Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment was met with a decent amount of negative feedback for its inclusion with microtransaction in Middle-earth: Shadow of War. With the announcement of the Forthog Orc-Slayer downloadable content last week, some say that Warner Bros. is taking advantage of the situation to make more profit.
After one of the developers who was working on the game passed away, Mike Forgey was made as one of the downloadable character for Shadow of War – Forthog Orc-Slayer – for $4.99. It was initially revealed that the earnings will not go to Warner Bros. and Monolith Productions but directly to the Forgey family.
However, in the recent report by Eurogamer, at the end of the Forthog reveal trailer it stated that most of the purchases made from the United States, excluding countries outside the Americas, will go to the Forgey family. In the eyes of the majority, this is one of the worst yet unsympathetic way of profiting from a death of an employee.
The UK-based online outlet reached out to Warner Bros. for an explanation and they were responded with, probably a generic reply, that the publisher and Monolith won’t be getting anything out of the DLC.
“Neither Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment nor Monolith Productions will profit from any sales of the Forthog Orc-Slayer DLC regardless of the territory in which that DLC is sold.”
This reply clearly states that both Warner Bros. and Monolith will not get any profit from the sales of the Forthog DLC regardless of where it was sold.
Now, we can consider that this might be some damage control stunt here, but with a little grain of salt we can be safe to assume that they might not get any profit from this.
We will update the story once if there are any updates.