Community Opinion: Stop With Movie-Based Games!
By jalexbrown —
September 17, 2009
Tags:
movie-based-games
opinion
An editorial discussing my opinions about why the game industry needs to stop making so many games based on movies.
Okay. I hate to say it, but I will. I'm a fiend for a creative product. Call me crazy, call me stupid, call me a bad consumer, whatever. If I have to wear these titles - and many others - because I dislike games based on movies, then so be it.
In the tough economic climate facing the US today, game publishers are more and more likely to push developers to use their pre-owned properties; it just so happens that a good chunk of these pre-owned properties are movie licenses. I understand that there are a few games - and I'm using that term loosely, because it's actually a very select few - that are based on movie properties that make total sense; perhaps a few of these movies were begging to be made into a good game. Take, for instance, The Godfather. I love the game to death, and I happen to be a huge fan of the movie trilogy. I happen to think that The Godfather was begging for a good sandbox experience, and the developers did a great job creating just that. It's a great fun game that understood its own concept, executed it well, and managed to stick to the source material without becoming to constrained by it. On the other end of the spectrum, developers today make a lot of games based on movies that just don't seem to stick too well with me. As an example of that, let's use...any game based on a movie made by Pixar. I'm sorry, but did Up really need a video game? The truth is the publisher used that license to leach a moderate amount of success off of the movie. It's not like you watch Up and think You know...this really should be made into a video game.
Blandness breeds blandness, and if the game industry doesn't decide to take chances and push away some of this mediocrity, we're going to have consoles with software lineups bloated with movie tie-ins and shovelware (whoops...sorry Wii...low blow). My advice to the game developers is to take some chances, try to create some new properties, and I'm sure there are enough open-minded games out there who are willing to give it a shot.
Besides...if I'm wrong you can always go back to making Pixar tie-ins.
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