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Can Warner Bros. Montreal Top Batman: Arkham City?
Warner Bros. new Montreal studio will be working closely with DC Comics and is likely working on games based off the publisher's stable of popular characters. It also hopes to buck the industry trend of cheap cash in titles that suck. Sounds good to us.
In a recent interview with Canadian Business, Warner Bros. Montreal studio head Martin Carrier said, “We realize how good a job Rocksteady did with Arkham Asylum. They changed people’s perceptions and that’s why we’re not satisfied anymore with sub-par superhero games. Now, it’s like they should be better than all the other games. So what’s their secret recipe?”
Vice-President and Executive Producer Reid Schneider added, “If you look over the past decade of superhero games, there were two. The first one was when Neversoft made Spider-Man – I think it was back on the PS1. People were like, ‘Wow, this is really good,' and then a couple of things came out that were okay. Then Rocksteady came out with Arkham Asylum and that again changed the expectations. If you look at the similarities between the two, they weren’t based on movies per se. They were just taking that really rich fiction from the comic books and exploring the characters.”
Schneider went on to talk about cheap movie cash-ins, and how he thinks the market for those types of games may be dying. “We can’t speak for everyone, but if you just look at the market, the number of those and the money they’re bringing in is dwindling. Those days where publishers could do stuff like that and make money from it, it’s just not the same. There’s a real stratification of games where only the really high-quality games with mass market appeal are making money. That whole middle layer, where there were movie games or cash-ins – that market is gone."
We hope Schneider is right, and we’re eager to see if the studio can put their money where their mouth is. Hopefully we get to hear about what Warner Bros. Montreal is working on sometime soon.
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