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The Avengers. The Dark Knight Rises. Skyfall. The Hobbit.
What do 2012’s biggest movies have in common? They’re all based on white-hot licenses. They’re all going to gross over $1 billion each when all is said and done, putting them in an elite tier of films. But there’s something else they share in common: Not a single one of them was accompanied by a tie-in console videogame. A Good Day to Die Hard, in theaters this weekend, is from a series that in the past has spawned all kinds of games featuring John McClane. This version? Nada.
A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Throughout the 2000s, game publishers worked alongside Hollywood to ship games based on the biggest blockbuster movies, day and date with the film’s release in theaters. With rare exceptions, these tie-ins were not very good games: The tight schedules of film production meant that the games had to be produced very quickly and couldn’t be delayed for further polish, and the fact that Hollywood was pulling the strings meant that the games’ developers didn’t have much, if any, creative freedom.
And yet even though they were never any good, movie-games were seen as an inevitable fact of life for the gaming world, since consumers still bought them based solely on the strength of the license. It seemed as if there was no way to kill off the movie-game business. And then, all of a sudden, it disappeared.
As it turned out, making movie-games was actually a lot riskier than it seemed from the outside. And a few industry shifts were all it took for the whole house of cards to come down.
At the onset of the 2000s, Electronic Arts made a big play for the movie-game crossover market. The game-publishing giant spared no expense opening a lavish Los Angeles studio in 2003 with the aim of deepening its ties with Tinseltown. It developed games based on Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Harry Potter, Batman, and other hot properties.
Licenses like these were not necessarily a golden ticket to success, says John Blackburn, vice president of the Disney-owned game developer Avalanche Software. If a game publisher wants to secure a license for a hot movie, "we're going to go to [the content providers] and we're going to promise them a certain amount of money," he said. "That's going to be right off the top ... a minimum guarantee."
"Because of the way those contracts work," he said, "it's more expensive to make those games. So a lot of the time, the development budgets go down because of that." It becomes, Blackburn says, a vicious cycle: Lower development budgets mean a less satisfying game, so consumers purchase fewer copies, so sales drop, so budgets drop even lower for the next batch of licensed games, which play even worse.
And they weren't all that good to begin with. Even if movie studios demanded less of an upfront fee for games, thus freeing up more money for development, it's still an almost-impossible task to develop a good game on the tight schedules of moviemaking, Blackburn says.
"If you think about how a movie gets made," he says, "if it's a live-action film, they nail down the script, and then they've got a year [to] film it and put it all together really quickly." Since the script and look of the film might not be finalized until only one year from release, the videogame team really can't do much of anything prior to that point. "To get to quality, you need time," Blackburn says, and movie-game teams never had that luxury.
But a lack of quality had always been a problem with movie-games, ever since the days when Atari cranked out a horrendous 8-bit version of E.T. in six weeks. And people still purchased them. What changed?
When movie games were popular in the early 2000s, "consumers were generally unaware of videogame brands such as Medal of Honor or Call of Duty," says Electronic Entertainment Design and Research analyst Jesse Divnich. When customers went to GameStop and stared at a wall of boxes of games they knew nothing about, a major movie license that they had heard of would be the thing most likely to catch their eyes, and their wallets.
Today, game publishers have made great strides in increasing casual players' awareness of game titles, building gaming-specific brands that are as strong as movie licenses: Call of Duty. Assassin's Creed. Grand Theft Auto. It's much more lucrative for a game publisher to invest in creating a unique gaming franchise that filters out of the gaming-enthusiast blogosphere and into the mainstream consciousness.
And it's not just that games are more recognizable, Blackburn says; they've also gotten much better. "When people were buying licensed games even though they might not be great, I think that was when people thought that it might be a C, you know? If this game’s a C, that’s enough," he says. "There weren’t a lot of A games out there at the time, most good games were like a B." As game designers started to perfect their craft and create more A-level experiences, movie games seemed even worse by comparison.
Kevin Chou, CEO of mobile game maker Kabam, says that evolving technology also helped shut out the movie-game genre. "The big difference between the latest generation of Xbox 360 and PS3 versus the PS2 is that in the current generation, online became very important," he says. Since the shooter genre lent itself well to online play, it exploded in popularity, Chou says, going from 12 percent of the console market in 2008 to 20 percent in 2010. "If you think about movies, they tend to focus on telling a story," he says, which lends itself more to "single-player experiences that are more exploratory." Movie games and online play didn't mesh.
In addition to struggles in the marketplace, games were looked upon by Hollywood as mere marketing tools, not collaborative creative works. According to a story in the recent book Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood, the studio exec in charge of the James Bond license had simply hung up on a top-level Electronic Arts director when he called regarding proposed ideas for a game's story. "I don't have time to be worried about your little game," she reportedly said before slamming the receiver down.
Some forward-thinking moviemakers who loved videogames did attempt to resolve these issues, working with top developers to build a better movie-game. Peter Jackson specifically requested game director Michel Ancel, creator of the cult hit game Beyond Good & Evil, for Ubisoft's game version of his King Kong remake. This deeper partnership resulted in a more enjoyable final product, but still not up to the level of the best wholly original games. A later Ubisoft collaboration with James Cameron's Avatar was far more hyped but got panned by critics.
Electronic Arts bailed out of the movie-game business in the late 2000s, saying that it was "falling apart." A startup game company called Brash Entertainment founded in 2007 to make games based on Hollywood properties emerged, released three lackluster products, and went under in 2008.
One of 2012's biggest movie releases almost had a game. Money-losing publisher THQ, which has since gone bankrupt, had an Avengers movie tie-in for consoles in the works but spiked it in 2011. Electronic Arts, which published a Batman Begins game, was working on a Dark Knight tie-in in 2008, but that was canned as well.
Today, the EA Los Angeles studio's primary claim to fame is that it is home to the company's ever-expanding division for browser and smartphone games. Interestingly, it's on those new platforms where movie-games are finding a new home.
The Hobbit might not have gotten its own console game tie-in, but there is a Hobbit videogame that's doing quite well. It's a free-to-play game that's garnered over a million users so far. Its maker, Kabam, has struck up relationships with Hollywood studios to create movie-games for social and mobile platforms based on other licenses, too, like The Godfather and Fast & Furious.
The smaller budgets and faster turnaround times on these platforms is more suited to the risky nature and tight schedules of movie-game production. Game studios don't have to make a big upfront investment, and can get the product on virtual shelves alongside the film. "The first meeting we had with Warner Bros. was in November 2011," said CEO Kevin Chou, "and so from the time that we met them ... to the time that we had a product in the marketplace was 12 months."
"The key was ... us educating them about free-to-play and getting them comfortable with that," Chou said. "When we launch the game, that's not the finished product, and we're spending the next three years as the trilogy came out over a much longer period of time continuing to add content."
EEDAR analyst Divnich says it's about anticipating where casual game buyers are going to end up. "These casual markets tend to consume these interactive entertainment fads quickly," he says. "Despite movie tie-in games failing on the HD consoles, they are thriving in the mobile markets. And eventually, that too will get stale. Some new technology will emerge ... and these trends will once again emerge."
For now, mobile phones and browsers are where movie games live. There's a very popular Avengers game on Facebook, a Dark Knight Rises game on iOS – and this week, even a brand-new Die Hard game for your phone. Yippee-ki-yay.
