PS3 Informer

Why Movie-Licensed Games Suck

Continuing the hot trend of layoffs and game studio closures, EA jumped on the bandwagon and shuttered the doors of Pandemic's Brisbane studio. The writing was on the wall when its Dark Knight tie-in game (rumored to be a money-hole) was canceled. Now on the bright side -- if you really want one -- this saves us from another one of those poorly produced, quick cash-in games. But why are movie-licensed games so endemically terrible? Maybe that's just part of their DNA.

Limitations like inadequate development time, strict regulation by the license holder, and creative constraint all commonly make up the basic nature of a licensed title. Quality suffers as expected. This was exactly what Pandemic Brisbane was up against. Its game became an utter disaster because it started out as a pure Batman game. Six months of pre-production were thrown out the window when EA decided it wanted a Dark Knight game.

In order to fit the property best, it was decided that the game had to be an open-world game. With little experience in such a genre, the studio's headaches were compounded by an accelerated production schedule brought about by expiration of EA's rights to the Batman license in December 2008. To cut down development time, the studio decided to use the same engine being used for Pandemic's upcoming WWII action title, Saboteur. Unfortunately, Saboteur's engine wasn't built for open-world gameplay and so technical hurdles surfaced in bundles.

Given enough time and money, the game could have come out fine, but the reality was that EA was already pumping more and more into the project with only diminishing returns to show for, as the ticking clock loomed above. Ultimately, the project fell under its own weight and lofty aspirations, and couldn't break from the mold of bad licensed games.

As the Dark Knight project demonstrated, bad and licensed remains synonymous. But what if in an ideal world you don't have to deal with forced deadlines, high licensing fees, and expiring contracts? Can quality emerge in a licensed game? Imagine if you can, a Matrix game that was actually good. Now the catch is that it would have taken four years to produce. Would it sell even nearly as much as the abysmal Enter the Matrix? Unlikely. The cardinal rule of licensed games is: hit it while it's hot. Plus, marketing costs are sky-high. For an exec to suggest starting up a separate marketing campaign for the game, years after the end of the movie trilogy, would get him thrown off the lot and cost him his third marriage. See, he forgot that licensed-games feed off a movie's hype machine to weasel itself into the minds of moms and kids when they're out at Walmart.

Take Ghostbusters: The Video Game for example. Here's a game that took its time in development, was nearing completion for the Fall, and enjoyed some fairly optimistic industry buzz before it was unceremoniously dumped by its original publisher. Why? It also forgot the nature of licensed games and took its sweet time -- 20 years in fact, because that's when the last Ghostbusters movie came out. Kidding aside, game publishers are feeling the pinch and are looking for a sure thing -- namely, sequels or a title with a built-in audience. For games like Ghostbusters, which missed its movie tie-in window by decades, you can expect their marketability to be pretty low, regardless of their polish. Atari fortunately picked up the publishing rights to this promising game. Let's hope the investment pays off.

In the end, what matters most to publishers are the sales numbers. Do you hold off a year to release a good game that's going to sell 300,000 copies or sell 2 million copies of a mediocre one, right now, while it's still relevant in the pop culture mindscape? Pretty obvious, isn't it? What's worse, it makes perfectly good business sense.

[Source: Kotaku]