Big game publishers fall back on the safety of Hollywood’s back catalog

This week, the video game industry received yet another infusion of boomer energy with the announcement of a new Indiana Jones Game. Meanwhile, there is also a James bond current gameand Ubisoft announced he was working on an open world Star wars Game– the first of a possible wave of new games set in the galaxy far, far away once EA’s exclusive deal with Lucasfilm ends in 2023. Big publishers hope Hollywood delivers their next hit could be a smart business or just another fad. Either way, it looks like an ominous sign of creative abandonment just months after the next console cycle.

As Hollywood rushes to buy the rights to video game films, the game industry now seems poised to rely more and more on successful franchises established in Hollywood. These are not the market synergies that I was looking for. The two psychics (and their respective corporate lords) have a lot to learn and contribute to each other, but spending years and hundreds of millions swapping the same old (mostly white) stories sucks. Hollywood is already growing by eating its own cock, creating endless sequels and reboots –Independence Day: Resurgence, Jurassic World, Ghostbusters. Seeing crossing in the game is even more exhausting.

“Some major studios make licensed games,” said Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards wrote on Twitter yesterday. “What’s your dream studio / franchise collaboration that you hope to see someday?”

The fantasy of your favorite developer creating a game in your favorite genre based on your favorite piece of existing fiction, as if Square Enix had created an open world RPG based on Frank Herbert Dune, There’s nothing new. More and more, these fantasies are turning into reality as the cost of making big budget gaming balls goes public.shers to look for safer bets. The success of Black Knight films led to Arkham trilogy, followed more recently by Insomniac Spider Man and Miles Morales and even Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel avengers: the popular studio behind the Grave robber reboot by working on a beat ’em up based on everyone’s favorite Marvel characters.

This is not a bad thing, nor a guaranteed success, as evidenced by Square Enix’s disappointment with Avengers. Some great games have come out of this pitching process, but it can also be a recipe for death by the heat of the imagination. Hitman The manufacturer IO Interactive is switching from its unique Agent 47 to trying to try the James Bond license. Wolfenstein Developer Machine Games will revive the Nazi piercer and colonialist if Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, these stories have felt creative and relevant for decades.

Disney is pulling Lucasfilm’s video game legacy from the Sarlacc pit with Lucasfilm Games, a sign that the mega media company is likely aiming to flood the market with newly licensed games in the same way it does with movies and tv shows. All of this, of course, is based on the existing canon, and it is all owned by a company with a net worth greater than the GDP of most countries.

EA got a lot of crap for their 10 year contract to be the exclusive publisher of Star wars games to be released, until 2019, a grand total of three. Now, it looks like the Monkey’s Paw’s wish has been granted, and we’re on our way to getting a lot more.

“We are looking to work with top-in-class teams who can create great games across all of our intellectual property,” Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly said yesterday. Reilly, in particular, said he expects games “across a wide range of platforms, genres and experiences”, with many “professionals” from Lucasfilm Games to help developers shape the vision. creative adaptations. An open-world Ubisoft game is just the start, in other words. In comparison, during the investor last December call Disney has announced nearly a dozen new Star Wars movies and TV series.

And, of course, there is also everything Star wars games that EA continues to work on. An EA spokesperson said Kotaku yesterday that the terms of its exclusive deal with Lucasfilm have not changed and remain in effect until 2023. According to a source familiar with the deal, only EA can publish Star wars games before 2023, after which the partnership with Lucasfilm will continue, but will no longer be exclusive. It means Ubisoft Star wars The game won’t be released until late 2023 at the earliest.

SSome of these games could be great. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and 2020 Star Wars: Squadrons were a lot of fun, but I’m not sure if we need a dozen big budget games to try and play in this space. I’d just as much like to see Respawn or EA Motive do something original, Ubisoft too for that matter. Despite the name that turns the eyes, Fenyx: Rise of the Immortals was pretty cool, although it looked a lot like previous Ubisoft and Nintendo games Breath of the wild.

It’s easy to imagine how studios could mix genres and gameplay mechanics with already established and beloved fictional worlds. It is much more difficult to conceptualize all the ideas and all the projects that will not see the light of day because of this media consolidation.

“None”, former developer of Naughty Dog and director of The Last of Us Bruce Straley written with a friendly wink in response to Keighley’s thought experiment. “We need all this talent and money to create new content, new IPs and innovate in the AAA Geoff space.”

Publishing blockbuster games has never been a bastion of risk-taking and creativity, but it could become even more obsolete if it becomes more monopolized by the existing entertainment monoculture. So no I wouldn’t like to see BioWare make another one Star wars RPG, and I’m far from thrilled at the prospect of Machine Games dabbling in knots to rehabilitate killer Indiana Jones into something less culturally obnoxious. It would be great, as always, to see video games trying to do something new. After all, where will future Hollywood blockbusters be? comes from?