An Arkham Knight clone in all but name would be amazing.
Yeah, but would that be a realistic thing to expect? Unless MS provides them a huge budget. Also, how big is the team?
I look forward to seeing what this is 8 years from now. 
But Xbox is dead, so how can they be making these type of deals?
I feel this could be a costly venture, one that may not get the results they want.
It’s 100 now, but it’s a new studio that could be using an early announcement to ramp up staffing.
Wouldn’t be surprised to see a big influx of people from Rocksteady in the coming months/years
Have WB had major layoffs yet? Suicide Squad seemed like a massive bomb
Guess they’re like “Nah, SS isn’t it. Let’s call up those veterans.”
On a side note, this sentence could also be uttered by a German in 1946 on his way to Argentina
My first thought was that it was actually the opposite. That it’s cheaper to make these deals than to own studios.
The last couple of months have made me think more about Xbox’s strategy and contrasting that to what its direct competition has always done. Where Microsoft made the effort to buy Bethesda, would it have been more economical to go the Sony route and pay for exclusivity for games like Ghostwire Tokyo, Deathloop, and the attempted exclusivity of Starfield?
I look at how Street Fighter 5 and Bloodborne were likely moderate sized investments but nothing compared to owning a studio.
I wonder how things would have fared for Xbox this generation if they outbid Namco-Bandai for something like Eldrin Ring. Such a bid would have been a sizable investment but, again, something much cheaper to the alternatives.
Working with this studio to publish their game probably looks different on their balance sheet than to buy the studio outright.
I could be missing something so definitely let me know if I am.
The problem is that we’ll never be privy to the financials, so without being able to see how much it costs to run a “AAA” studio on a yearly basis vs what it costs to fund a “AAA” game in it’s entirety, we’ll never really know.
I would assume it’s cheaper to contract a game though and there are probably some tax implications that would make funding a project more desirable. Owning your own studios gives a bit of certainty though, so I think a healthy dose of both is probably preferable.
In essence, who knows?
I am curious what the economics are for these kinds of publisher deals, especially when comparing a cross platform publisher (like Bandai Namco), the dominant first party (like Sony), or a last place first party (like Microsoft).
If payment is tied to sales (and im sure it is in part), does someone like Microsoft have to give a substantially better cut than the others do?
They seemed to make a lot more of these kind of moves in the past and it impacted them negatively because the studios weren’t always available to them for follow ups or were acquired by competition. See troubled development of Crackdown or lack of developer for a sequel to Killer Instinct as examples.
It is also more expensive to acquire dev and only to shutdown them a few years later.
Would be awesome if Microsoft could somehow work out a deal for a WB license, perhaps Batman and this game ending up being a new Batman Arkham game or better yet, go get the Superman license. So many possibilities.
Actually that’s not necessarily true. It can end up being a tax write off in some cases to show you couldn’t run it, there’s a lot of history of companies doing that, especially in cases where it was a competitor that you “just couldn’t turn around and run profitably…”
This speculation about the accounting is hilarious. MS and hopefully the devs have all gamed this out before signing the deal. I don’t see the point of speculating about costs or whatever since MS makes a ton of deals like these.
This should be interesting, but knowing how game development works this will be a next gen game, but it’s def on my radar
For years Ive wondered what Rocksteady talent could do with an original ip. It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up in the coming years