This week, the video game industry received a fresh infusion of energy boomer with the announcement of a new one Indiana jones game. In the meantime, there is A James Bond game in progressand Ubisoft announced that he was working in an open world Star Wars game—The first in a possible flood of new games taking place in the distant galaxy, once EA’s exclusive deal with Lucasfilm is concluded in 2023. The big publishers who hope Hollywood will deliver the next hit could be a smart deal or just another fashion. In both cases, it feels like an ominous sign of creative teaching just a few months after the next console cycle.
While Hollywood is in a hurry to buy video game rights, the gambling industry now seems ready to lean more and more into Hollywood’s successful franchises. These are not the market synergies we were looking for. Both environments (and their respective corporate bosses) have a lot to learn and contribute to each other, but spending years and hundreds of millions changing the same old (mostly white) stories. Hollywood is already full of food, eating its own tail, creating endless sequels and restarts …Independence Day: Renaissance, Jurassic World, Phantom Boilers. SCrossing in games feels even more tiring.
“Some great studios make licensed games,” said Geoff Keighley, Game Game Awards host. wrote on Twitter yesterday. “What is your dream studio / franchise collaboration that you hope to see one day?”
Your favorite developer’s fantasy of creating a game of your favorite based on your favorite piece of existing fiction, as if Square Enix had created an open world RPG based on Frank Herbert’s Dune, it’s nothing new. Increasingly, these fantasies are becoming reality as well as the cost of making balloons with high-budget games that leave the audience.to look for safer bets. The success The dark knight the movies led to Arkham trilogy, followed more recently by that of Insomniac Spider Man and Miles Morales and even Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel Avengers: the popular studio behind tomb Raider restart working at a pace 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 the disappointment with Square Enix Avengers. Some great games have come out of this pitching process, but it can also be a recipe for imagining dead heat. Hitman producer IO Interactive is moving from its sole agent 47 to taking a hit on the James Bond license. Wolfenstein Machine Games developer will revive Nazi fist and colonialist Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, decades have passed since those stories felt creatively fresh and relevant.
Disney inherits the Lucasfilm video game from the Sarlacc pit with Lucasfilm Games, a sign that the mega media corporation is considering flooding the market with newly licensed games as in the case of movies and TV shows. All this, of course, is based on the existing fee and all this is owned by a company whose net worth is higher than the GDP of most countries.
EA got a lot of shit for its 10-year-old business to be the sole publisher of Star Wars games just to launch, by 2019, a grand total of three. Now it seems that the monkey’s paw wish has been fulfilled and we are about to get much more.
“We are looking to work with the best teams in the class, who can make great games across our IP,” said Douglas Reilly, vice president of Lucasfilm Games. Reilly, in particular, said he expects games “across a wide range of platforms, genres and experiences,” with plenty of “professionals” at Lucasfilm Games to make sure developers shape the creative vision of the adaptations. In other words, an open world Ubisoft game is just the beginning. For comparison, during the investor last December Disney’s call announced nearly a dozen new Star Wars movies and television.
And, of course, there is everything Star Wars EA games continue to work. An EA spokesman said Kotaku yesterday that the terms of its exclusive agreement with Lucasfilm have not changed and remain in force until 2023. According to a source with knowledge of the transaction, only EA can publish Star Wars games before 2023, after which the partnership with Lucasfilm will continue, but will no longer be exclusive. That means Ubisoft Star Wars the game will not come out until the last part of 2023 at the earliest.
SSome of these games could be great. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and 2020 Star Wars: Squadrons they were a lot of fun, but I don’t know that we still need a dozen big-budget games to try and play in that space. I would also like to see Respawn or EA Motive do something original, and Ubisoft, by the way. Despite the name that causes eyes, Fenyx: Growing immortals it was pretty great, even if it hit too many of the previous Ubisoft and Nintendo games Wild breath.
It’s easy to imagine how studios could combine and combine games and game genres with fictional worlds already established and loved. It is much harder to conceptualize all the ideas and projects that will not see the light of day due to the consolidation of the media.
“None”, former developer Naughty Dog and director of The Last of Us Bruce Straley he wrote with a friendly eye in response to Keighley’s thought experiment. “We need all the talent and money that is focused on creating new content, new IP and innovation in the AAA Geoff space.”
The release of blockbuster games has never been a bastion of risk-taking and creativity, but it could become even more so if it is further monopolized by the existing entertainment monoculture. So, no, I don’t want to see BioWare create another one Star Wars RPGs and I’m far from excited about the prospect of Machine Games trying its hand at trying to rehabilitate Indiana Jones into something less culturally ugly. It would be great, as always, to see video games trying to do something new. After all, where else will the future Hollywood blockbusters be It comes from?