Sega believes movie-licensed games will improve
If you’ve just spotted this title and muttered, “Well, it’s about ******* time!” you definitely aren’t alone. Game adaptations of movies are mostly sub-par (with a few exceptions), being half-games that don’t even pass as half-movies either.
But in a recent interview with Next Gen, Sega‘s VP of marketing Scott Steinberg believes that the movie-licensed game will improve in the near future. He believed that the problem of rushing games in a six-month period was to blame.
Movie licenses would usually get shoved into game developers throats and had to be developed in a short deadline. He commented, “No surprise [the licensed game] might not have been the greatest.”
But recently the movie and game industry have matured to a point that they take things more seriously now. The movie company see the importance of how a game reaches out to more people, therefore strengthening the fan-base for the franchise. Steinberg explained:
As publishers and the different movie studios are recognizing how important videogames are to the marketing of a film to the [target] demographic, movie studios realise that they can’t trivialise the interactive space.
In 1991 or ’92 the [movie] studios saw videogames as sort of chump change. They’d bounce perhaps a property six months before a game, basically when the movie was in the can, and publishers tried to crank it out with using an existing engine, threw a couple of artists on it, and shipped a 16-bit game.
Having recently secured a deal with Marvel Entertainment, Sega will now be one of few game development companies to create games based on the Marvel franchise. It’s been reported that characters such as Captain America and Thor will also be given their own title, and to have “upcoming movie tie-ins.”
Apparently, Sega also licensed the Aliens franchise for two games (an RPG and an FPS) and The Golden Compass franchise, both of which also made it big in the big screen prior to going interactive. What comes out of these games will certainly make or break Sega’s claim and rep, but it would be nice to see an improvement after years of poor game adaptations. Now only if someone could do something about games becoming bad movies…
Via Next Generation
If you’ve just spotted this title and muttered, “Well, it’s about ******* time!” you definitely aren’t alone. Game adaptations of movies are mostly sub-par (with a few exceptions), being half-games that don’t even pass as half-movies either.
But in a recent interview with Next Gen, Sega‘s VP of marketing Scott Steinberg believes that the movie-licensed game will improve in the near future. He believed that the problem of rushing games in a six-month period was to blame.
Movie licenses would usually get shoved into game developers throats and had to be developed in a short deadline. He commented, “No surprise [the licensed game] might not have been the greatest.”
But recently the movie and game industry have matured to a point that they take things more seriously now. The movie company see the importance of how a game reaches out to more people, therefore strengthening the fan-base for the franchise. Steinberg explained:
As publishers and the different movie studios are recognizing how important videogames are to the marketing of a film to the [target] demographic, movie studios realise that they can’t trivialise the interactive space.
In 1991 or ’92 the [movie] studios saw videogames as sort of chump change. They’d bounce perhaps a property six months before a game, basically when the movie was in the can, and publishers tried to crank it out with using an existing engine, threw a couple of artists on it, and shipped a 16-bit game.
Having recently secured a deal with Marvel Entertainment, Sega will now be one of few game development companies to create games based on the Marvel franchise. It’s been reported that characters such as Captain America and Thor will also be given their own title, and to have “upcoming movie tie-ins.”
Apparently, Sega also licensed the Aliens franchise for two games (an RPG and an FPS) and The Golden Compass franchise, both of which also made it big in the big screen prior to going interactive. What comes out of these games will certainly make or break Sega’s claim and rep, but it would be nice to see an improvement after years of poor game adaptations. Now only if someone could do something about games becoming bad movies…
Via Next Generation
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