Warner’s complaints led to the inexplicably closed Monolith game including this technology in the game!
A decade and a half ago, many publishers complained about the existence of used games, with one Fable 3 developer calling it worse than piracy. And it’s thanks to this that the Nemesis system made an appearance in 2014’s Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and then in 2017’s Shadow of War. Laura Fryer, who was vice president of WB Games during the development of Shadow of Mordor and ran the publisher’s Seattle studios, talks more about this in the video embedded below.
At the time, Monolith was working on a Batman game based on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, but after Nolan said he didn’t want a game based on his movie, the studio had to scrap its work. Monolith switched to another license, and Rocksteady made a Batman game that drew more from the comics and cartoons. Meanwhile, publishers were not losing a lot of money reselling used games. To them, a lost purchase is one that was pirated or bought used instead of at full price. Management has forgotten that there are poor people and that there are also used books, clothes and computer parts. If something works, it doesn’t have to be thrown away, does it?
Warner wanted its studios to make single-player games that players would not want to resell. In the case of Arkham City, that meant free DLC (featuring Catwoman) with a one-time activation. The theory was that the nemesis system would keep players in Shadow of Mordor after they finished the game. They would have their personal Nemesis on the disc and not want to let it go, thus preventing sales. But physical sales were already starting to take a back seat…
“It all started when Rocksteady shipped Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. It sold great. Then suddenly sales started to drop. They could see it because the data from their game analytics showed that more people were playing the game than paying for it. The theory was that people would play through the game and then return the disc to a retailer and get paid, which was very common at the time. It 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 they could then sell the used game at a discount and pocket the money. But it was a disaster for the game developers because they didn’t get paid for each game – they only got paid for the first copy sold. They lost millions of dollars.
With Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, we had the same problem. How do we make a single-player game so compelling that people will keep the disc in their library forever? We knew that Monolith’s game engine wasn’t yet capable of a fully open world like a GTA, and this team wasn’t interested in going the multiplayer route, but we still had to solve the constraint. And that thinking led to the Nemesis System – arguably one of the most creative and cool game features in recent memory,” Fryer said.
Too bad the studio was recently shut down, and with it, the Wonder Woman project…
Source: PCGamer
