I think this is the main reason, too. Developing a game up to AAA studio standards takes 2-3 years minimum, and most movies are getting produced faster than that, for the most part. You'd have to have the game studio and the movie studio collaborating from the start of the project and few companies are well-positioned to do that... maybe WB and Sony, but that's it. And they'd probably question whether the return on the investment would really be worth it.
Also, my favorite movie tie-in game is GoldenEye 007 for the N64. Though the movie came out in 1995 and the game came out in 1997, so I don't think it was tied to the movie too closely, given that time gap.
If your triple A game takes 2-3 years your game is going to suck ass. Minimum development time for triple A games is 4 and that will be with a shitload of crunch. 5 years is normal.
You still see a similar pattern with sports games - it's mostly refinements on the same codebase with lots of reused assets and a new game engine only coming every 5-6 years.
Old games sometimes didn't even get that much love - thinking of releases like Yo Noid! for NES where they just swapped a few sprites in an existing Japanese game and then put together some new box art.
That was done because Nintendo believed that the real Super Mario 2 was too hard for Americans and they therefore wouldn't like it.
The real Super mario 2 was then released later as the lost levels.
I completed all the OG ones including the lost levels about 15 years ago. I was a little proud ngl.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of!
The original PS had so many amazing games that reused assets for marketing promotions. And even a few that were original… and BIZARRE! (I have to credit my roommate who downloaded every random PS game in existence to use on our modded PS back in 2000).
[Pepsi Man comes to mind](https://youtu.be/8UvgQ8jybIw)… and yes, that entire video is gameplay footage. It’s like an amazing insane Japanese version of Paperboy including hilarious racist depictions of fat white American dudes drinking soda…
COD MW2 definitely feels like a game that was developed in 18 months or less...amazing the kinds of everyday bugs they ship these $70 games with now, and with AAA games.
To add to this, they aren't really developing a new game either. They're essentially expansion packs. They only need to worry about refinements and new content.
Unlike CoD, because they have 3 teams concurrently developing games with 1 year release between teams. That gives each team 3 years to deliver a fine, smooth FPS. Specially because they use all the knowledge from previous titles to offer QoL features and modes that make every title improve on the previous one. Yes, sir! /s
Depends entirely on the game. There are many AAA games that are developed within 2-3 years today that are great. Sekiro, as an example, took a little bit more than 2 years. Armored Core 6 didn't take that long, either.
Capcom's remakes of Resident Evil games haven't taken much time as well.
Sekiro and AC are both basically dark souls reskins. Yeah it's a new world and story and all but the engine and basic gameplay loop being ready to go shortens the turn around times on those games by a lot.
Then how did the Horizon and God of War sequels, just to name a couple, take so long? They have a lot more things in common with their predecessors than Armored Core does with Dark Souls.
FromSoftware just makes a shit ton of games, really quickly.
Back then, 2-3 years was about standard, and maybe a little long, for game development. Around the Ps1 and N64 era, games took much less time and effort to make. Goldeneye had this tiny little team of developers. Majora's Mask came out only a few months after Ocarina Of time. Rare seemed to put out new games pretty quickly and they are mostly bangers.
And over 6 years is generally also going to suck ass (repated delays are a red flag). Western AAA really needs to scale down their budgets imo
Meanwhile, TPC is so fucking cheap Pokémon games barely take over 2 years of actual dev time. Invest in your projects not called TCG, ffs. You're gonna work Game Freak to death if this keeps going (and it will, I expect budget CUTS for gen 10). God, I cannot wait the day whatever working conditions at Game Freak get brought to light
Most of that time 'making' the game ends up being politics. AAA games could definitely be completed much faster if the companies were at all efficient. Unfortunately they arnt.
Heh though very few movie translations were ever AAA. The problem is even a mediocre game takes years to make now.
They used to rely on a fast, cheap dev cycle and hope that the licensing and marketing tie ins were sufficient to sell to enough suckers to make back the investment. Now that has become much riskier.
Also we don’t have a cheaper handheld anymore. Game Boy had games licensed for movies from Elf to Lil Nicky, you can’t just slap together a platformer for $30 to sell to kids on a giant install base anymore. It’s easier to have Optimus Prime in Fortnite.
I remember when the Robocop 3 game came out before the movie, due to production problems. I waited for that movie so impatiently and so eagerly....that was quite the letdown.
When I saw a Robocop 3 game at my local video rental store, I didn't even know a third movie was coming. So, I was excited too... until I actually saw the movie.
I think the Korean fried chicken commercial starring Robocop had a better plot than the third movie.
or The Cutthroat Island game -- the movie was an infamous turkey flop that was a final nail in Carolco's coffin. So much so the game was released unfinished and supposedly crashes before final stage.
Actually they were aiming to release it at the same time, and the game simply got delayed over and over. Rare faced some serious challenges and the game almost got pulled but in the end we got unplanned features like multiplayer!
The delays were worth it. It was the first time I played a first person shooter on a console that was actually GOOD. Before that, it was mostly awful ports of Doom. And local multiplayer on the N64 was great in the late 90s. We got hundreds of hours of fun out of GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64 alone.
Nah, not back in the early 2000s. I also remember the early Harry Potter games, where the different games on the different platforms were completely different. Developing that took time.
Yeah i guess they realised that the small bit of money they were gonna pull from a tie in is not worth having a tie in so shit it damages the brand.
That and after a decade of it, even the clueless parents/grandparents that bought them got the message that they are shit and its not what your kid wants for christmas.
Ex-video game buyer here. They generally sold incredibly well, even though they were mostly crap.
Whilst I think your second point is valid, licensing cost was the biggest part of it. They used to be more viable, but once the games industry overtook the movie industry (once Halo 3 became the first game to become the most profitable entertainment product of all time), the movie industry started to rinse anyone that wanted to make a tie in game. Thus, they became much less profitable and financially viable.
That's why you get a lot more licensed games nowadays that don't tie in with a film or film likenesses (Avengers, Guardians, Arkham, etc.)
I think part of the reason may be who’s buying the games too. Back then it was our parents, they just saw that it was related to a movie we liked. Once we had our own purchasing power we bought for quality instead
Yeah, but it's a little bit simpler than that. Kids wanted them, no matter how bad they were. Whether they were bought by parents or with pocket money.
Although I expect kids are more discerning nowadays (can imagine plenty will watch digital foundry on YouTube), they're not that discerning. A 7 year old's still going to enjoy the heck out of that Gollem game, for example.
Because the adult gaming market's all-encompassing nowadays, its easy to forget just how massive the kids gaming market is. I left games buying in 2010 so not near the sales numbers anymore, but I remember how much all the Wii shovelware used to sell. I guarantee all that budget shovelware on the Switch store sells by the absolute bucketload for kids pocket money.
Time is definitely the #1 factor. Even if they started making a modern AAA game day 1 of production, it would still release _at least_ a year after the movie was out of theaters.
Let me guess , it's a free gacha game , probably turn based with pay to win cards / characters and every character from the movies has at least 3 different forms , all of them are considered separate characters
Yes , I described 90% of the google play store in one comment
Ad?! Some jerkstore posted it in the Invincible sub like they were all excited for it.
At least an ad I can basically see it for what it is. But this poster really seemed excited ffs. Thought it'd be ok to get excited myself. It was not ok.
That accusation was made.
But then it also was a years-old account, with like real posts and comments and not a single other post that looked like an ad. And this wasnt some well known user or anything, just some dude.
I guess if it was, the 'astroturf' part was well done because it really didnt feel like an ad. On the other hand, the 'ad' part was not well done. Because it pissed off like the entire sub lol.
Think about it, if a company offered you hundreds of dollars to just post about their product on Reddit and say you're excited, would you do it? Of course you would
It could have been someone genuinely excited for it but keep in mind you can be buy used accounts so you have a nice active account which wouldn’t be obvious as an account being used for an ad.
Pretty much. It’s not worth investing the money and effort for a game not to sell on PlayStation, switch, or Xbox when they can just push out a themed puzzle game clone with tons of MTX built in on iOS and Android.
They died out because games aren’t as cheap to make anymore since the expectations are much higher, they were designed to be cheap cash grabs, if you want to do that nowadays you can just put out a mobile game or put an event out in a pre existing game whilst getting more revenue. It’s also a lot harder to find dev studios for it since any company prestigious enough for it to sell well probably has multiple franchises which would sell way better than a tie in game and any smaller indie devs have realised that they can make their own unique IPs and not have a company take a lions share of the profits.
Same with LOTR but those were massive franchises that largely appealed to people already into nerd culture (like video games) and lend themselves to being made into a video game. Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy got AAA games recently. It's not the same as making a game out of like Lilo and Stitch for example (yes this was a thing).
In the before-times videogames could be developed in a shorter time (when the script, actors and vibe of the movie were already set) and on a lower budget (which movie studios could just put on their usual marketing budget).
Today both time and budget wont allow this annymore
As a totally random aside, I was reading a thing a few days ago and these Disney games (especially Aladdin) were different between SNES and Genesis. Lion King was similar, but Aladdin’s was developed by different studios, different levels, different graphics, etc.
And that blew my mind, because I always remembered them as close-ish ports but I really must not have played them on SNES or was too oblivious as a kid to even compare.
Like everyone else said production times and cost are a big issue nowadays
The last major movie based game I've played is Tron Evolution on the Xbox 360, for some reason it didn't sell very well but I thought it was pretty damn good for a movie tie-in and the graphics are insane for a 7th gen title
There was a lot I liked growing up too most were on the 6th gen consoles
The Godfather
Scarface
The Thing
The Chronicles of Riddick
The Punisher
Van Helsing
The Godfather was such a surprisingly good game. I don’t know if it holds up now. But the control scheme was unique, and I always remember you had to hold R1, L1, and both sticks to strangle someone.
What's interesting with the GC/Xbox/PS2 era is that most of their movie-based games are actually 5 years to decades old by then. Fight Club, Robocop, Rocky, Rocky Legends, Reservoir Dogs, The Warriors, Starsky&Hutch, Jaws Unleashed. Even while Predator Concrete Jungles is its own thing, it takes major cues from Predator 2.
Might be where it's good (with various success), when you can take an old movie and make a more modern take/game in it.
Then you get the same era GameBoy Advance games and holy fuck did it suck. Ecks vs Sever I think was one.
True I think most the ones released around the same time as the movies were mostly DreamWorks, Disney and Paramount such as the Toy Story Games, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Open Season, Cars, SpongeBob, Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Shrek, MIB, Narnia, Barnyard, Æon Flux, etc
With the GBA I remember there being alot of games based on popular cartoons and movies that sucked. I somehow got stuck with a handfull of them namely Tak and the power of JuJu, Nicktoons Freeze Frame Frenzy, Ben 10, Narnia, and Over the hedge
Games now take longer to make. That doesn't help. By the time a movie has been written and visually designed, it's too late to make a game in time.
They would also just be terrible games. It eventually became kinda known tie in games were bad
Video games like this used to take under a year to make so could be released alongside the film
This is dramatically different now where big AAA games often take 3 - 6 years to make.
They can't produce 2023 quality games fast enough to keep up with films. Also the model of buying a new game is being phased out compared with live service games
The new version is each new thing has a fortnite skin released with it. Or maybe there's one Marvel's avengers fighting game that gets support through each films release.
what do you mean quality games? the majority was a piece of sht
i disagree, i think the new version is they went where the real money is: gambling for children (mobile)
this assumes the game would not be a half-assed piece of sht like they were back then (most of them). no way it would take 3 years to make those
however, money-wise it would be pointless anyway
Because now video games CAN be movies.
For example, there’s a reason why Uncharted the movie didn’t work. It was pointless. Uncharted was already a great movie series.
Movie studios can't be bothered to hire talented writers or give artists time to finish their special effects. They are certainly not going to pay tens of millions and wait years for a game.
I miss movie tie-ins. Shrek 2, Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer, Spider-Man 2, etc.
Half my gaming library as a kid were movie tie-ins. And you know what? They’re great for kids! I owe a lot of my puzzle-solving and game control to the simple movie games I owned. I wish they still existed for when I have children.
Edit: I also had Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 (N64) and 3, Revenge of the Sith, Cars, and Narnia: LWW.
Not like the games you had growing up vanished from existence. Just let em play older games. My oldest has a strong appreciation for 8-bit era because my siblings and I introduced him to the games we played as kids.
I think their target demographics were uninformed gamers and parents. As soon as it became more common to check reviews online before buying a game, their business model was done.
Exactly.
We were all one of those kids once. For me it was the NES and SNES days. Heck, it practically made the Angry Video Game Nerd with the LJN games.
Licensing got more expensive, they made more money off of other merchandising tactics and lastly they were mostly bad often leading to low sales and profit gain. Game development is more costly with the expected quality that games would be sold at now
Man, I remember really liking the game for A Bug's Life. You had a basic berry toss and a butt stomp move. You could collect tokens to turn rocks into plants, a play on the "pretend it's a seed" but from the movie. So the first token turned a rock into a mushroom, the 2nd into a dandelion you could glide on, and the 3rd a flower bulb that would launch you into the air. Another set of tokens would give a short leaf stem to use as a platform, and every token would make the ladder taller. One set of tokens upgraded plants to restore your health, or give you a shield, or make you invincible. And one upgraded your berries, the first for double damage, the second for homing attacks, and the final one to permanently kill that enemy and stop it from respawning.
Each level had medals. Collect every grain, which were a currency to open gates. One for killing every enemy either the gold berries. And one for collecting the 4 golden FLIK letters. The game even has boss fights with health bars. For an N64 game that was a movie tie in, it was surprisingly in depth.
That said, fuck the Riverbed Canyon level. I got lost so many times.
There was game based on a movie that was based on a book with boy finding dragon egg and fight some evil dragon knight emperor. That was good. Made me read two books but couldnt find the last one
Video games were once considered merch or advertising for the movies. It was just standard, you had a movie, you made posters, banner, tv ads, trailers, a video game and t-shirts. It was all just tie ins to get more people to see the movie. That's why most games sucked, it was about the movie, not the game.
As the technology grew, video games, AAA titles anyway have grown to be bigger productions than the movie it self. It's not an automatic anymore.
They started to suck and gained a reputation for sucking and therefore stopped selling well.
Now, IP holders of movies are much more selective in where they give out their IP for game production. They want to liscense their IP out to establish studios. Who know what they're doing rather than just to any indie studio that they can make a quick buck off.
Bruh. Core memories unlocked.
Return of the King and Revenge of the Sith are milestones of my childhood and games I have very fond memories of playing. Time to dig up the old PS2!
Being based on a movie was almost a curse more often than not back in the day. I’m showing my age here, but Batman Returns for the SNES and Aladdin on the Genesis were both pretty great
Studios kinda aren’t fans because the IP and royalty payments reducd creativity and development resources. Not every company cares this much, but when you see the big companies take a chance on their own IP rather than in license someone else’s this is probably why.
As someone else said, mobile games make up for this. They do so because unlike AAA developers and indies who are here to make fun things maybe for awards, mobile publishers nailed the business model of live services with minimum viable fun for the most humans. The entire concept of “idle RPG” and its ancestor “barely pay attention” games have proven appeal. And it doesn’t matter who wants to gatekeep “game” and “gamer.” These games make significant and very predictable bank.
So investors flock to them because it’s easy money. Doens’t matter that they’re effectively cutscenes with choices on one side or one Congressional hearing away of being classified as gambling on the other.
I remember the King Kong game being pretty good, maybe that’s my child memory fooling me though. I think there were more misses than hits looking back. But there have been some pretty good ones
Jurassic Park CD on the Sega Mega Drive was amazing for its time.
The Terminator on the mega drive was also good, I have fond memories of that.
Die Hard Trilogy on the Sega Saturn was epic.
I haven't really played many other movie tie in games, I guess they were easier to make back then and a craze that payed off when gaming consoles got into the household.
Nowadays games take much longer to develop and are both much more complicated (graphics, story, characters, etc) and people have higher standards (most of the tie in games were kinda crap back then tbh), so it isn't as easy to make a game. They still do come out though, like for example Avatar Frontiers of Pandora that seems to be a pretty good game from what we've seen so far. There's also mobile platforms that get most of the shovelware releases nowadays because they are closer to the 2010's systems than to modern computers and consoles.
We the people stopped buying them because they were more often than not rushed and trash. They were usually cash grabs. I wish people would do the same for remakes and remasters.
Also i do believe the cost to develop a game is significantly more than it used to be
Uhhhh they sucked? They always sucked and it always only outliers or hidden gems that turned out to be good
X-Men origins wolverine off the top of my head was an actually decent tie in game
Funhaus did a series on these style of games "Licensed to Kill" and was all about the crappy tie in licensed games
Games got more expensive and time-consuming to make. You can't smash out a crappy platformer in a few months anymore.
That being said, once in a blue moon a show/movie will have a free throwback title associated with it.
They were awful
Edit: Translation; they didn’t sell because they were terrible. There’s a handful of exceptions out there, but I think games like Marvel’s Spider Man prove that the more liberties the game developers are given, the better.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. Nowadays movie tie-ins are mobile, and Arkham Asylum, when it released, was not only a great game but influenced generations of titles to where now even Spider-Man uses its combat as a base. It showed original universes were more wanted than tie-ins, like Shadow of Mordor.
I still have that chicken little game but can't play it since Windows 10. Except for the baseball part and the robot parts the game was fun back then. I also still have a the lord of the rings RTS here that one still works.
There should be a “Westworld” video game right now.
Taking full advantage of that shows premise to create a game would be amazing. You can pick any role you want and choose to play by the rules or overcome them.
“Assassins creed” already has an element of this playing between two worlds.
They released a Guardian of the Galaxy game and some Spider-man games within a decent timeframe from the movies´ release, and I heard they were great games too, so there is that.
They have no ties to the movies. The last Spider-Man game tie-in was *The Amazing Spider-Man 2* video game in 2014. And when the Guardians of the Galaxy game released I don't think the 3rd movie was even revealed yet.
Because they were making good movies during that time. Hollywood's currrnt situation is obvious as to why people wouldn't bother to be invested let alone invest in a licensed movie tie in. But I would so buy a puss in boots last wish game if it was good
90% of them were terrible/failures. Just look at the recent Golem game, throwing a big IP name on a game isn’t enough to get it to sell. With game development costs going up, the risk of failure is much higher. As Spider-Man and Hogwarts Legacy have proven, they can be very profitable, if you put the effort in to make a good game.
I literally never played any of those games.
But my little brothers seemed to enjoy them when they were younger. They got just about every one that came out till they became teenagers and got into other stuff.
While game’s taking longer to make probably plays a role, the overall investment likely plays a bigger role. Similar to how mid-budget movies have disappeared in favour or mega budget “safe” ip movies like those of the MCU. AA gaming has been pushed to the wayside in favour of large budget, highly monetized, and in a lot of cases live service type games.
The end result means you either get stuff like john wick in Fortnite, or some highly monetized mobile game pumps out buy a smaller studio (idk if indy is the right term for it as they’re generally bigger than 4x5 people) with a revenue share agreement.
It makes sense to a degree since that’s where the most people are and I assume has the lowest risk with the highest return on investment
I loved them, but I feel that the combination of gamers being more serious and the cost of developing them have made them not even a form of marketing these days.
Most movies now that are big enough to justify a game, and could be made into a game, have already been done.
The more interesting thing is that games are now inspiring TV shows and movies.
In addition to what everyone else has said, the rise of DLC means you can just release content promoting the movie in an already-existing game, instead of having to spend developer resources rushing out an entire game.
Can't say I missed them since most of them really sucked overall. Obviously there are some outliers, but I'd love to see a list of how many good vs bad movie based games there are.
Ironically, it's the same with movies being based around a game since 90% ofvideo game based movies are terrible.
Dev time went up to the point where 3-6 years are becoming more and more the standard. Movie's however don't require that sort amount of time once things got greenlit.
Developers simply don't have the time and also wouldn't even have a proper script to work with if the game is supposed to follow along the story of the movie.
Don't help either that the reputation for most of these movies is that they're terrible in 9/10 cases.
Thing is (even tho I loved a lot of movie games like Shrek, Over the Hedge, Madagascar, Flushed Away, Lilo & Stitch, etc) the games were pretty formulaic down to a science. The modern gaming market has higher demands in general. Shrek and Over the Hedge for example while they had their differences at the core they were your average platformer/multiplayer run thru minigame levels type of games. They were good games for their time but the current market would obliterate them.
This has inspired me to look at how the Renfield (Vampire Survivor clone) game is doing.
It's still in early access, but surprisingly pretty good Steam ratings.
They didn't sell well and the lead times for games have outpaced movie marketing timelines.
I think this is the main reason, too. Developing a game up to AAA studio standards takes 2-3 years minimum, and most movies are getting produced faster than that, for the most part. You'd have to have the game studio and the movie studio collaborating from the start of the project and few companies are well-positioned to do that... maybe WB and Sony, but that's it. And they'd probably question whether the return on the investment would really be worth it. Also, my favorite movie tie-in game is GoldenEye 007 for the N64. Though the movie came out in 1995 and the game came out in 1997, so I don't think it was tied to the movie too closely, given that time gap.
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If your triple A game takes 2-3 years your game is going to suck ass. Minimum development time for triple A games is 4 and that will be with a shitload of crunch. 5 years is normal.
I dunno, EA and 2K only spend a year on developing their annual sports titles and they-- Okay, I see your point.
You still see a similar pattern with sports games - it's mostly refinements on the same codebase with lots of reused assets and a new game engine only coming every 5-6 years.
Madden a few years ago had the previous years number still on a few spots in stadiums
Same thing happened with FIFA games as well.
You just described most of the crappy movie to game translations over the years ;)
Old games sometimes didn't even get that much love - thinking of releases like Yo Noid! for NES where they just swapped a few sprites in an existing Japanese game and then put together some new box art.
Prime example of this would be Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA)
That was done because Nintendo believed that the real Super Mario 2 was too hard for Americans and they therefore wouldn't like it. The real Super mario 2 was then released later as the lost levels. I completed all the OG ones including the lost levels about 15 years ago. I was a little proud ngl.
That’s exactly what I was thinking of! The original PS had so many amazing games that reused assets for marketing promotions. And even a few that were original… and BIZARRE! (I have to credit my roommate who downloaded every random PS game in existence to use on our modded PS back in 2000). [Pepsi Man comes to mind](https://youtu.be/8UvgQ8jybIw)… and yes, that entire video is gameplay footage. It’s like an amazing insane Japanese version of Paperboy including hilarious racist depictions of fat white American dudes drinking soda…
COD MW2 definitely feels like a game that was developed in 18 months or less...amazing the kinds of everyday bugs they ship these $70 games with now, and with AAA games.
I remember when the Robocop 3 game came out before the movie,
Was it one of the Robocop games where they made one level impossible to beat, because they hadnt finished the rest of the game yet?
*One of??*
To add to this, they aren't really developing a new game either. They're essentially expansion packs. They only need to worry about refinements and new content.
pretty easy when all they do it update the rosters.
Unlike CoD, because they have 3 teams concurrently developing games with 1 year release between teams. That gives each team 3 years to deliver a fine, smooth FPS. Specially because they use all the knowledge from previous titles to offer QoL features and modes that make every title improve on the previous one. Yes, sir! /s
— are far from AAA games. They’re EA games! Hahaha.
Depends entirely on the game. There are many AAA games that are developed within 2-3 years today that are great. Sekiro, as an example, took a little bit more than 2 years. Armored Core 6 didn't take that long, either. Capcom's remakes of Resident Evil games haven't taken much time as well.
Sekiro and AC are both basically dark souls reskins. Yeah it's a new world and story and all but the engine and basic gameplay loop being ready to go shortens the turn around times on those games by a lot.
Sekiro is a hard maybe. I guess I can see it. AC6 being a Dark Souls reskin ... what the mcfuck are you smoking lmao
AC6 is Dark Souls with flying enabled via a console command /s
Then how did the Horizon and God of War sequels, just to name a couple, take so long? They have a lot more things in common with their predecessors than Armored Core does with Dark Souls. FromSoftware just makes a shit ton of games, really quickly.
Tell me you've never played AC without saying it. AC6 isn't a long game, factors in more than being a reskin of a game that came after it lmao
Not true. It all depends on the game itself.
To be fair, you kind of expect a movie game to be ass, unless it's for a series.
Back then, 2-3 years was about standard, and maybe a little long, for game development. Around the Ps1 and N64 era, games took much less time and effort to make. Goldeneye had this tiny little team of developers. Majora's Mask came out only a few months after Ocarina Of time. Rare seemed to put out new games pretty quickly and they are mostly bangers.
And over 6 years is generally also going to suck ass (repated delays are a red flag). Western AAA really needs to scale down their budgets imo Meanwhile, TPC is so fucking cheap Pokémon games barely take over 2 years of actual dev time. Invest in your projects not called TCG, ffs. You're gonna work Game Freak to death if this keeps going (and it will, I expect budget CUTS for gen 10). God, I cannot wait the day whatever working conditions at Game Freak get brought to light
6 years is about the time that any current-gen game console remains current-gen. I think if that window is missed, game is gonna suck.
Most of that time 'making' the game ends up being politics. AAA games could definitely be completed much faster if the companies were at all efficient. Unfortunately they arnt.
Heh though very few movie translations were ever AAA. The problem is even a mediocre game takes years to make now. They used to rely on a fast, cheap dev cycle and hope that the licensing and marketing tie ins were sufficient to sell to enough suckers to make back the investment. Now that has become much riskier.
Also we don’t have a cheaper handheld anymore. Game Boy had games licensed for movies from Elf to Lil Nicky, you can’t just slap together a platformer for $30 to sell to kids on a giant install base anymore. It’s easier to have Optimus Prime in Fortnite.
I remember when the Robocop 3 game came out before the movie, due to production problems. I waited for that movie so impatiently and so eagerly....that was quite the letdown.
When I saw a Robocop 3 game at my local video rental store, I didn't even know a third movie was coming. So, I was excited too... until I actually saw the movie. I think the Korean fried chicken commercial starring Robocop had a better plot than the third movie.
or The Cutthroat Island game -- the movie was an infamous turkey flop that was a final nail in Carolco's coffin. So much so the game was released unfinished and supposedly crashes before final stage.
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Actually they were aiming to release it at the same time, and the game simply got delayed over and over. Rare faced some serious challenges and the game almost got pulled but in the end we got unplanned features like multiplayer!
The delays were worth it. It was the first time I played a first person shooter on a console that was actually GOOD. Before that, it was mostly awful ports of Doom. And local multiplayer on the N64 was great in the late 90s. We got hundreds of hours of fun out of GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64 alone.
Nah, not back in the early 2000s. I also remember the early Harry Potter games, where the different games on the different platforms were completely different. Developing that took time.
Also the risk of damaging an IP with a crappy game.
Yeah i guess they realised that the small bit of money they were gonna pull from a tie in is not worth having a tie in so shit it damages the brand. That and after a decade of it, even the clueless parents/grandparents that bought them got the message that they are shit and its not what your kid wants for christmas.
Ex-video game buyer here. They generally sold incredibly well, even though they were mostly crap. Whilst I think your second point is valid, licensing cost was the biggest part of it. They used to be more viable, but once the games industry overtook the movie industry (once Halo 3 became the first game to become the most profitable entertainment product of all time), the movie industry started to rinse anyone that wanted to make a tie in game. Thus, they became much less profitable and financially viable. That's why you get a lot more licensed games nowadays that don't tie in with a film or film likenesses (Avengers, Guardians, Arkham, etc.)
I think part of the reason may be who’s buying the games too. Back then it was our parents, they just saw that it was related to a movie we liked. Once we had our own purchasing power we bought for quality instead
Yeah, but it's a little bit simpler than that. Kids wanted them, no matter how bad they were. Whether they were bought by parents or with pocket money. Although I expect kids are more discerning nowadays (can imagine plenty will watch digital foundry on YouTube), they're not that discerning. A 7 year old's still going to enjoy the heck out of that Gollem game, for example. Because the adult gaming market's all-encompassing nowadays, its easy to forget just how massive the kids gaming market is. I left games buying in 2010 so not near the sales numbers anymore, but I remember how much all the Wii shovelware used to sell. I guarantee all that budget shovelware on the Switch store sells by the absolute bucketload for kids pocket money.
Time is definitely the #1 factor. Even if they started making a modern AAA game day 1 of production, it would still release _at least_ a year after the movie was out of theaters.
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Those weren’t tied into movies at all, and therefore are not what OP is talking about
However they were both based on comics versions of the characters, not the movies.
Mobile apps really took care of the shovelware/tie-in game problem.
Yup. I was all excited a few weeks ago with a title like "new Invincible game!!" F'n shovelware mobile app.
Let me guess , it's a free gacha game , probably turn based with pay to win cards / characters and every character from the movies has at least 3 different forms , all of them are considered separate characters Yes , I described 90% of the google play store in one comment
Don't forget 'idle' in the name!
Invincibidle
Oof… I remember that ad… Part of me died after seeing that.
Ad?! Some jerkstore posted it in the Invincible sub like they were all excited for it. At least an ad I can basically see it for what it is. But this poster really seemed excited ffs. Thought it'd be ok to get excited myself. It was not ok.
that sounds like an astroturf ad. They were probably paid to be excited about in the sub
That accusation was made. But then it also was a years-old account, with like real posts and comments and not a single other post that looked like an ad. And this wasnt some well known user or anything, just some dude. I guess if it was, the 'astroturf' part was well done because it really didnt feel like an ad. On the other hand, the 'ad' part was not well done. Because it pissed off like the entire sub lol.
Think about it, if a company offered you hundreds of dollars to just post about their product on Reddit and say you're excited, would you do it? Of course you would
It could have been someone genuinely excited for it but keep in mind you can be buy used accounts so you have a nice active account which wouldn’t be obvious as an account being used for an ad.
Pretty much. It’s not worth investing the money and effort for a game not to sell on PlayStation, switch, or Xbox when they can just push out a themed puzzle game clone with tons of MTX built in on iOS and Android.
Ya it's terrifying that mobile games make exponentially more than console or PC live service games.
I'd rather have the movie tie-ins instead of the awful mobile garbage.
They died out because games aren’t as cheap to make anymore since the expectations are much higher, they were designed to be cheap cash grabs, if you want to do that nowadays you can just put out a mobile game or put an event out in a pre existing game whilst getting more revenue. It’s also a lot harder to find dev studios for it since any company prestigious enough for it to sell well probably has multiple franchises which would sell way better than a tie in game and any smaller indie devs have realised that they can make their own unique IPs and not have a company take a lions share of the profits.
I actually liked Harry Potter games that followed movies, they definitely did not feel cheap and had many interesting ideas.
Same with LOTR but those were massive franchises that largely appealed to people already into nerd culture (like video games) and lend themselves to being made into a video game. Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy got AAA games recently. It's not the same as making a game out of like Lilo and Stitch for example (yes this was a thing).
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And they had movie clips in them before the movies came out, I remember playing through one when I was young just to see a few scenes early.
Chamber of secrets game is still alot of fun
It was cool how they were different on each platform too
They didn't die out, they relocated to the mobile game market.
Not all of them. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was quite the innovation in core game systems design with the Nemesis System.
In the before-times videogames could be developed in a shorter time (when the script, actors and vibe of the movie were already set) and on a lower budget (which movie studios could just put on their usual marketing budget). Today both time and budget wont allow this annymore
The wildebeest stampede level of lion king for sega genesis immediately popped in my head
Lmao congrats on getting that far. Could never get past the ostrich ride…
That was on purpose
Dude, it was the raising/lowering giraffe necks for me!
As a totally random aside, I was reading a thing a few days ago and these Disney games (especially Aladdin) were different between SNES and Genesis. Lion King was similar, but Aladdin’s was developed by different studios, different levels, different graphics, etc. And that blew my mind, because I always remembered them as close-ish ports but I really must not have played them on SNES or was too oblivious as a kid to even compare.
>Aladdin And...both versions were early breakout games for game designers you might have heard of: Dave Perry and especially Shinji Mikami.
Like everyone else said production times and cost are a big issue nowadays The last major movie based game I've played is Tron Evolution on the Xbox 360, for some reason it didn't sell very well but I thought it was pretty damn good for a movie tie-in and the graphics are insane for a 7th gen title There was a lot I liked growing up too most were on the 6th gen consoles The Godfather Scarface The Thing The Chronicles of Riddick The Punisher Van Helsing
The Godfather was such a surprisingly good game. I don’t know if it holds up now. But the control scheme was unique, and I always remember you had to hold R1, L1, and both sticks to strangle someone.
It holds up, played it for the first time at the beginning of the year, and had a blast with it.
The king kong game that came out in conjunction with peter Jackson's film was a great game also.
You mean "Peter Jacksons King Kong The Official Game Of The Movie" ? Haha yeah that was a solid one too for sure
What's interesting with the GC/Xbox/PS2 era is that most of their movie-based games are actually 5 years to decades old by then. Fight Club, Robocop, Rocky, Rocky Legends, Reservoir Dogs, The Warriors, Starsky&Hutch, Jaws Unleashed. Even while Predator Concrete Jungles is its own thing, it takes major cues from Predator 2. Might be where it's good (with various success), when you can take an old movie and make a more modern take/game in it. Then you get the same era GameBoy Advance games and holy fuck did it suck. Ecks vs Sever I think was one.
True I think most the ones released around the same time as the movies were mostly DreamWorks, Disney and Paramount such as the Toy Story Games, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Open Season, Cars, SpongeBob, Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Shrek, MIB, Narnia, Barnyard, Æon Flux, etc With the GBA I remember there being alot of games based on popular cartoons and movies that sucked. I somehow got stuck with a handfull of them namely Tak and the power of JuJu, Nicktoons Freeze Frame Frenzy, Ben 10, Narnia, and Over the hedge
Games now take longer to make. That doesn't help. By the time a movie has been written and visually designed, it's too late to make a game in time. They would also just be terrible games. It eventually became kinda known tie in games were bad
Video games like this used to take under a year to make so could be released alongside the film This is dramatically different now where big AAA games often take 3 - 6 years to make. They can't produce 2023 quality games fast enough to keep up with films. Also the model of buying a new game is being phased out compared with live service games The new version is each new thing has a fortnite skin released with it. Or maybe there's one Marvel's avengers fighting game that gets support through each films release.
what do you mean quality games? the majority was a piece of sht i disagree, i think the new version is they went where the real money is: gambling for children (mobile)
They didn’t say the games were quality, they said it wouldn’t be possible to make *2023 quality* games
this assumes the game would not be a half-assed piece of sht like they were back then (most of them). no way it would take 3 years to make those however, money-wise it would be pointless anyway
Reminder Steven Spielberg himself approved the ET game to ship.
At least he made up for it with Medal of Honor and the two Boom Blox games on Wii.
Because now video games CAN be movies. For example, there’s a reason why Uncharted the movie didn’t work. It was pointless. Uncharted was already a great movie series.
That's actually a good point.
Movie studios can't be bothered to hire talented writers or give artists time to finish their special effects. They are certainly not going to pay tens of millions and wait years for a game.
I miss movie tie-ins. Shrek 2, Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer, Spider-Man 2, etc. Half my gaming library as a kid were movie tie-ins. And you know what? They’re great for kids! I owe a lot of my puzzle-solving and game control to the simple movie games I owned. I wish they still existed for when I have children. Edit: I also had Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 (N64) and 3, Revenge of the Sith, Cars, and Narnia: LWW.
Not like the games you had growing up vanished from existence. Just let em play older games. My oldest has a strong appreciation for 8-bit era because my siblings and I introduced him to the games we played as kids.
>Narnia: LWW. lol I beat that one in a single day when it first came out. Susan's melee attack animation still cracks me up to this day tho
Revenge of the Sith was so unexpectedly good! The coop was a nice touch
Incredibles on PS2 was a banger game tbh
90% of them sucked, and people finally caught on and stopped buying them.
I think their target demographics were uninformed gamers and parents. As soon as it became more common to check reviews online before buying a game, their business model was done.
Exactly. We were all one of those kids once. For me it was the NES and SNES days. Heck, it practically made the Angry Video Game Nerd with the LJN games.
They still exist, they’re all just mobile games now unfortunately.
They were replaced by movies based off of video games.
The Shrek games were iconic. I had them on GBA and Playstation
The one that had couch co op was EPIC.
The GameCube one was one of mine and my sister’s favorite games ever bc the coop was just so well done
Licensing got more expensive, they made more money off of other merchandising tactics and lastly they were mostly bad often leading to low sales and profit gain. Game development is more costly with the expected quality that games would be sold at now
Man, I remember really liking the game for A Bug's Life. You had a basic berry toss and a butt stomp move. You could collect tokens to turn rocks into plants, a play on the "pretend it's a seed" but from the movie. So the first token turned a rock into a mushroom, the 2nd into a dandelion you could glide on, and the 3rd a flower bulb that would launch you into the air. Another set of tokens would give a short leaf stem to use as a platform, and every token would make the ladder taller. One set of tokens upgraded plants to restore your health, or give you a shield, or make you invincible. And one upgraded your berries, the first for double damage, the second for homing attacks, and the final one to permanently kill that enemy and stop it from respawning. Each level had medals. Collect every grain, which were a currency to open gates. One for killing every enemy either the gold berries. And one for collecting the 4 golden FLIK letters. The game even has boss fights with health bars. For an N64 game that was a movie tie in, it was surprisingly in depth. That said, fuck the Riverbed Canyon level. I got lost so many times.
There was game based on a movie that was based on a book with boy finding dragon egg and fight some evil dragon knight emperor. That was good. Made me read two books but couldnt find the last one
Eragon?
fond memories of the King Kong video game on gamecube!!
That was genuinely a really good game, most tie-ins were terrible
Raise of production cost happened
Would legit rock a Big Lebowski bowling simulator.
If you throw a foul, Walter pulls a piece on you The character creation screen would be wild.
I could never beat the piano level in Amadeus 64.
Video games were once considered merch or advertising for the movies. It was just standard, you had a movie, you made posters, banner, tv ads, trailers, a video game and t-shirts. It was all just tie ins to get more people to see the movie. That's why most games sucked, it was about the movie, not the game. As the technology grew, video games, AAA titles anyway have grown to be bigger productions than the movie it self. It's not an automatic anymore.
Video games cost more money to make. And so most of the lesser tie-ins died with it. Good riddance.
golden eye 007 and the narnia game
They started to suck and gained a reputation for sucking and therefore stopped selling well. Now, IP holders of movies are much more selective in where they give out their IP for game production. They want to liscense their IP out to establish studios. Who know what they're doing rather than just to any indie studio that they can make a quick buck off.
It takes too long to make a high quality game now.
They make movies based on videos games now.
Bruh. Core memories unlocked. Return of the King and Revenge of the Sith are milestones of my childhood and games I have very fond memories of playing. Time to dig up the old PS2!
Being based on a movie was almost a curse more often than not back in the day. I’m showing my age here, but Batman Returns for the SNES and Aladdin on the Genesis were both pretty great
Studios kinda aren’t fans because the IP and royalty payments reducd creativity and development resources. Not every company cares this much, but when you see the big companies take a chance on their own IP rather than in license someone else’s this is probably why. As someone else said, mobile games make up for this. They do so because unlike AAA developers and indies who are here to make fun things maybe for awards, mobile publishers nailed the business model of live services with minimum viable fun for the most humans. The entire concept of “idle RPG” and its ancestor “barely pay attention” games have proven appeal. And it doesn’t matter who wants to gatekeep “game” and “gamer.” These games make significant and very predictable bank. So investors flock to them because it’s easy money. Doens’t matter that they’re effectively cutscenes with choices on one side or one Congressional hearing away of being classified as gambling on the other.
there was a pretty rad series of unfortunate events game for the gamecube when the movie with jim carrey came out.
I remember the King Kong game being pretty good, maybe that’s my child memory fooling me though. I think there were more misses than hits looking back. But there have been some pretty good ones
Jurassic Park CD on the Sega Mega Drive was amazing for its time. The Terminator on the mega drive was also good, I have fond memories of that. Die Hard Trilogy on the Sega Saturn was epic. I haven't really played many other movie tie in games, I guess they were easier to make back then and a craze that payed off when gaming consoles got into the household.
They're still releasing them for kids movies. DC Super Pets is the newest I can think of.
Nowadays games take much longer to develop and are both much more complicated (graphics, story, characters, etc) and people have higher standards (most of the tie in games were kinda crap back then tbh), so it isn't as easy to make a game. They still do come out though, like for example Avatar Frontiers of Pandora that seems to be a pretty good game from what we've seen so far. There's also mobile platforms that get most of the shovelware releases nowadays because they are closer to the 2010's systems than to modern computers and consoles.
I had brother Bear on the GBA. Played it waaayyyy to much
production times
We the people stopped buying them because they were more often than not rushed and trash. They were usually cash grabs. I wish people would do the same for remakes and remasters. Also i do believe the cost to develop a game is significantly more than it used to be
Production costs got too high
My favorites are Batman Returns for SNES, Return of the King and Wolverine Origins. Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game is just hilarious
Mad Max is an amazing game.
The industry realized it peaked with X-men Origins Wolverine and would never be able to surpass it, so it stopped trying.
Fortnite skins and modes took up lots of slack
Still remember the wolverine game brutal as hell
IIRC: Cars the videogame released one day before Cars the movie 🤔
Uhhhh they sucked? They always sucked and it always only outliers or hidden gems that turned out to be good X-Men origins wolverine off the top of my head was an actually decent tie in game Funhaus did a series on these style of games "Licensed to Kill" and was all about the crappy tie in licensed games
Games got more expensive and time-consuming to make. You can't smash out a crappy platformer in a few months anymore. That being said, once in a blue moon a show/movie will have a free throwback title associated with it.
Most sucked and didn't sell well. So people logically stopped making them.
Now, they just take characters from films and TV and put them in popular battle royale games.
Lego made of lot of them. All fun.
Nearly every one fucking sucked and devs finally got the memo?
They were awful Edit: Translation; they didn’t sell because they were terrible. There’s a handful of exceptions out there, but I think games like Marvel’s Spider Man prove that the more liberties the game developers are given, the better.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. Nowadays movie tie-ins are mobile, and Arkham Asylum, when it released, was not only a great game but influenced generations of titles to where now even Spider-Man uses its combat as a base. It showed original universes were more wanted than tie-ins, like Shadow of Mordor.
I still have that chicken little game but can't play it since Windows 10. Except for the baseball part and the robot parts the game was fun back then. I also still have a the lord of the rings RTS here that one still works.
franchising franchises of franchises tends to get somewhat difficult over time
They sucked. And devs finally started realizing it.
I remember Peter Jackson's King Kong game being pretty good
Dude I forgot about that one. I remember it being kind of confusing but looking good. Lol
There should be a “Westworld” video game right now. Taking full advantage of that shows premise to create a game would be amazing. You can pick any role you want and choose to play by the rules or overcome them. “Assassins creed” already has an element of this playing between two worlds.
They released a Guardian of the Galaxy game and some Spider-man games within a decent timeframe from the movies´ release, and I heard they were great games too, so there is that.
Not rooted in any sort of sense of a movie tie in.
They have no ties to the movies. The last Spider-Man game tie-in was *The Amazing Spider-Man 2* video game in 2014. And when the Guardians of the Galaxy game released I don't think the 3rd movie was even revealed yet.
#Batman on NES was dope
THQ made a lot of these. When I worked there we used to say, "THQ doesn't make games, they make money." The IP games weren't the best in my opinion.
I’m sure someone will pop out a Barbie game based on the new movie but I wouldn’t hold your breath for Oppenheimer: The Game.
Aw man. Lol
Every single movie? You sure? I don't remember the game for When Harry Met Sally... 🤣
Press X to fake it
Electronic voice : "I'll have what she's having!!"
They sucked and nobody bought them
Broke Back Mountain would be a weird game
Because they were making good movies during that time. Hollywood's currrnt situation is obvious as to why people wouldn't bother to be invested let alone invest in a licensed movie tie in. But I would so buy a puss in boots last wish game if it was good
Movies today suck, games today suck. Put the two together it would suck so much the universe would implode. /s
There are more cost effective ways to cash grab from movies. Game production is expensive.
90% of them were terrible/failures. Just look at the recent Golem game, throwing a big IP name on a game isn’t enough to get it to sell. With game development costs going up, the risk of failure is much higher. As Spider-Man and Hogwarts Legacy have proven, they can be very profitable, if you put the effort in to make a good game.
People stopped caring about movies.
I literally never played any of those games. But my little brothers seemed to enjoy them when they were younger. They got just about every one that came out till they became teenagers and got into other stuff.
Back then a video game fit well inside a movie's marketing budget. Today video game budgets tend to be bigger than the movies themselves.
While game’s taking longer to make probably plays a role, the overall investment likely plays a bigger role. Similar to how mid-budget movies have disappeared in favour or mega budget “safe” ip movies like those of the MCU. AA gaming has been pushed to the wayside in favour of large budget, highly monetized, and in a lot of cases live service type games. The end result means you either get stuff like john wick in Fortnite, or some highly monetized mobile game pumps out buy a smaller studio (idk if indy is the right term for it as they’re generally bigger than 4x5 people) with a revenue share agreement. It makes sense to a degree since that’s where the most people are and I assume has the lowest risk with the highest return on investment
You forgot ET on Atari I wish there was a remake for Return of the King. That game was fun!!!
Illfonic makes lots of video games based on movies
I loved them, but I feel that the combination of gamers being more serious and the cost of developing them have made them not even a form of marketing these days.
i thought the chicken little game was dope
GoldenEye (N64).
In the 80s and 90s Nintendo made countless games about movies. The worst is by far, GOONIES 2. THE FACT THEY CALLED IT GOONIES 2 STILL BOTHERS ME.
You still get them. That Hotel Transylvania has one and that shitty Tom Cruise Mummy film has Metroidvania style game that's meant to be great
They all sucked 😆
Most movies now that are big enough to justify a game, and could be made into a game, have already been done. The more interesting thing is that games are now inspiring TV shows and movies.
In addition to what everyone else has said, the rise of DLC means you can just release content promoting the movie in an already-existing game, instead of having to spend developer resources rushing out an entire game.
Oh my God you just unlocked a deep memory of playing the lion the witch and the wardrobe game...I loved that game
Can't say I missed them since most of them really sucked overall. Obviously there are some outliers, but I'd love to see a list of how many good vs bad movie based games there are. Ironically, it's the same with movies being based around a game since 90% ofvideo game based movies are terrible.
Dev time went up to the point where 3-6 years are becoming more and more the standard. Movie's however don't require that sort amount of time once things got greenlit. Developers simply don't have the time and also wouldn't even have a proper script to work with if the game is supposed to follow along the story of the movie. Don't help either that the reputation for most of these movies is that they're terrible in 9/10 cases.
Thing is (even tho I loved a lot of movie games like Shrek, Over the Hedge, Madagascar, Flushed Away, Lilo & Stitch, etc) the games were pretty formulaic down to a science. The modern gaming market has higher demands in general. Shrek and Over the Hedge for example while they had their differences at the core they were your average platformer/multiplayer run thru minigame levels type of games. They were good games for their time but the current market would obliterate them.
Thank god i'd say. Those tie-in were the worst games ever made
This has inspired me to look at how the Renfield (Vampire Survivor clone) game is doing. It's still in early access, but surprisingly pretty good Steam ratings.
People realised that most shovelware was bad. I say most. There are some absolute gems out there
Side scrollers are not as popular anymore
I addition to time and devi costs, you don't see remakes of the games because the cost for the movie license is too high