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Movie Games Losing Their Appeal to Game Publishers
The New York Times (registration required) has an article on the relationship between games and movies, as regards movie tie-in games. While efforts like Spider-Man 2 or Escape from Butcher Bay prove that quality games based on movie properties are possible, game developers and publishers are beginning to realize the inherent dangers involved in attempting to capture a movie as a game. From the article: "Another factor adding to the risk is that the development process for most major games is now 18 to 24 months, longer than that of many movies. The long development time puts publishers under pressure to make their picks when a film is just a script. And still, not all games come out on time for a movie's release..."
If only they would realize game-based movies are an equally bad idea!
Ceci n'est pas un post.
different points of interest. The biggest issue with translating any story from one medium to another is that what is "really cool" in one is just goofy or boring in another. In the Lord of the Rings books there were many places where the party was just traveling. Tolkien used that time to describe the changing landscape, the fear and uncertainty they were feeling, and their comradery. If this had been done in the same way in the movie (which can show in a few seconds several pages of description) it would have been boring. This is part of the reason Douglas Adams naturally adjusted his story to suit each media it was translated into.
When big movie companies get involved in making a game based on their movie, they insist that the game stay close to the story. You end up with behaviors that are similar to the movie but aren't a lot of fun in a game and a lot of direct from the movie cut scenes, all of which are buggy because of the push to get it released in time.
It is funny that it has taken movie companies so long to get this.
A lot of the difference comes from the distinction between fads and niche markets. Fads are very short lived and generally spill down from the core market to less sophisticated markets: people will buy macarena-based garbage, not a movie. Niche markets are the ones with a die-hard core of nerds that will shell out for anything related to the product. Few people are buying Light Sabre flashlights and bartman dolls, but Star Wars videogames, simpsons filmographies, and any number of related pieces of merchandise are selling pretty hard.
Still, things are getting better. There was a period when I remember seeing the California Raisins and VAnilla Ice both having video games in production, and neither being able to make it to the market before the fad was passe'.
Mind you, the Chronicles of Riddick game (referring to PC version here, can't comment on consoles) was quite a corker. Rather than just trying to sloppily re-create "cool" moments from the film into a stereotypical chopped-together movie->game transfer - some elements of the Riddick story are told only in the movies, while others are told only in the game, and the two media support eachother quite well IMHO.
Add to this a fair bunch of DVD-movie-a-like "extras" on the game disk, including a sometimes fascinating in-game developer commentary, shots of early development versions, concept artwork and such. I think what you end up with in "Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay (Developers Cut)" is a movie-game tie-in that merits a small footnote in the history of the development of these kind of cross-media entertainment franchises.
Alli
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Just because some publishers are moving away from movie licences doesn't mean its going away. People wil still buy games just because it has spiderman or harry potter on the cover no matter how bad the game may be. And as long as people are willing to buy the games, publishers will keep buying licences.
Or perhaps Hollywood just realized that Halo 2, GTA SA, Metroid Prime 2, made quite a few million bucks, and their best "tie ins" "spiderman , ridick" barely reached the top 20 most sold games of the year?
Heres a hint: 1 year development time with zero creative freedom an unexperienced team and copycat techniques, cant lead to more than a regular game, never will, never has. No matter how "cool" it looks on paper.
Probably the most succesful licensed game is Kotor (1) which took almost 3 years in development. Complete creative control (since is barely tied with the star wars universe) and a team of rpg experts leading it. Take a note hollywood producers.
Heres an idea. Grab an experienced team who actually admires your franchise and grant them the license and resources to do a game about it. Forget about "tying it" to the release of a movie. Leave them do their work. If everything works you will make almost as much money as you did with the movie.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Good points, but when the movie industry announces a date, it sticks. This is especially true when a movie leaves the pre-production phase (scheduling an actor, for example). There are exceptions, but those are rare. Yet, there are very few video game companies that can accurately predict their own release date, even in the very last stages of production. With Fantastic Four, the date didn't change four months. It changed a few weeks. Compare that to our industry's epitome of professionalism: Valve. Would a movie studio have announced a firm date for, say, Spider-man 2 in multiple magazines, let that date pass without saying a word, and then announce to weeks after that date that it wouldn't be out for another year?
Maybe the key is, as you indirectly suggest: secrecy. Game companies have time and again proved that they are incapable of keeping their projects under wraps when they don't have a specific date. Valve might have been an exception with their announcement of HL2 supposedly only a few months before September 30th, but even they were unable to keep this date.
EA and Nintendo are some of the few companies that have developed a practice of not announcing their game without a street date, and then sticking it (although Nintendo wasn't always this way). Where's the rest of the industry?
That means no more "Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game"s... Now if games as movies would lose appeal as well, we could legally shoot Uwe Boll and put an end to poverty, sickness, hunger, and . . Well, Uwe Boll.
Game developing is in great part software development. Software development today is completely unpredictable.
So, only when game development houses start using better tools and pre-made engines, that can be easily slapped together, and concentrate on content creation, game development will be as unpredictable as always had.
EA is only efficient with their sports games, because, in the worst case they just pick up last year's game, update roosters and call it good.