Already an investor in TT Games, Snowblind Studios and Midway Games assets, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is buying further in to the video games market by acquiring a majority of London-based Rocksteady Studios, the developer that made the Batman: Arkham Asylum game starring WB’s superhero.
Group president Kevin Tsujihara tells FT the stake is 68.4 percent, though the price isn’t disclosed: “The biggest gap this fills is that it locks in development talent on one of our most valuable pieces of intellectual property for games: Batman.”
Last year’s Arkham Asylum was well received and has sold over three million copies. It was published by Eidos, of which Time Warner owned about a fifth, but - after Square Enix bought out Eidos - WB said back in December it would publish the forthcoming sequel itself.
WB owns Batman publisher DC Comics so the Rocksteady acquisition is to secure a lineage for future Batman games - Tsujihara, in the announcement, says it will mean the “continuation of the franchise”.
But Rocksteady will also be working on other games using other WB IP.
—WB bought TT, the developer behind the Lego series of games, in 2007, using it to redeploy its own Batman IP through Lego Batman, as well as Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
—Last year, it bought Snowblind to develop its The Lord Of The Rings games.
—And in July 2009, WB bought most of Mortal Kombat publisher Midway Games’ assets for $49 million.
2 Comments
February 23, 2010
Batman: AA was a genuinely excellent game that did credit to the franchise. Bringing Rocksteady under their roof gives WB a triple-A developer on hand for any number of future projects, so it'll be exciting to see what the future holds for them.
March 8, 2010
HI Guy's,
I'm going to say that we're erring on the side of "development sweatshop with little power or control over the destiny of the industry", but so long as there are people in the industry bull-headed enough to keep pitching titles upwards to their American overlords then I think there will be just enough British influence to keep the nation on the map.