10 Times Publishers Sabotaged Their Own Video Games

9. Forcing Microtransactions Into Shadow Of War - Warner Bros.

Shadow Of War Loot Boxes
Warner Bros. interactive Entertainment

2014's Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a pleasant surprise for Lord of the Rings fans. The title, headed up by Warner Bros' Monolith Productions, was a competent and enjoyable action game elevated by something the studio called the 'Nemesis System', a unique gameplay element that generated unique enemies to make each individual player's experience different to everyone else's.

It was a fun game, and so naturally WB decided that a sequel should be made. Great! Fans thought. The first title was enjoyable but it was clear that there was so much more Monolith could do with the license, including improvements to boss battles and a more intricate version of the factional conflict that was in the first game.

Sadly, the story of the sequel proved to be anything but a fairytale - and not in a good, Tolkein-ish kind of way either. Sexy Shelob notwithstanding, it seems as though pretty much every bad decision that contributed to Shadow of War's controversial launch came from WB themselves. Microtransactions blighted the entire game from start to finish, with many even claiming that the sequel was effectively pay-to-win.

Even though WB did eventually remove loot-boxes from Shadow of War around mid-2018, the damage had already been done.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and the Golden Age of Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled.