This week, the video game industry received a new infusion of boomer energy with the announcement of a new Indiana Jones games. Meanwhile, there are also an James Bond game in progressand Ubisoft announced that it is working in an open world Star Wars games– the first in a possible flurry of new games taking place in the galaxy far, far away, as EA’s exclusive deal with Lucasfilm ends in 2023. The big publishers who expect Hollywood to deliver their next blockbuster may be smart businesses or just another fad. In any case, it looks like a sinister sign of creative surrender a few months after the next console cycle.
While Hollywood runs to buy the video game movie rights, the gaming industry now appears poised to lean more and more towards established Hollywood franchises. These are not the market synergies I was looking for. Both mediums (and their respective corporate masters) have a lot to learn and contribute to each other, but spending years and hundreds of millions exchanging the same old (mostly white) stories sucks. Hollywood is already growing up eating its own tail, creating endless sequences and reboots –Independence Day: Resurgence, Jurassic World, Ghostbusters. swatching it move on to the games is even more exhausting.
“Some big studios are making licensed games,” Game Awards presenter Geoff Keighley wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Which studio / franchise of your dreams do you hope to see someday?”
The fantasy of your favorite developer making a game in your favorite genre based on your existing favorite work of fiction, as if Square Enix made an open-world RPG based on Frank Herbert Dune, it is nothing new. Increasingly, these fantasies are becoming a reality as the cost of making big-budget game balloons leaves the publicshers to look for safer bets. The success of dark Knight films led to Arkham trilogy, most recently followed by Insomniac’s Spider man and Miles Morales and even Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel Avengers: the popular studio behind the tomb Raider restart working on a beat ’em up based on everyone’s favorite Marvel characters.
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This is not a bad thing, nor is it a guaranteed success, as evidenced by Square Enix’s disappointment with Avengers. Some great games have emerged from this pitch process, but it can also be a recipe for dying the heat of the imagination. Hitman the manufacturer IO Interactive is switching from its exclusive Agent 47 to try to obtain the James Bond license. Wolfenstein Machine Games developer will revive the Nazi and colonialist thief Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, it has been decades since these stories seemed creatively new and relevant.
Disney is taking the legacy of the Lucasfilm video game from the Sarlacc pit with Lucasfilm Games, a sign that the mega media corporation probably aims to flood the market with newly licensed games in the same way it does movies and TV shows. All of this, of course, is based on the existing canon, and all of this is owned by a company whose net worth is greater than the GDP of most countries.
EA received a lot of shit for its 10-year deal to be the exclusive publisher of Star Wars games just to launch, by 2019, a total of three. Now it seems that the monkey’s paw wish has been granted and we are about to achieve much more.
“We want to work with the best teams that can make great games across our IP,” announced Lucasfilm Games VP, Douglas Reilly yesterday. Reilly, notably, said he expects games “on a variety of platforms, genres and experiences”, with many “professionals” at Lucasfilm Games to help ensure that developers shape the creative vision of adaptations. In other words, an open world Ubisoft game is just the beginning. To compare, during last December’s investor Call Disney has announced nearly a dozen new Star Wars movies and TV.
And, of course, there are also Star Wars games EA continues to work on. An EA spokesman said Kotaku yesterday that the terms of its exclusive contract with Lucasfilm have not been changed and will remain in effect until 2023. According to a source with knowledge of the business, only EA can publish Star Wars games prior to 2023, after which the partnership with Lucasfilm will continue, but will no longer be exclusive. This means that Ubisoft Star Wars the game will not be released until the end of 2023, at the very least.
ssome of these games can be great. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and 2020 Star Wars: Squads they were really fun, but I don’t know if we need a dozen more big budget games trying to play in that space. I would also like to see Respawn or EA Motive do something original, Ubisoft too. Despite the eye-inducing name, Fenyx: Immortals Rising it was really cool, even though it also worked a lot with previous Ubisoft and Nintendo games Breath of the Wild.
It’s easy to imagine how studios can mix and match genres and game mechanics with fictional worlds already established and loved. It is much more difficult to conceptualize all ideas and projects that will not see the light of day because of this consolidation of the media.
“None”, former Naughty Dog developer and director of The Last of Us, Bruce Straley wrote with a friendly wink in response to Keighley’s mental experiment. “We need all that talent and money focused on creating new content, new IP and innovation in the AAA Geoff space.”
The publication of highly successful games has never been a bastion of risk-taking and creativity, but it can become even more obsolete if it is monopolized by the existing entertainment monoculture. So, no, I wouldn’t like to see BioWare do another Star Wars RPG, and I am far from happy with the prospect of Machine Games trying to strive to rehabilitate tomb raider Indiana Jones into something less culturally abhorrent. It would be great, as always, to see video games trying to do something new. After all, where else are the future Hollywood box office hits come from?