Games based of a license, whether it’s a movie, book, comic and whatever license were never really the easiest thing to tackle. Just the second ever game with a license – E.T. - is regarded as one of the worst games ever and is also considered one of the symbol of the gaming crash in the eighties. This sort of start made people not expect much from licensed games, but with time we got many great games.
I’d like to start right of the bat by stating: You can of course view licensed games as just this little appendix of movies, tv-series, books or whatever, but this isn’t necessarily the case in all instances. Just look at games as the Harry Potter games, Chronicles of Riddick games or all the recent LEGO games.
Why to make a game based of a licensed
In a discussion at GDC 2009 some of the most competent people to talk about this – Leo Olebe from Bioware and Feargus Urquahrt from Obsidian Entertainment – started the discussion by talking about how they start the creative process behind making a new game.
First they try to pitch new original titles to the publisher and if those don’t succeed, they change them a bit so they fit into one of the established licenses. And sometimes they just completely create games from the scratch to fit inside a certain license, but that happens mostly only when a publisher comes to them.
What we tend to forget is the fact that the publishers are in the business of making money and they don’t like to risk. So as Urquhart said – in a bad economical situation, when games aren’t being sold as much, the developers don’t try to pitch as many original games to the publishers as they are very unlikely to succeed. In that situation they directly aim to pitch established games or licensed games.
So whenever games are being sold like crazy, we can expect more original games to come out, but in a situation when the market is down, we should probably tone down our expectations and understand that the companies still need to make money.
Licenses have their benefits, but also some disadvanteges
On the other hand, there are game studios that primarily focus on creating licensed games. Stephen D’Angelo from Cryptic Studios said in an interview with GamesIndustry.org that he would estimate that working with a license can speed up the development process by up to a year as you don’t have to spend resources on the story and the people working on the process have an easier job knowing what the focus it. This specially applies to the marketing departments as the people working there often aren’t gamers and marketing a license is much easier for them.
But whenever you're working with a well know license and universe, it also brings some disadvantages. For example: too high expectations of the license owners or worse – the fans. Just look at Star Trek Online where some of the fans expected the whole game to be sort of fun, like the famous The Trouble with Tribbles episode of the original series and weren’t just able to understand that Star Trek is much more complex then just their favorite episode. Fans are often just more closed towards new ideas and it’s much harder to satisfy them than even the publisher or the license owners.
In the end, the development of a game based on a license has its very specific problems. You need to know which part of the license your going to use and how to use it withing your mechanics. You need to market it in a way that not only the fans of the license will pick up the game, but it will also interest the rest of the market, but at the same time it is faithful to the main ideas of the universe you are trying to depict. Luckily, these days it seems that most developers, publishers and license owners are getting better and better and find the lines where all the stuff that is needed to create a good licensed game meet. And while many people still view licensed games as “that shitty game that came out with the movie” it is certainly possible to create great games based of licenses.
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The problem with most licensed games is the property being used is meant to sell the game not the merits of the game itself. A big part of that is a large number of licensed games are to coincide with the release of a movie or other project, giving the development team a very small window to make a fun and functioning game.
When thinking about games being built around a certain license one would think that it would almost always be awesome, giving the massive shortcut the developers are getting. Unfortunately i think that many of the studios that get licensing games to develop are often under pretty tight money and time-stress (big movie companies ain't got no patience for anything other than profit) causing many titles to fall flat on their head, as you mention in your post (i thought it was a good point).
With that said, The Riddick series was freaking awesome, love every game in that series! They really showed how a licensed game should look like, great mechanics that fitted perfectly to the movie/game universe, awesome for both movie fans and rookies to the universe of Riddick alike!
Nice post dude, enjoyed reading it!:)