While video games based on movies are generally of excremental quality, Chris Bateman notes, they still sell well — and there are sound reasons for the path From Film, to Game, to Bargain Bin:
Film-to-game adaptations are a merchandising proposition — the whole basis of the commercial viability of the form is to get the game on the shelves when it can share in the hype of the movie (thus saving on marketing costs). Consequently, the damned souls condemned to work on a film-to-game adaptation are immediately up against the clock. The famed E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial game had to be made in six weeks — when this is taken into account, its poor quality is perhaps more forgiveable.That’s just the beginning of the problem though. Not only do you have insufficient time to work on these kinds of projects, but you are usually working solely from the screenplay (because you have to start work before principal photography has begun) and so if the goal of the project is to have the game represent the film, you can look forward to a panoply of crises later in the project as you discover your game doesn’t match the film at all. Not to mention that as well as having a publisher interfering with the development process, you also have the licensors from the movie studio interfering — and this usually means even more disastrously ill-conceived feedback than usual.
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And let’s not forget, many of these games do sell rather well. Sales figures below half a million are quite rare for a big film-to-game license, and figures around a million are common. These aren’t exactly a high watermark figure (five, ten and fifteen million unit sales exist for the best titles in the current market) but they probably bespeak of a project in profit. Remember that E.T. game that everyone likes to knock? It still sold 1.5 million units. The game is only considered a failure because Atari paid too much for the license and thus manufactured too many units trying to hit the break point; if their bid had been reasonably judged, they would still have made a profit on this title, irrespective of the quality of the game.The ghastly truth of the matter is that many perfectly well-made games do not sell in unit numbers on a par with the film-to-game adaptations, which underscores the reason for the adaptations in the first place: the commercial reality is that you’re going to sell more copies of a mediocre game with a strong brand license (especially with simultaneous release) than of a well-designed original game at least nine times out of ten, if not more. If you’re an investor (instead of, say, a gamer), which proposition do you think you’re going to prefer?
So, how do you end up with a quality film-based game, like GoldenEye?
GoldenEye, for instance, was not released to coincide with the 1995 Bond film of the same name, and was in fact released to coincide with the following Bond movie (Tomorrow Never Dies) in 1997. The team had the time they needed to get the game as good as it could be, and it benefited from superior review scores, word-of-mouth and all the other advantages of a quality game title that didn’t have to be rushed to master.
Also, if a film doesn’t suggest a game that hardcore gamers will like, how about not trying to make a game for hardcore gamers? Make a game for the audience you have:
Most videogames are too difficult for the mass market audience — many adaptations shouldn’t be making a game for the hobbyists at all, they should be making it for the actual audience such a licensed game will receive. It seems like a no-brainer, and yet developers get this wrong time and time again.Case in point, Traveller’s Tales 2003 Finding Nemo game was monstrously old school in its design sensibilities; it’s hard to believe that the audience for the film who were then interested in the game could possibly have their play needs met by this sequence of unceasing pain. Yet the game sold in good numbers (about 1.12 million units in the US on the PS2) — on the back of the popularity of the brand. I do not think it is much of a stretch to suggest a more forgiving, more casual-friendly game design could have been delivered on the same resources but have better met the needs of the audience for a Finding Nemo branded game, and benefited from better sales on the back of better word-of-mouth and fewer returns.