There are a couple of pretty significant factors that have contributed to the wait for the next Batman: Arkham game feel as long as it has. The first, of course, is that it has been a long wait, plain and simple, with Batman: Arkham Knight having launched all the way back in 2015. More recently, however, that wait has seemed even more excruciating, thanks in large part to the fact that Arkham developer Rocksteady Studios recently put out the hugely disappointing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice league, a game set in the Arkham universe, but one that’s nowhere near as good as Rocksteady’s past titles were.
Recently, however, a new Arkham game was announced at long last- though this right here is a classic “not like this” situation. In collaboration with WB Games, Oculus Studios recently announced Batman: Arkham Shadow, a virtual reality spinoff being developed by Camouflaj exclusive for Meta Quest 3. On paper, of course, it’s a brand new game in the Batman: Arkham series, but analyzing the situation within its wider context for even a second shows just how tone deaf WB Games has become, and how poorly it continues to manage one of its biggest IP.
I should begin this with the disclaimer that this isn’t a rant against the game itself. Batman: Arkham Shadow may very well turn out to be a legitimately enjoyable experience. Oculus Studios has done an excellent job of supporting the Quest headsets with some really good games, and Camouflaj is obviously a talented studio, something that it proved beyond doubt with the genuinely solid Marvel’s Iron Man VR. There’s every chance that Arkham Shadow turns out to be a good game- but even if that does happen, it will remain representative of WB Games’ most frustrating tendencies as a publisher and IP owner.
The plain and simple fact that there has been no true follow-up to Batman: Arkham Knight even now, nearly a decade on from its launch, has been a constant source of frustration for fans as it is. The two studios that worked on the franchise – Rocksteady Studios and WB Games Montreal – were both taken off Arkham and put to work on other superhero games that were tangentially related to Batman, but were really just doing their own thing. The big problem, of course, is that the things that Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were doing were underwhelming at best and downright atrocious at worst, and in the aftermath of both launches, the vast majority of the people who played the games were left wondering why the studio behind them didn’t just make a new Arkham game instead.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in particular was especially grating. Taking talented single player studios and turning them into underprepared live service factories has been a rampant epidemic in the games industry, and Rocksteady predictably fell victim to that trap as well. But not only did Suicide Squad’s shocking lack of quality further cement the notion that Rocksteady and WB Games would both have been far better served if the former had just made a new single player Batman game, the fact that it was set in the Arkham universe and proved to be such a disappointing (and at times downright destructive) return to it was also salt in the wounds for fans of the Arkham games.
Amidst the growing restlessness of the Arham fanbase and the recent disappointment of Suicide Squad, the announcement of Batman: Arkham Shadow comes across as massively tone deaf. It is certainly worth noting that the game is being published by Oculus Studios, and developed in-house by Meta-owned Camouflaj, which means WB Games is presumably going to have minimal involvement with the project. But seeing the company license out the IP for a VR exclusive spinoff while refusing to greenlight the next big single player instalment that series fans have been waiting for for decades is exasperating move- and, unfortunately enough, completely on brand for what WB Games has turned into of late.
Because, once again, many of the biggest issues that so many have with WB Games in recent years can be traced back to the company’s insistence on going all in on the live service fad. On no few occasions, the company has made it clear that it intends to expand its profits going forward by prioritizing recurring user spending in live service experiences, which is a strange decision to take at this point, when the games industry as a whole has seen a startling number of high profile live service failures, and major players seem to be more reluctant to try and get a slice of that pie. One would assume that the complete critical and commercial failure of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League would have set WB Games straight, but no- the company has only doubled down on its live service stance since then. Though the upcoming Wonder Woman title is apparently not going to be live service, it’s more than likely that the majority of other future WB titles will be.
The roaring success of Insomniac’s Spider-Man games has shown in no vague terms that there’s incredible demand for well-made AAA single player superhero games (to say nothing of the critical and commercial success that WB itself enjoyed with the Arkham trilogy), and there’s plenty of other major players in the industry who have been alerted to that demand and are set to come out with their own AAA superhero games in the coming years. But WB Games has decided in all of its wisdom that wasting massive properties like Batman in favour of live service games (that, judging by Suicide Squad, aren’t going to be great) is where the true gold lies. Never mind the fact that 2023’s highest selling game worldwide was WB Games’ own Hogwarts Legacy, an entirely single player game with no live service elements and no microtransactions.
So are we going to see a new single player AAA Batman game anytime soon? Sadly, all signs right now point to no. Warner Bros. seems all set on chasing the dream of endless live service money, in spite of the fact that its very first attempt to do so has fallen completely flat, while ignoring the deafeningly loud demand for a new Arkham sequel, or something that at least provides a similar experience. From the lack of a new instalment, to the disappointment of what Arkham’s makers have delivered instead, to the company’s larger frustrating business decisions, restlessness in the Arkham fanbase has been high, which is why it feels like the announcement of Batman: Arkham Shadow has come at the worst possible time.
That’s probably unfair to the team making it- in fact, it definitely is. The last time that Camouflaj made a virtual reality superhero game was Marvel’s Iron Man VR, and as those who’ve played it will tell you, it was a legitimately good game- which means there’s every chance that Arkham Shadow, too, turns out to be another impressive notch on the belt for the studio. For now, however, more than anything else, it serves as a reminder for how spectacularly Warner Bros. has mismanaged one of its biggest and most successful gaming IP. It’s a shocking display of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. WB Games has not only shot itself in the foot, it’s fed the decapitated foot into a meat grinder and then tossed the meat into a lake where it’s been digested and pooped out by gators.
Just make a new Arkham game, man.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
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