Warner Bros. shuttered Monolith, the studio behind the acclaimed Middle-earth games, which featured the innovative Nemesis system influencing player experience. Former Warner Bros. VP Laura Fryer revealed in a YouTube video that sales for Batman: Arkham Asylum dropped significantly, leading to concerns about lost revenue from used game sales. This prompted strategies like exclusive content for original purchasers, highlighting the struggles developers face due to the used game market. The Nemesis system was partly a response to the industry's challenges with player engagement and retained value in the gaming ecosystem.
It all started when Rocksteady shipped Arkham Asylum in 2009. It was selling great. Then suddenly sales dropped off. They could see this because the data from their game analytics revealed that more people were playing than were paying.
This was great for gamers because they could buy the game and then sell it back to a company like GameStop and buy something else. It was great for GameStop because then they sold that used game for a discount and they pocketed the money.
For game developers though, it was a disaster because they weren't getting paid for every game--they were only getting paid for the first copy sold. They lost millions of dollars.
Fryer recalls, WB was alarmed by the way sales fell from Arkham Asylum's peak, and company executives believed that millions in sales were lost when used copies of the game were sold on the secondary market.
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