Popverse's top stories

• DC to reissue the comic that current Batman writer Matt Fraction says shows that the Dark Knight is "capable of wonder and joy"
• What to Watch October 2025: Halloween is just around the corner, and Netflix's Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Prime Video's Hazbin Hotel, and HBO's IT: Welcome to Derry are just a few ways to stream and scream
• Stranger Things season 5 fires the first shot as Netflix enters the popcorn bucket wars

Things are looking good for DC. They’ve got a certified hit at the box office with DC Studios’ Superman, which provides a solid foundation to build their new DCU shared universe. So, Warner Bros. is, of course, keen to capitalize on the rising popularity of DC by… creating a new live-service game based on one of their core properties. It seems that even watching Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League flop harder than a teenager on the high dive wasn’t enough to dissuade Warner Bros. from trying to tap into the live-service industry, and I’m starting to wonder what will.

The news broke back in July that Warner Bros. was ramping up development on a new game. WB Games Montreal, which created the good-but-not-great Arkham Knights and the actually bad Batman: Arkham Origins, is looking for an executive producer with experience that includes “deep understanding of the full game development lifecycle, including live services.” The game itself isn’t specified, but the job listing suggests it will be a “high-quality AAA game based on one of the iconic IPs from the vast Warner Bros. and DC Comics catalogue.” That and the fact that WB Games Montreal is involved tell us that a new DC Comics game is on the upcoming slate.

So, Warner Bros. is going back to the live-service slot machine, hoping against hope that this will be the one to stick the landing and become a money-printing machine. While Suicide Squad is the highest-profile example of Warner Bros. failing spectacularly to deliver a games-as-a-service model, it is hardly the only one. Mortal Kombat 1, a reboot of one of the most iconic fighting game franchises that sold well, died a slow death as Warner Bros. pushed players toward the weird single-player mode rather than letting them play against people online – you know, that thing that most fighting games live and die by these days. Then you have MultiVersus, which was a goofy but fun fighting game that failed to deliver infinite money and was shut down by Warner Bros. less than a year after it launched.

This obsession with live-service games that Warner Bros. has is further proof to me that they should be kept as far away from video games as possible because their instinct to shoehorn these things into a game is like a gambler desperately pumping quarters into a slot machine, muttering about how this is the pull. This is the time that they get the jackpot. This time, the machine will pay out. Just one more pull, they say, sweating anxiously as their friends and family look on in a mixture of horror and fascination.

The thing is, I want Warner Bros. to make great games. I want the Wonder Woman game they cancelled. I want the fun Superman game they will never make. I want a brutal and bloody Mortal Kombat game that doesn’t force me to grind through dumb missions before I get wrecked by someone online. I want them to do well because they own franchises that I care about and want to play in.

And yet, here we are, staring down the barrel of a game that probably has a cool concept that is overshadowed by awkward attempts at recreating the live-service mechanics of other, less impulsive companies. And I know exactly who to blame for this: Rockstar Games. They did what few companies could even fathom doing – they turned a great single-player game into an even better online game that went on to make them approximately all the money ever. It has been almost 12 years since Grand Theft Auto V came out, and people are still playing its online mode. They cracked the code and everyone else is desperate to catch up.

I firmly believe that this broke something in game developers. Watching a company earn billions of dollars off a game and seeing it become a steady source of income for a decade filled them with jealousy and an almost unreasonable urge to recreate that success. And sometimes they do. So many games have ongoing stories or content updates that keep players engaged long after they make the initial purchase. But these things only work when A) the core gameplay is fun and B) the new content adds to that fun rather than distracts from it.

Live-service games aren’t going anywhere. There is too much money to be made after you’ve purchased a game for studios to completely abandon the concept just because of a few high-profile flops. Still, there is something almost tragic about how hard and relentlessly Warner Bros. is chasing this format, no matter how many studios they have to close and developers they have to lay off in the process. They will burn the entire gaming industry to the ground rather than shift to just making really good games you can buy and play how you want. 

The gaming industry has come a long way since Pong blew all our minds in the 70s. We've got everything you need to know about the next big thing in games. Of course, Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be the big game of 2026, but there are plenty of other games coming out between now and then. Here is our starter guide for every gamer:

• All upcoming games in 2025 and beyond
• Gamify My Life, our weekly gaming column designed
• Popverse Picks: The best Assassin's Creed protagonists
• How to play every GTA game in order
• Why the GTA 6 budget isn't as crazy as you think
• The Magic: The Gathering x Spider-Man crossover set wouldn't exist without the Spider-Verse

And be sure to check Popverse regularly for the latest gaming news.