The offical number is about 1390 licensed games. About 680 of those where relased in Japan only, so outside Japan that number is arund 710 games.
I have a new concept for you, you might not be aware of it, as it is very exclusive and well hidden from "normal" people. It is called "Indie Games". Now, be careful with this knowledge, dont spread it around, you know, so the plebs gets hold of it.

Edit - and I am ging to add, just because it annyed me - ALL games are made for hobbyists...

I wasn't sure if it was just referring to some recent, yet another, "Spider-Man 2" movie or whatever.

After all, it seems already years or decades ago there were games called e.g. "Spider-Man 3", according to the list of games with the Spider-Man franchise. Maybe they were directly related to the 2007 movie by that same name, I dunno.

I've already lost track of all these Spider-Man movie reboots and whatever, it seems they reboot the whole series every decade, we get to learn how Peter Parker became Spider-Man, over and over again (and now he apparently has an Afro-American sidekick or something, just like an Afro-American woman got the title 007 in a James Bond movie).

Same for Batman of course, their stories are becoming as common as how Jesus became Jesus. Oh how many times I've seen the scene of someone shooting the parents of poor little Bruce Wayne, for some reason the assailant seems to be a different person every time (sometimes it was the young Joker, sometimes just some generic street thug, in the latest version it was some socialistic BLM activist apparently who hated the rich, etc.).

EDIT: Of course, to nitpick, this 2023 game is not "Spider-Man 2", but "Marvel Spider-Man 2". I guess that is how they differentiate all the different Spider-Man games, and possibly movies, from each other. Maybe the next Spider-Man reboot will be "The Fabulous Spider-Man", non-binary of course.

Did Daedelics shut down already, or what?

(I didn't realize or remember that the infamous Gollum game was by them. I have wishlisted that game though, somehow I still want to try it, but not with the current pricepoint.)

To be fair, the latest iteration of Spider-Man and Batman both skipped the origin, However, the newest Batman movie was an absolute piece of shit that made Batman & Robin look like a jolly good time in comparison.

Miles Morales. He was initially created for a separate universe as a legacy character, who became Spider-Man after Parker died in that world. That comic line eventually got scrapped, but the character became so popular they kept him around, he's also the protagonist of the new animated films.

I don't mind him at all, I have to say, though I never read the comics, It's not like they changed an existing character to be "diverse", they just created someone new and he happens to be black. He's been around for a while, too, before "diversity" became a buzzword. I'm not a fan of his either, but in general I like legacy characters picking up the mantle from older heroes. Gives comics a sense of forward momentum they often lack. DC does it way better than Marvel though, or at least they used to.

I think they are still going to publish games but not make them. It's really a sad end for the studio behind osme of my favorite games.

Same. Well, I don't actually havei t on the wishlist, but it's at the back of my mind that I would like to try it for myself, out of some morbid curiosity, but only once it's absolutely dirt cheap.

They closed their development department, they announced it on June 30.
From now on they will only act as publisher.

Apparently it was not a really good place to work. One of the allegations was, that they tried to get their devs - which they usually recruited fresh from college - to work for less than minimum wager by having them sign a contract that they only did a practicum for orientation. Crunch times and all that go without saying. They tried to get bigger too fast.

Also they couldn't handle the transition from 2D art to 3D. The first game they tried that on, took way too long to develop and didn't sell well.

The Joker movie (which I liked BTW) gave another depiction of how, or by whom, Bruce's parents were killed. I was actually somewhat surprised that it wasn't Joker itself in his own movie, but maybe they just didn't want to rehash that scene from the 1989 Batman movie.

I was a bit confused by the age difference of the Joker and Bruce characters in this movie (Joaquin Phoenix was close to his 50s in that movie (but I guess the role was supposed to be a person in his 20s or 30s?), and Bruce was a teenager?)... but I don't know what the age difference of Batman and Joker is in the original Batman lore, and who really killed his parents.

In the comics they are roughly the same age. The identity of the killer is either a guy named Joe Chill, or remains unkown, depending on some changes to the continuity (I always preferred the latter, the murder being unsolved just makes more sense to me as a motivation to become Batman). Anyway, the Joker movie was never meant to be lead to a Batman film, the connection to the comics is tangential, to the point where it's mostly just some names, serving as a marketing gimmick to sell a mostly old school drama as a superhero blockbuster (and it worked). It was supposed to be a standalone film, and even though it is getting a sequel now, it's unlikely we'll ever see Phoenix's Joker interact with any Batman.

it is canon, from Detective Comics #39 released in 1939, that the killer of Thomas and Martha Wayne was a mugger called Joe Chill. There is nothing special about him, he is just a normal human mugger.

Since Warner Brothers / DC have no plan how to actually make the movies work, they got back to DCs multiverse concept, meaning that different worlds can exist with a few fix points (one of them being Superman) which everything revolves around. And yes, in one of them the Joker was the killer, in another he was that guy we see in the movie "The Joker", in another one there are multiple Jokers, constantly trying to create new ones until they get the perfect one. And in yet another, he never became the Joker, but saw through the multiverse how his other selves got a more interesting life and tried to become one. But he kept failing and instead became the creator of most existing Jokers.

Mind you, in "The Flash" the writer had no idea how it works and explained it completely wrong.
In The Flash they say that a change in the timeline causes the timeline to shift in both directions, creating different parallel universes. However, in DC it does not work that way. Time changes are permanent. When the Flash travelled back in time, he effectively eradicated the existing reality for good, creating a new one he called Flashpoint. Later he repaired a few things, but it never got back the way it was before his changes. Dr. Manhatten (the guy from Watchmen) also experimented with time changes, by changing Superman's time of arrival on earth a couple of times, that's why most DC heroes are about 10-15 yeary younger than they used to be, they miss a good part of their history.

In DC the multiverse is created. There are several multiverses in fact and multiple creators, the one they are in, was founded by Perpetua. While the others are all about order and harmony, she tried to create an invincible army to fight against her colleagues. So her realities are all about conflict, heroes and villains. New universes emerge constantly, but only 52 of them can coexist stable at the same time, most other vanish shortly after they were created, being unstable and all.

Talking about multiverses: You should checkout the stories where Superman meets He-man :)
One of the encounters between Justice Leauge and the Masters of the Unicerse is part of the official main story lines in both franchises.

ps: It's fun to be a nerd.

The motive being money, or what?

I recall in some depictions it was money (mother got shot when trying to get her necklace or something), in the Joker movie it seemed to be just a street thug who hated the rich elite (like most people living in the streets did) and recognized The Waynes on the street and decided to act, etc. I guess this latter depiction was the director's or writer's own idea as commentary to social issues, I guess.

That's a bit unfair, seeing how Marvel's doing the same exact thing, isn't it? And anyway, it's not like the concept of the multiverse is where all these different versions of things start, at least as far as the movies are concerned. It's just a way they can now use to connect whatever they want, but we had reboots with different versions of the same characters and events on the big screen long before.

Which is a really stupid rule to have, since we all know that anything that's ever introduced in comics can, and eventually almost certainly will, be brought back, no matter how "gone" it is.

Money, just like most robbers. It was a mugging going a little wrong, that's it.

With about 20 movies and several TV shows in their portfolio all playing in the same universe, I tend to disagree.

The movies are only the end of the development. You now see it as a natural thing, but it started far away from that.
Of course not all comics are always canon, that is normal. DC was aware of the discrepancies and how it would confuse fans and actually wanted to get rid of it. They created the "Crisis" story arc, created the concept of parallel worlds coexisting and called it the "Multiverse". The storyline was about the Animonitor who wanted to destroy all worlds. In the end he was almost successful, one new world emerged with the last survivors from all universes.

But of course this could not last forever, new story arcs were created not fitting into that one official universe. Many years later DC had a second crisis, this time not as hard as the first one. What followed, was the New52, the 52 universes able to coexist.
After that a third sorf-of-crisis happened, DC tried a few things that fans didn't like and backed off (like having heroes from different realities fight each other, that was just stupid). Now we have the "Rebirth" universe, a mix of New52 and Back-To-The-Roots, while leaving other universes intact.

During the first crisis, many heroes were removed from DCs portfolio "for good", a few of them made it back only recently after they were gone for a very long time(the original Green Lantern and Flash, the Justice Society of America).
We can be quite sure that the original Batwoman and Batgirl will never return ^^. Their concept was way too stupid.

Marvel? I bet they bit their tongues for not having that idea first. They never came up with a cool alternative concept. Instead they made for example Peter Parker make a deal with the devil, eradicating and replacing reality.
It took them a long time to acknolodge that they had different parallel worlds and even longer to come up with a story that broke the boundaries of a single universe. Still they avoided the term "multiverse" at all costs. Instead they had the "Spider-verse", which was basically the same thing, but with a different name. The multiverse only made it into the movies recently with Spider-man and Dr. Strange.

The rule came from the name of their main comic line, which was called "New52". I think the name came from the 52 issues it was designed to last, but I am not sure about that. They used that number for the number of stable worlds in the story arc where horrors from the other worlds would come into the main universe.

There's not much to agree or disagree about, it's a simple fact they're making multiverse movies with characters from outside the MCU too. I'm not arguing over who has better movies or more of a plan, i'm just saying - that particular gimmick just seems to have come in vogue, mostly simply because it's a chance to cash in on nostalgia.

Dude, you don't have to explain Crisis on Infinite Earths to me :D Nor Flashpoint. I spent years writing for a DC comics fan website. I'll admit, I did gradually give up on most DC stuff after that reboot though. It just got worse and worse despite some good series early on.

The New52 only came into being after Flashpoint, not after Infinite Crisis (the Crisis on Infinite Earths sequel). IC did reconstituted the multiverse with 52 universes, but that wasn't the New52.

They called it that because that's how many new series in that universe they were publishing initially after Flashpoint. Even before that they had the weekly 52 series they published after Infinite Crisis. Ever since they became sort of weirdly obsessed with that number and making it meaningful in the universe.

I just don't see the "connected universe" as that important, so while yeah, Marvel did that way better, it doesn't really mean much to me. Their movies were mostly very bland, only a couple stood out and after the first Avengers movie most were outright bad. I'll take Batman v Superman or Wonder Woman over most of Marvels super planned out output any day.

But that's all say about it here, we already highjacked and derailed the thread way to much. I actually kinda forget what it was initially about and carried on as if the Spider-Man game and related superhero stuff was the subject :D