A post for a mystery playtest of an “unreleased AAA 2D fighting game” appeared on the Good Gamers Group website over the weekend, and while details on the project are intentionally sparse, every scrap of evidence available points to said unreleased title being NetherRealm Studios’ unannounced Injustice 3.
This was originally spotted over the weekend by EventHubs, which makes a rather compelling case for the game in question being Injustice 3. For starters, EventHubs notes that we can eliminate several upcoming fighting games, such as Virtua Fighter Crossroads and Dead or Alive 7, on account of them being 3D titles.
Secondly, as stated on the Good Gamers Group playtest page, the unreleased game is specifically described as a “AAA” fighting game. That likely means that, no offense to the devs, Melty Blood Twi-Lumina is out of the running too.
So, what does that leave us with? Nothing, basically. From what I can tell, no developers or publishers have announced any upcoming AAA 2D fighting games. So, considering that this is almost definitely an unannounced title, what evidence points to it being Injustice 3 and not, for instance, Street Fighter 7?
Well, the location of the playtests is the main piece of evidence here: Culver City, California. While NetherRealm Studios’ headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois, the developer’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, has headquarters in two locations: New York and, you guessed it, Culver City.
Most importantly, however, NetherRealm Studios has been not-so-secretly at work on a new game for quite some time now. The studio’s last game was Mortal Kombat 1 in 2023 and, as EventHubs also pointed out, NetherRealm has been hiring for a bunch of new positions over the past few months. Oh, and last year, it was reported that both Phil LaMarr and George Newbern, who voiced Aquaman and Superman, respectively, in the first two Injustice games, may have accidentally revealed that they’d be reprising their roles for the unannounced Injustice 3 (before seemingly walking back these claims not long after).
I suppose there’s a chance that this is that DCKO mobile game that Warner Bros announced back in July, but…again, no offense to people who like mobile games, but that doesn’t particularly look like a “AAA”-level game to me.