of $200 million thanks to the game's failure.
On the other hand, however, last year's single-player RPG Hogwarts Legacy was a huge success for WB Games, racking up millions upon millions of sales. A Director's Cut version of the game is reportedly in the works.
If you want to find somewhere to lay the blame for these purported NetherRealm mobile layoffs, you could perhaps do worse than Suicide Squad's failure, but there's another elephant in the room, too; Warner Bros' failed Discovery merger.
As reported by the Financial Times, Warner Bros' share price is dropping, and the company is apparently currently eyeing up a breakup plan that would see its movie and streaming divisions spun off into a different entity.
While these problems aren't directly related to Warner Bros' gaming division, it's all part of the same corporate structure, and so problems in one area will almost certainly have a knock-on effect in others.
For now, though, we'll just have to wait and see what happens next. We've reached out to Warner Bros for comment and will update this story as soon as we hear anything back.
