Talking to
Canadian Business, studio head Martin Carrier and Reid Schneider, vice-president and executive producer of Warner Bros. Montreal have teased their upcoming plans for the mysterious superhero project they're currently working on with DC as well as commenting on the trend of increasingly unpopular and low quality video game movie tie-in's.
"We’re definitely working closely with DC on different titles, yet to be announced. It’s one of the reasons we talk to Geoff Johns and Jim Lee [the publisher's head honchos] on a regular basis," revealed Carrier.
"It’s interesting for our geeky side to be in touch with those guys, especially now that they’ve relaunched all the 52 [comics]. It’s a good time to be working with DC. There’s so much energy going on there. So yeah, [we’re in] the triple-A space and the casual online space. "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," added Schneider when quizzed on exactly how they plan to maintain the high benchmark set by the likes of
Batman: Arkham City.
"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. It’s not about hitting the movie date or some arbitrary date—it was giving the game the time it needs to be successful and really just concentrating on the quality of it." As for whether the game they're working on will tie-in to an upcoming DC movie such as
The Dark Knight Rises or
Man of Steel, Schneider made it clear that this is not the direction the studio will be going in, adding that they're not even taking them into consideration at this point. He even acknowledged the clear dip in quality that cheaply and quickly made movie tie-in's suffer from (this year saw such mediocre games as
Thor and
Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters).
"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."
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