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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..."
(this would solve the Game to movie problem, not the other way around)
A lot of movies based on games have been so crappy lately, and I blame the "Uwe Boll" phenomenon.
He's the worst thing that has been happening to the industry. Period.
I don't think it's his fault personally, but it his horrible what happened these past few years. Alone in the dark? (What part of "alone" didn't he understand?) House of the Dead?
And next, he's going to butcher Dungeon Siege, Farcry, Bloodrayne and Hunter: reckoning...
This has got to stop.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
The basic problem is that the movie industry has developed a predictable efficiency, and the game industry has yet to do that. Perhaps that's why so many movie studios favor EA; they're mostly on time, and they get it done (granted, at the cost of overworked employees and p-oed wives).
I still contend that if the movie industry can more or less accurately predict a release date before even starting production, eventually so can the gaming industry. With the new consoles, this is going to hit critical mass. It's only going to get worse for the game industry. It needs to start developing better tools.
And maybe unions.
Good points. I think another issue is that when staying exactly to the same scenes as the movies, is the issue that you've already seen it, what's the motivation to actually doing it?
While on paper, it might sound cool to act out the adventures of heroX in a movie, the driving force behind games a lot of times is finding out what happens next, what's behind that door, etc.
If seeing the movie means I know it all, I'm going to get bored quite quickly.
As much bad press as it got, I think the Matrix game had the right idea in that sense. It was terribly flawed beyond repair in other ways, but by taking two characters from the movies who had little part in the movie, and using the game to explain their backstory, what they were doing while the movie was going on, and having them occassionally intersect at key elements was a very cool way to do it.
You get the bonus of being in the matrix world, you get the bonus of participating in pivotal moments from the movie, but you also get the bonus of seeing and doing new things. It's a synergetic effect that is quite cool. I hate that the rest of the game sucked, though.