Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis Machine used to be most productive created because WB Video games wanted one thing to strive in opposition to Batman Arkham Asylum’s 2d-hand sales, exec says

Heart-Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System is quite cherished more than ten years after its release; however, it seems like it was primarily designed to discourage individuals from reselling their physical discs, according to a former executive.

“Trends have always been prevalent in the gaming industry,” former WB Games executive Laura Fryer shares in a recent retrospective video about the now-defunct developer Monolith Productions. “This isn’t a new phenomenon; however, in many respects, it has intensified. We encountered this during my time at Monolith – it was essentially what inspired the creation of the Nemesis System.”

Fryer recalls that Batman: Arkham Asylum was “performing exceptionally well” at its launch in 2009, but it quickly lost traction. Analytics from WB Games revealed “that more individuals were playing than actually paying,” prompting the company to deduce that many gamers completed the title and subsequently traded it in at a second-hand store to regain some of their money, which evidently harmed publishers who only profited from the initial sale of the game.

With the upcoming Lord of the Rings game, the publisher aimed to combat second-hand sales. “How do we develop a single-player game that is so engaging that players retain the disc in their collection indefinitely?” Fryer comments that Monolith’s engine was not capable of handling a GTA-scale open world at the time and the team clearly had no interest in pursuing a multiplayer approach.