July 3, 2012 Update: A less than stellar E3 from the company that brought us Batman: Arkham City last year. Their big holiday games are... a Lord of the Rings DoTA, another Lego game and Scribblenauts on the Wii U. It sure feels like something's missing.
May 30, 2012 Update: The president of WBIE moves down one position to make room for Peter Vesterbacka and impressive Angry Birds Space download numbers.
Why He's Powerful
Who?
Oh, it's Martin Tremblay, president of Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment.
What do they do again?
Batman. The Arkham stuff. Three years ago WBIE may have been another joke branch of a major media company, this one trying to convince innocent people to play wretched Watchmen games because some suit (Tremblay!) thought it was a good idea. But then Rocksteady Studios made an awesome Batman game.
And then an independent studio called 5th Cell made an ingenious game called Scribblenauts, giving WBIE one of the hottest games in Nintendo DS history. So WBIE goes and buys Rocksteady, who make another excellent Batman game. They also buy Traveller's Tales who make increasingly good and absurdly popular LEGO video games. The classic arcade company Midway folds, WBIE swoops in and buys Mortal Kombat and the people who made that franchise. Somehow, WBIE and the developers make Mortal Kombat cool again.
This Tremblay guy is figuring it out. But it's not all fantastic for WBIE, because, if it was, they wouldn't have been shrinking their Seattle studios last fall. And they would have found a way out of making Green Lantern video games.