It’s been a decade since the official release of the wacky multiplayer FPS Gotham City Imposters. Despite shifting to a free-to-play format in late 2012, Gotham City Imposters never seemed to find its footing. It found a decent amount of players when it arrived on Steam, with 7,195 concurrent players in September 2012, but the player base dropped to 829 concurrent players in just the following year.
Since then, the gaming industry and market has only evolved and adapted, changing immensely every year. Free-to-play games are now some of the most popular video games, with titles such as Destiny 2, Fortnite, Dota 2, and even Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel gaining millions of players fairly quickly. With the Batman IP under their wing, Gotham City Imposters could find a space in players’ libraries too.
With many games now asking for a lot of your time, with the introduction of seasonal passes or “Battle Passes” as they’re commonly referred to, there are not many games outside of single-player experiences that don’t request your constant attention. With the FPS genre seeing an all-time low with the critical and financial failure of Battlefield 2042 and Call of Duty: Vanguard (compared to previous entries), it seems like the perfect time for the return of Gotham City Imposters. Under the right circumstances, of course.
Gotham City Imposters could respect your time, more than other games in the current climate, by offering a more traditional multiplayer FPS experience. Rather than offering a multitude of challenges and daily missions to complete, it could simply be that players could hop into a few matches, earn some currency to upgrade their loadout and then do whatever else they want to, rather than dedicating their time to a single game.
Before we get any further, we have to discuss why the game failed to attract a consistent audience. If you search “Most Popular Games of 2012”, 90% of the games appear to feature a character with a gun for the cover. Games like Halo 4, Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and the extremely popular Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, all came out in 2012. To say the market was oversaturated with games in the FPS genre is an understatement, whether or not some of those games featured different mechanics or experiences.
It seems like developer Monolith Productions had their work cut out for them, and taking on one of the most popular franchises, Call of Duty, with a genre Activision dominated at the time was a pretty bad idea. Once the game went free-to-play, they didn’t release many updates at all, if any, giving no reason to return to Gotham City. Add in the fact that only a year later the new generation of consoles (the Xbox One and PlayStation 4) was released, it seemed that Gotham City Imposters wasn’t even given a chance to succeed.
If that’s the case, how would Gotham City Imposters get popular now when it failed many years prior? It’s all a matter of good timing and marketing. Firstly, the current generation of consoles has only just begun. Since Microsoft and Sony are still focused on pleasing both current and last generation customers, Gotham City Imposters would likely need to be on both generations. This already allows it to bring in a new audience for the title.
Warner Bros., as the publisher, as well as Monolith Productions (if they were to develop it again) would need to place their faith in the title. Make sure it’s consistently updated, even if at first it struggles to attract consistent money. Not every game is like Fortnite, where it blows up overnight. Offering an update on the original, by using the existing amount of content and adding more before re-launch will already provide a decent range of content for new and old players to jump into.
The market is currently focused on being a money-making machine. Of course, all developers and publishers need to make money from their releases, but a lot of free-to-play games offer the aforementioned Battle Passes, requiring players to complete challenges on a daily and weekly basis. It’s pretty much guaranteed that Gotham City Imposters will use a daily (and weekly) mission reset to entice players to return, but it should reward players for their time by offering exclusive cosmetics or premium currency, instead of points towards completing a pass. Let players earn the premium currency for continuous play, but make sure it’s only cosmetic and not a pay-to-win situation.
Battle Royales are the buzz, even Call of Duty is focused on that slice of the market. Bringing in a (kind-of) fresh take on the FPS multiplayer genre would be a welcome change. A lot of players miss the classic feeling of dropping in-and-out of matches in old Call of Duty games, so emphasizing the wacky gadgets and weapons of Gotham City Imposters with the fast-paced and quick nature of this genre would even bring in the most hardcore FPS fans.
This all being said, it’s hard to predict how the market would react to Gotham City Imposters if it was given a second chance at life. However, it seems people appreciate a casual experience that can also offer a more competitive content pool. If Gotham City Imposters got that opportunity again, it would need to add in the quality of life features that most people would expect in a multiplayer FPS currently, such as cross-progression, a ranked mode, prestige system, and more. I genuinely loved Imposters when it first went free-to-play, but like many others, I dropped off shortly after.
It won’t be long before the audiences of free-to-play games grow tired of games asking for their undying devotion, and that’s why we need Gotham City Imposters to return. Despite the game being delisted on Steam, Imposters still has a loyal, albeit small, fan base that comments on the Steam community pages, showing some people wish to see its return. Warner Bros. just needs to have faith in the game. I’m just hoping for it to make a comeback, call it bliss.
