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Franchise games - yay or nay?

bylam

Funcom
Developer
Joined
Oct 30, 2006
Messages
707
Something we've been discussing at work is the value of franchises and intellectual properties as they apply to games. Throwing a few conclusions from our discussion out there to see if folks agree or not.

Conclusion one - Non-gaming franchises don't bring any particular advantage when expanded to games.

Basically, just because The Hunger Games is a successful book and movie series, doesn't mean it would be a successful game series. It might succeed if it is a good game, but being a "Hunger Games" game gives it no particular advantage.

Batman Arkham series seems to buck this trend, but the first game was considered a very good game. And then the rules of the established gaming franchise seem to kick in (see conclusion two).

Conclusion two - The strongest franchises in gaming are original game franchises.

Seems obvious, I guess, but Half Life, Witcher (fail, Witcher is based on the books, of course), Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, Elder Scrolls etc. They all seem to grow more successful with each successive games (regardless of quality increase).

Conclusion three - Gaming franchises rarely succeed outside of the gaming space

Finally, turning it back around, are there any real examples of game ips crossing over into other media forms and being successful?

It seems to me that your best bet as a developer these days is to make a solid game, then work on sequels that expand upon the functionality of the original.
 
Last edited:

Kz3r0

Arcane
Joined
May 28, 2008
Messages
27,013
Usually games based on franchises are shit, they are called tie-in if I am not mistaken.
There are exceptions of course.
Regarding being successful that depends how you measure that, they can sell above average but don't last very long, because they depend on the main franchise.
There are cases as The Witcher where the game promotes the main franchise, the books, and is even more successful than them, but it's one of a kind situation.
However the most successful game franchises are Japanese, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Super Mario, etc., Western franchise tend to run dry quite fast, Bethesda is an exception.
 

DraQ

Arcane
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Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
  • Games are a very different medium than any of the traditional linear storytelling ones, many things don't cross this medium boundary well
  • Games are still not a mature medium (maybe they will never be) when it comes to actually conveying stuff which creates dissonances
  • Modern game development is obviously a commercial venture, but tie-ins typically involve large monetary investments and/or expectations due to licensing making them really profit driven as well as cost and risk averse - obvious cash-ins in other words
  • It's hard to harmonize linear and interactive fiction running concurrently or intended to pick up after one another because of canon ambiguity of things like multiple endings/paths through the game or obvious game'y elements.
 

Catfish

Learned
Joined
May 8, 2015
Messages
222
Conclusion one - Non-gaming franchises don't bring any particular advantage when expanded to games.

You've made several interesting points. However I believe the fact that most franchise releases are sub-par is actually part of a bigger problem in the medium - the current publisher-developer relationship.

Pitch an idea to a team of talented people, give them time and resources and they will produce something worthwhile. And there are a lot of examples. Bioware took Forgotten Realms and produced Baldur's Gate, took Star Wars and produced Kotor. Interplay took Planescape and delivered Torment. Rainbow Six was awesome until a certain point - that is based on Tom Clancy fiction. Frank Herbert gave Westwood the perfect setup to create an entire new genre for the medium. Et cetera.

So game development is pretty much good with licensing an established universe to work with. But unfortunately at this point in time game publishing kind of destroys the creative environment needed to produce good products of this type. They need licensed games to be released while they are relevant, like when the movie they are tied into comes out. And since developing a game, especially a good one, almost always takes more time than producing a movie - the result is average at best.

Original franchises are normally also spawned based not on whether that particular game needed a sequel, but because it would generate profit.

So yeah. I guess my argument is that games need franchises just as much as movies, books and the like - when the creative team behind them has more to say within the established world.

Batman Arkham series seems to buck this trend, but the first game was considered a very good game. And then the rules of the established gaming franchise seem to kick in (see conclusion two).

On the Arkham series - allow me to express an opinion. I really think the second game is a major improvement on the first, though I admit this is nothing more than an opinion. As for "Origins" - this was developed by a different studio and published by Warner as a compromise - the publisher keeps their "release regularity" profits and Rocksteady gets more time to create the actual sequel, and from what I'd seen in the gameplay footage it looks really promising.
 

Archibald

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2010
Messages
7,869
Arkham managed to succeed because it is not related to any specific movie release. Many other franchise games have to be released at specific times to get more exposure from movie or tv show or whatever which usually results in rushed games.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
27,093
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
I believe the fact that most franchise releases are sub-par is actually part of a bigger problem in the medium - the current publisher-developer relationship.

Pitch an idea to a team of talented people, give them time and resources and they will produce something worthwhile. And there are a lot of examples. Bioware took Forgotten Realms and produced Baldur's Gate, took Star Wars and produced Kotor. Interplay took Planescape and delivered Torment. Rainbow Six was awesome until a certain point - that is based on Tom Clancy fiction. Frank Herbert gave Westwood the perfect setup to create an entire new genre for the medium. Et cetera.

So game development is pretty much good with licensing an established universe to work with. But unfortunately at this point in time game publishing kind of destroys the creative environment needed to produce good products of this type. They need licensed games to be released while they are relevant, like when the movie they are tied into comes out. And since developing a game, especially a good one, almost always takes more time than producing a movie - the result is average at best.

Original franchises are normally also spawned based not on whether that particular game needed a sequel, but because it would generate profit.

So yeah. I guess my argument is that games need franchises just as much as movies, books and the like - when the creative team behind them has more to say within the established world.

You have no idea how true this is (except for the Dune thing, which I'll touch on later.)

25 years ago there was a game spawned from an idea, that idea was developed a little further and then the devs went "shopping" for a publisher. Every single publisher said two things:

# This game is great, we love it!
# We're not going to publish it because it's not a franchise.

Eventually one publisher decided to release the game after the devs paid them a second visit and agreed to the publisher's demand that they change some of the game's music (because copyrights).

That game? Lemmings, which sold over 15 million units over a 15-year period and appears often on "Top XX games of all time" lists. (Well, any serious ones, anyway. ;) )

Now, as for Dune - Westwood's Dune 2 (obviously) wasn't the first Dune game to be made, but it was the second Dune game published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment. In this case the publisher had secured the rights to what was perceived to be a dead franchise at the time, and were planning to make a little money off of it. Cryo's Dune is a neat little game that combines several small genres into a cohesive whole, but for a while it looked like it was going to be cancelled, so Virgin scrambled to find another developer that could make a Dune game. Cryo's Dune then didn't get cancelled, but since Cryo's and Westwood's games were so different Virgin didn't think any harm would be done by releasing both of them, so they got released in the same year (1992).

That Dune 2 became the de facto standard for RTS games was a coincidence, an executive at Virgin had seen Herzog Zwei and realized that "this kind of game" would be perfect to portray the stressful activity of controlling the spice. There was no market research involved until post-release, then someone finally realized that people not only loved Dune 2, but wanted more of the same. This prompted Westwood to start Command & Conquer, while a known copycat studio called Blizzard cobbled together a Dune 2 clone called Warcraft, whose only real new feature proved to be vital to its success: Muiltiplayer support. The fact that Warcraft was also (probably?) the only RTS game developed and released before Command & Conquer came out was also a big factor.

So yeah - franchise games live or die based on the publishers, not the devs.
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
90% of franchise games are utter shit. If you disagree, please take a time machine back to 2000 and spend the decade there. Report back with your findings.
 

baturinsky

Arcane
Joined
Apr 21, 2013
Messages
5,526
Location
Russia
Franchase gives some deepness to world and characters virtually (but not actually) for free.
 

rohand

Cipher
Joined
Aug 20, 2014
Messages
592
Location
Planet Escape
Considering that D&D is a franchise, they do have potential for some great games but also some terrible shit.

Yes, Descent to Undermountain, I'm looking at you.
 

Catfish

Learned
Joined
May 8, 2015
Messages
222
You have no idea how true this is

I used to work project management for a gaming publisher, and this general logic is one of the big reasons for the past tense :)

Was Warcraft really a clone of Dune 2?

Topdown view. Bases on a grid with concrete connectors. Single unit selection as the main control. Yeah, the originals were pretty much brothers, they started really differing only with C&C/WC2
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
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Messages
27,093
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Was Warcraft really a clone of Dune 2?

Topdown view. Bases on a grid with concrete connectors. Single unit selection as the main control. Yeah, the originals were pretty much brothers, they started really differing only with C&C/WC2

Unit hierarchy almost identical to Dune 2.
Building hierarchy almost identical to Dune 2.
Same font used in both games (the little info screen).
Layout of info screen (small image next to health bar).

The differences are minute, like how resources are harvested from one local pool in Warcraft, while they're part of the scenery in Dune 2. Commands were changed from buttons with text to graphical icons, but yeah.

Warcraft also allowed up to four units to be selected at once, which was another new addition.
 

rado907

Savant
Joined
Apr 23, 2015
Messages
249
Nay.

Though some of the Star Wars games have been pretty good. Especially those Jedi Knight games.
 

Destroid

Arcane
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
16,628
Location
Australia
Lot's of really good games have used non-gaming franchises as their basis. It's a lot of fun to convert an expansive setting (like star wars) into gameplay systems, and you sidestep the problem of introducing players to your (probably) much worse setting than one stolen from books/film/comics.
 

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