Launching a new intellectual property is one of the most difficult things that there are in the current entertainment sector, and we are not just talking about the electronic one. The guys at Ascendant Studios know this well with their Immortals of Aveum, to give a recent example.
It's one thing to produce a project tied to an already popular and established franchise, It's one thing to start from scratch and hope to carve out a place for itself in a market inevitably dominated by sequels, remakes and reboots.
So what do you do when you're a company that has a catalog of brands with practically boundless value? It depends: if your name is Warner Bros. and among your assets there are brands like Batman, Superman or Harry Potter, you might want to bet on something else, perhaps because otherwise it would be too easy to cash in on millions and millions of dollars.
The news came in the last few hours that Warner Bros. wants to focus on live service and mobile despite the success of Hogwarts Legacy which, to be clear, was the best-selling game overall in 2023. Let's repeat in case you hadn't understood: the overall best-selling game of 2023but they want to focus on live service and mobile.
And Batman? After the original trilogy, which invented the freeflow combat system and stealth sessions in which you eliminate enemies one at a time from generally elevated positions (a formula that Insomniac seized on for Marvel's Spider-Man, selling tens of millions of copies), Rocksteady Studios has worked for something like nine years to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
Now, despite not being the disaster that many say, it is clear that the English team's latest project belongs to another category compared to the various Batman: Arkham, and also seems to confirm that at the moment at Warner Bros. the best idea they have to exploit their most famous character is to kill himbe it Gotham Knights or Kill the Justice League.
Did it suck so much to bet on Arkham Origins?
The solution was there, for all to see: allow WB Games Montreal (incidentally, the authors of Gotham Knights) to continue the series inaugurated by the too often ignored Batman: Arkham Origins within the universe created by Rocksteady, retracing the first years of the Dark Knight's activity up to the events of Arkham Asylum.
And then maybe continue after Arkham Knighttell what became of Bruce Wayne following the Knightfall Protocol, perhaps at that point introduce the Justice League and finally bring to the screen a credible, modern videogame Superman, capable of capitalizing on the extraordinary popularity of the superhero par excellence.
In short, we find ourselves in 2024 with a publisher who, despite having a boundless catalog of intellectual properties of great value and having achieved great success with a single player action adventure, he maintains that the right path is that of live services and mobile games.
Do we want to talk about it?
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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