The Future of Game Licensing

Gamasutra has a writeup of an E3 event where representatives of some of the big publishers discussed the future of game licensing. Representatives from THQ, Viacom, and Marvel were there, among several others. From the article: "The perception of quality has also hit the publishers. Gioia noted that at THQ, the company has shifted to where one SKU can cost as much as 15 million dollars. 'Why would I do that unless you're dealing with a substantial license or an original IP?' She argues that you have to be narrowly focused on what will work for your target demographic; properties like The Godfather with mass-market capability are really quite rare. With that in mind, there are plenty of other game size opportunities out there for content producers looking at games; it doesn't have to be the AAA game that so many licensed games seem to be skewing towards."

Comments

THQ + AAA?

[ZephyrXero]

Has THQ ever made a AAA title?

Re:THQ + AAA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, but Destroy all Humans looks to be promising.

Re:THQ + AAA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has THQ ever made a AAA title?

The closest would be Dawn of War, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Red Faction with GameRankings scores of 87%, 83%, and 86% respectively. Their line-up in the past has been mostly Pixar, WWE, and Nickelodeon games. I think they realize that and that is why they are publishing original content like Destroy All Humans!, Company of Heroes, and Titan Quest.

Re:THQ + AAA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dawn of War was freakin' amazing.

Shocking release schedules...

[Retroneous]

15 million for a single SKU (or product, as normal folks call it)? Check the release list. Kim Possible, That's So Raven, 80 other Disney licences for handhelds only. The WWE licence (getting to the point of being a complete joke when it comes to quality) and some random comic licences. Oh, and Full Spectrum Warrior.

What's new?

[Wan]

This article doesn't really say anything new. To me it sounds like everyone is saying concentrate on the game, the IP is icing on the cake. Without this article, we already know that IP holders are looking at games just as another merchandising opportunities. Which is why most of the time the quality is low and veteran gamers stay away from them. Everyone is familiar with the saga of the worst game ever, right?

Re:What's new?

[kaens]

I could have sworn that the worst game ever was Action 52....

Re:What's new?

[FidelCatsro]

You never did play ET on the 2600 did you ;) Now there was an utter piece of tripe made worse so by the fact that it could have been a good game if it had actualy been given enough time to be developed a little more . Instead it was the buggiest game known to man , things randomly occured and killed you and you basaicaly have no idea what is hapening

sickening

[cahiha]

Language like

properties like The Godfather with mass-market capability are really quite rare.

makes me sick. The Godfather is a piece of art (whether a good or a bad one is another discussion) and culturally belongs to everybody; the fact that it "belongs" to someone in some narrow copyright sense is incidental.

Fortunately, over the next decades, technology will make the creation of movies and computer games no more difficult than typing out a story on a typewriter, and computer networks make publishing them essentially free. Lots of good content will be free, and the content that won't be free will cut out the kind of windbags that talk about "properties", "franchises", and "mass-market capabilities".

Re:sickening

[Anonymous Coward]

It belongs to the people when copyright expires. That the IP collectors are conniving to make it never expire is sort of orthogonal ... Mario Puzo's only been dead for five years, so I think most of us could say it still belongs to his estate. That they whore it out is tragic, but not a crime.

Re:sickening

[FLAGGR]

ahahaha YEAH RIGHT.
Both game development and movie making are getting more difficult and more expensive. People are still going to want to uy quality games and watch quality movies, and I hate to break it to you but hippies aren't going to be making them and distributing them over thar intarweb, its going to be the big corperations, and your still going to watch your movies in the theatre and pay 10$ a ticket plus popcorn and pop, your always going to be playing your games on a 300$ (or more from what ive read) console/even more expensive computer, and its still going to cost 60$ a game, if not more. Hate to break it to ya hippie.

Re:sickening

[Planesdragon]

The Godfather is a piece of art (whether a good or a bad one is another discussion) and culturally belongs to everybody; the fact that it "belongs" to someone in some narrow copyright sense is incidental.

The Godfather is a work of art. Like every other work of art since the dawn of time, it belongs to the artist.

The fact that it was a collaborative work does not diminish the ownership of its creator. In the end run, copyright is a limited run, and in a few hundred years it will all be public domain.

Re:sickening

[nunchux]

Amen. If you want to make a profit off someone else's creation-- using their characters in your own book or movie game, using their song in your game or movie, etc-- you have to have their permission. Parody is of course an exception, as is not-for-profit fanfiction. If you don't have the talent to come up with an original idea, if you find someone else's property so compelling that you want to piggyback on it, then you should realize the value that piece of art has and be willing to pay for it. Though I would argue copyright should expire with the creator-- history has shown "the estate of..." can't be trusted to do anything but cash in on the artist's work.

There are two levels of artistic property ownership, and Slashdotters who want information and culture to be free would be wise to realize it. Whether or not you really "own" a piece of music when you buy a CD, or whether it's morally right to download is a completely separate issue.

Re:sickening

[Planesdragon]

Parody is of course an exception, as is not-for-profit fanfiction.

Don't forget the original purposes of the fair-use doctrine: news and scholarly reporting.

(And don't ever think that fanfiction follows different rules; if you favorite fanfic writer suddenly got a million fans who paid him $1 each, the copyright holder would likely want a piece of the cash. It's just that most of the time, fanfics aren't worth tracking down.)

Though I would argue copyright should expire with the creator-- history has shown "the estate of..." can't be trusted to do anything but cash in on the artist's work.

"The estate of" is supposed to do nothing but cash in on the artist's work. The estate is the artist's widow or children, and of all the folk in the world those are the ones who should profit first from an artist's deathbed masterpiece.

(OTOH, making post-mortem copyright a one-person "living will" type would work just as well. One could even limit it to spouses or incompetent dependents until death or children until age 25)

Re:sickening

[cahiha]

Both game development and movie making are getting more difficult and more expensive.

Yes, they are, because they are trying to do more complicated things. But now tool makers have a market and are automating more and more of the process. It will take a few more years, but the process will be almost completely automated.

I hate to break it to you but hippies aren't going to be making them and distributing them over thar intarweb

No, hippies aren't going to be making them, but writers and storytellers are, because writing and storytelling is going to be the primary creative input to a movie or game. You may also need one or two visual artists and a composer, but that's it.

The hippies are going to be the out-of-work "artists" and programmers who have been making money painting dirt on rocks in video games and who have been fighting with Direct 3D and pointer errors.

Re:sickening

[FidelCatsro]

They can keep pt 3 , Dear god that was tripe.
The first movie to bring me to tears *shudder* , I was thinking maybe i had exagerate how bad it was and last year decided to whatch it again . Unfortunatly i was right the first time .
PT1 and 2 are great art , pt3 however is comparable to an andy warhols soup cans(unless you like warhol , then replace him with an artist you strongly dislike)

Ugh

[charlie in the trees]

We need more original content, not liscenses and franchises.

Re:Ugh

[ZephyrXero]

I personally welcome these big companies to licence and rehash the hell out of everything...Then the real gamers will support indie games. Just like the music and film industry, it's the unknowns who really come up with something new when all you get is crap from the mainstream.

Re:Ugh

[neverkevin]

I never understood this reasoning. If a game is good then it is good, it does not matter if the game developer made up the content or paid for it. The problem comes when the game sucks and is sold based just on the license or franchise. However, there are just as many bad games with original content then their are with licensed content.

Re:Ugh

[kaens]

Could you perhaps point out a few good indie games? Most of the 'indie games' that I've seen have been MUDs.

Re:Ugh

[ZephyrXero]

Well, first thing you could do is check out the annual Independent Games Festival, then there are a few game sites devoted to just indy games, like Game Tunnel, or for a good example games you could try something like Gish or Saga of Ryzom. And, if people started taking more notice and buying more, we'd see a lot more indy developers giving it a shot.

Re:Ugh

[Dave2 Wickham]

Don't forget Darwinia and Uplink as decent indy games.

Re:Ugh

[kaens]

Thanks alot

Movies vs. Games

[nick_davison]

The perception of quality has also hit the publishers. Gioia noted that at THQ, the company has shifted to where one SKU can cost as much as 15 million dollars. 'Why would I do that unless you're dealing with a substantial license or an original IP?'

Has anyone noticed the games industry has got slightly over obsessed with how big business it thinks it is?

It's like the claim they're bigger than the movie industry when, in fact, they only just beat box office sales and don't come close when comparing DVDs, Video, Rental, Cable and other distribution channels of the exact same product.

A single SKU can cost "as much as $15m"?! Woo. So what you're saying is that games are now comparable to small movies where the very cheap ones still go for a couple of million to around $20 million, the mid size ones around the $60m mark and the massive ones around the $100m mark.

Hollywood is somewhat discerning about licenses but only somewhat. For every Batman or Spiderman movie, there's going to be a Darkman, Phantom or Dick Tracey. If their budgets are even bigger still, how come they keep doing it?

Because they've got over themselves and stopped being impressed with how big they've got. Instead, they ask the simple question: Will what I invest in an IP allow me to recoup more at the end? If yes, they buy it, if no, they don't.

Just as in the movie industry, the games industry is going to discover:

The Spiderman IP is probably worth quite a few million. You can no doubt recoup that investment and more if you make a decent game.

The Darkman IP isn't ever going to add several million to what you recoup on the strength of the name alone. Thus it's not worth several million to buy in the IP. But the point is you don't buy in the IP for several million. You buy it in for several tens of thousands or whatever and it adds more than that amount to your otherwise anonymouse masked hero game.

Yes, games cost a lot and make a lot these days. But get over yourselves. You're still relative babies by the movie industry's standards. They still buy in the occasional small IP for a smaller title because it's still profitable. That's the only thing that counts. If you're so hyped up yet nervous about making a mistake that you've lost track of return - cost = profit, you really shouldn't be in the position to be making those decisions.

Waaaaah

[Jukashi]

Someone give these pussies a hanky. I play video games because I like games. Not because I want to be part of some piece of shit movie. The whole reason I started playing games in the first place was to get away from this silver screen diarrhea. I think it's all summed up in one line:
developers should be focused on franchises, not games.
Yeah, I'm always like "man, I wish the developers focused a little less on this game, and a little more on 'the franchise'". These douchebags better keep working on polishing up their turds so that unsuspecting parents can continue to disappoint their children with licensed games.

Re:Waaaaah

[Austerity Empowers]

Games can be franchises too...Warcraft, Doom, Quake, etc.

I just think games were better when they were simple enough for one or two developers to make who actually had both a vested interest in the end product, and also cared about it. The more people involved with making something, the less people really care about it.

the one that got it right

[Technetium Web]

Kingdom Hearts, from what i've seen the only tv/movie liscenced game that was actually a great piece of work on its own, i really enjoyed it and i hate disney stuff, but my partner loves it, whereas i love square stuff and she had never been exposed to it, and we both started to develop a like for the other side of the liscence. anyone know of any others that succeeded?

Re:the one that got it right

[Mandoric]

Various Japanese devs have a long history of getting licenced games right---Camcom put out a series of quality Disney licences for the NES and SNES, while Konami's TMNT, Simpsons, and X-Men arcade games were quite good. The Macross property's been farmed out to various publishers with some excellent (although some crappy) results, and Banpresto, with development support from, among others, Winky Soft and From Software, has proved adept at pumping out great games games that feature a variety of giant robots.

Re:the one that got it right

[bVork]

Don't forget about the good games by Western developers. Aladdin on Genesis (by the people who would become Shiny) was fantastic. Goldeneye on N64, by Rare, was one of the best games on the system. Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (and its sequel, Judgement Rites) were excellent adventure games by Interplay. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is also very good. Quite a unique FPS. And it's far better than the movie it's based on. Rainbow Six is an interesting case of a novel-based game series that has become more well-known than the novel it was originally based on.

On a side note, Macross has not exactly had many excellent games based upon it - it has had far more terrible games than good ones, though I did quite enjoy Do You Remember Love on Saturn.

Re:the one that got it right

[radish]

There have been some decent Star Wars games - KOTOR is the obvious one but I also really like Battlefront (seems I'm on my own there though!). Lego Star Wars is dual licensed and also a lot of fun, particularly for the casual gamer.

Of course there have also been many, many terrible Star Wars games. "Yoda Desktop Adventures" anyone?

Yeah, I now development costs are going up, but...

[Zangief]

What the hell is a SKU?

Re:Yeah, I now development costs are going up, but

[nelsonal]

Shelf keeping unit. It's sort of equivalent to a UPC code but references the product rather than the code. In gaming it is equivalent to titles if you count each platform as a separate title.

Re:Yeah, I now development costs are going up, but

[Zangief]

Thank you.

One less license for Xbox 360

[rAiNsT0rm]

After being attacked numerous times for my statements that developers do not have good things to say about the Xbox 360 this news today was released by developer Factor 5:

"yesterday development company Factor 5 helped Sony fire another blow to Microsoft's camp by declaring allegiance to the Playstation 3. President Julian Eggebrecht told News.com that the Playstation 3 offered more processing power to more easily simulate the real world for a better game experience. The company had previously stated that it would work on the Xbox 360."

Now all the pro-MS Xbox crowd can start to see my inside contacts ARE CORRECT, and that this will not be the last such statement by developers as they become available in the main stream press.

Re:One less license for Xbox 360

[Lucractius]

...And MS dont care.

Xbox 360 is just as the original Xbox was. No more than a gigantic "Market Penetration Excerscise"

MS are making the Xbox for company PR, and as a way to Sell other MS stuff though ancilliary channels.

I expect its fairly obvious there will be a point where they release a full OS for it and nice matching versions of their core software suites. All bundled at a discount price for already having gotten the (by the time) near manditory for all the "must have games" Xbox live service (and purely for having the Xbox itself as well) and slowly feeding MS more consitently and reliably than any other method.

But it is good to see that Inside contacts still exist :) theyve been sadly lost for a while.

Re:THQ + AAA? testing

[Anonymous Coward]