rampancy: I'm not denying that you could be right, but I got another take on this. This looks to me like (a) WB is now aware that this IP is in significant demand, therefore being potentially very valuable, (b) that they have a significant legal stake in it, and (c) other competing studios have an interest in it as well. The latter point means that WB may feel like they're not in a position to exploit the NOLF license completely on their own (which is what they'd prefer of course) since Activision and 20th Century Fox have a stake in it too.

I remember hearing once on a Jimquisition video that many execs in the industry have an "all-or-nothing" approach to the market -- they'd rather make no money, than some of the money, if they can't have all of the money.

So another possibility is that WB, now knowing that they've got something valuable on their hands from the attention it's gotten from NDS, wants to sit on it. Either because they want to evaluate how they can exploit it on their own (either by getting Monolith to do another game, or make a movie/TV show/etc. on it), or because they simply want no one else making money on something of which they have a controlling stake.

And on top of that, WB is an "old media" company. There's nothing that suggests to me that they have any idea of how the video game industry works, or of how gamers think, and spend their money. They don't understand that there's a revenue stream virtually guaranteed for them by releasing NOLF and NOLF2 (albeit one where they don't get every piece of the pie). And given that NOLF is barely a blip on their media property radar, they likely don't care -- at least, not until Michael Bay comes with a pitch for NOLF: The Movie, with Megan Fox as Cate Archer, Channing Tatum as Dmitrij Volkov, and Seth Rogen as Bruno Lawrie.