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Remember that weird time about 15 years back when the videogame industry filled its nappy over the existence of second-hand games? Activision-Blizzard clamped down on them, following EA and THQ’s lead, and one of Fable 3’s developers said they were worse than piracy, which was the other big bogeyman of the day. One unexpected consequence of that weird industry huff is Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system.
Laura Fryer, who was vice president of WB Games in charge of the publisher’s Seattle studios during Shadow of Mordor’s development, told this story on her YouTube channel. At the time, Monolith had been working on a Batman game based on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight, but had to pivot hard when Nolan said he didn’t want a videogame based on his movie actually, thank you very much. If you’re interested, here’s a look at that canned Batman game. Monolith switched to a different licence, while Rocksteady made a Batman game that drew more on the comics and cartoon.
“It all started when Rocksteady shipped Arkham Asylum in 2009,” Fryer began. “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. The theory was that people would play through the game and then return the game disc to a retailer and get paid, which was very common at the time. 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.”
To stop things briefly there, of course they didn’t actually “lose” millions of dollars because of second-hand sales. That figure relies on the idea that every single person who bought a secondhand copy at discount would have bought Arkham Asylum for full price if they couldn’t get it cheaper. Which is the kind of thing videogame executives are capable of thinking because they don’t know “poor people” exist. If they did, they might also be aware of the existence of second-hand books and clothes and all the other industries that haven’t been destroyed by the existence of a second-hand market.
Moving on, Fryer explains that WB Games wanted its studios to make singleplayer games that players wouldn’t want to resell. In the case of Arkham City, that meant a free DLC that let you play as Catwoman, which you could only activate once. Players who bought Arkham City second-hand (or didn’t connect to the internet to activate their copy) would miss out on a significant chunk of the game.
“With Shadow we faced the same problem,” Fryer said. “How do we create a singleplayer game that is so compelling that people keep the disc in their library forever? We knew Monolith’s game engine wasn’t yet capable of having a fully open world like a GTA and this team wasn’t interested in going the multiplayer route, but we still had to solve for the constraint. And this thinking is what led to the nemesis system—arguably one of the most creative and coolest game features in recent memory.”
The theory was that the nemesis system would keep players involved in Shadow of Mordor after they’d finished it. Their personal nemeses would be there on the disc, and they wouldn’t want to let them go. Of course, physical sales were already reduced in relevance by the time Shadow of Mordor came out in 2014, and digital sales would mean that GameStop’s second-hand section would no longer haunt the videogame industry.
Monolith brought the nemesis system back for a second go-around in 2017’s Middle-earth: Shadow of War, before moving on to a Wonder Woman game. Unfortunately that game was canceled and the studio shut down earlier this year.
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Kurt Indovina
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