Grab your Lasso of Truth, because the internet doesn’t need one right now — everybody’s already spilling secrets. Over the past few days, the gaming press has been in full detective-cosplay mode over a mystery playtest in Culver City, California, and nearly every headline lands on the same three words: Injustice 3 Rumors.
Not confirmation. Not a trailer. Not even a logo. Just a deleted job listing and an entire fanbase doing forensic accounting on it like it’s the Zapruder film.
Here’s the thing about Injustice 3 Rumors as a genre: they’ve been circling the drain for years, the way that one relative always “might” come to Thanksgiving.
But this week’s crop is different, because for the first time there’s an actual paper trail — a listing, a location, and a very specific description that reads less like a coincidence and more like NetherRealm forgot to lock the studio door.
The Listing That Started It All
It began, as all good internet mysteries do, with something that got deleted five minutes too late. A casting-and-playtesting outfit called Good Gamer Group posted a call for testers on an “unreleased AAA 2D fighting game,” and specifically, a “major 2D fighting game.”
EventHubs spotted it first, and from there it spread through the fighting-game community faster than a Scorpion combo string. Kotaku picked it up, laying out — piece by piece — why the available evidence points at NetherRealm’s still-unannounced third entry in the series.
The sessions themselves ran four hours a pop, on September 14th and 15th, in Culver City, California — which, if you’ve never had the pleasure, is a lovely little pocket of Los Angeles best known for one very relevant fact: it’s where Warner Bros. Games keeps its headquarters.
Cosmic Book News reports the listing was offering participants $250 to show up and beat each other up on a controller, provided they ranked in the top 25% of a major 2D fighting game and were old enough to legally do so in person. Standards, people. Even secretive megacorporations have standards.
Dark Horizons rounds out the location argument nicely, noting the studio behind Mortal Kombat has been refreshingly honest that it’s cooking up something — NetherRealm boss Ed Boon said back in May the team is “actively pursuing another Mortal Kombat game,” while also “definitely doing more as well.” That “more” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in every single one of these Injustice 3 Rumors roundups, and honestly? Fair. When your studio only makes two franchises, “more” doesn’t leave a ton of room for imagination.
The Circumstantial Evidence Is… a Lot
If you want the full CSI: Culver City treatment, ComicBook.com has assembled the most compelling case file. Their reasoning: the playtest explicitly said “2D,” which quietly rules out modern 3D fighters like Tekken or Dead or Alive, and points instead at a game built the old Injustice way — flashy, brutal, and full of superheroes throwing buses at each other.
They also note the timing lines up suspiciously well with James Gunn’s ongoing DC creative reboot, in which Gunn has repeatedly said games are part of the master plan. Nothing sells a Batman movie quite like letting people punch him in the face at home first.
Then there’s the paper trail nobody asked for but everybody loves: according to multiple outlets covering the Injustice 3 Rumors cycle, including GLITCHED and Aroged, a couple of voice actors briefly let slip last year that they were reprising their roles for a third game — before hastily walking it back, in that very specific “I said too much at a con panel” way that has become an entire subgenre of leak.
Add a Warner Bros. artist’s resume that reportedly name-dropped the project before getting scrubbed, and you’ve got exactly the kind of breadcrumb trail that makes Injustice 3 Rumors impossible to ignore, even for the professionally skeptical.
The Skeptic’s Corner (Every Rumor Needs One)
Not everyone’s fully sold, and credit where it’s due — Techtroduce is playing this one refreshingly straight. Their reporting points out that the actual recruitment materials never mention NetherRealm, Warner Bros., or Injustice by name anywhere, and that the reference games listed for testers — Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Granblue Fantasy Versus, King of Fighters — were likely just shorthand for “we want people who are actually good at 2D fighters,” not hidden clues about the mystery game’s combat system.
It’s the journalistic equivalent of someone at the party going “guys, we don’t actually know this,” which, fair, but also deeply unwelcome at a party this fun.
Instant Gaming’s news desk lands in the same careful spot, noting this is all still speculation stitched together from circumstantial threads, and recommending the appropriate seasoning of salt. Which, sure. But “grain of salt” has never once stopped an Injustice fan from making a wish list of DLC characters, and it’s not going to start now.
Why This Particular Rumor Feels Different
Here’s what separates this round of Injustice 3 Rumors from the usual seasonal drought of nothing: there’s an ownership subplot happening in the background that actually gives the timing some teeth. Warner Bros. Discovery is mid-sale to Paramount in a deal reportedly worth over $100 billion, a deal that hasn’t closed yet and is currently tangled up in a lawsuit from a group of state attorneys general.
Once that deal closes, NetherRealm and every DC character it’s ever put gloves on go along with it — landing, per Cosmic Book News, under new leadership said to be leaning hard into growing the DC brand everywhere it can go. A beloved fighting-game franchise with a decade of built-in nostalgia and zero recent competition is exactly the kind of low-risk, high-nostalgia bet a new regime loves to greenlight early.
Add in that The Game Awards is sitting right there in December — historically NetherRealm’s preferred stage for exactly this kind of reveal, going back to when Mortal Kombat 11 was announced the same way — and you start to see why this specific batch of Injustice 3 Rumors has more heat than the usual “insider hears things” tweet.
So… Is It Real?
Officially? Nothing. Zero. Not a single “no comment” from Warner Bros., which in itself is its own tiny tell, because studios usually can’t resist at least denying things they’re not working on.
Unofficially, you’ve got a real, verifiable, non-fabricated playtest listing, a location that couldn’t be more on the nose if it tried, a string of accidental leaks from people who should really know better, and an industry-wide vibe check that all points in one direction.
Will it actually be called Injustice 3? Will Superman finally get therapy? Will they let us play as a guy who’s just Aquaman with better PR? Unknown. But if you’ve been holding out hope for a third round of DC heroes throwing cars at each other in glorious slow motion, the Injustice 3 Rumors mill has never been running this loud, this consistently, or this close to an actual announcement window.
Keep your ear to the ground — and maybe don’t apply for the next mystery playtest unless you’re genuinely ready to sign an NDA with your soul.
Sources: Kotaku · Dark Horizons · ComicBook.com · Cosmic Book News · GLITCHED · Aroged · Techtroduce · Instant Gaming News
