Aside from Goldeneye and a few choice others, any game that bases itself on a movie-tie in is usually hot garbage, and we all know why. These games tend to be made on incredibly short schedules with ridiculously small budgets, as publishers try to take advantage of a window of popularity where a certain IP is hot and in the public mind. These games aren’t selling themselves on quality, they are selling themselves on buzz.
But then we have games like Goldeneye or The Godfather that did quite well for themselves, primarily because they weren’t made on some sort of crazy time crunch. Yet, even games like The Godfather only received midling reviews, primarily because the constraint of the license and the content contained therein. There is only so much design space you have because you can’t go against the plot and canon of the license you are using.
And this has been the big problem with licensed games from the start. It’s a bunch of developers trying to fit a game into a license.
But what if we flipped that formula on its head? What if we instead tried to fit a license into an existing game?
That’s exactly what Mortal Kombat X did with Jason Voorhees and The Predator. Instead of trying to make a game based on WB movie properties, they asked themselves, “what characters fit well in the Mortal Kombat universe?” Soul Calibur did something similar to this when they put Yoda and Darth Vader into Soul Calibur IV , but even this was kind of a tie in for another Star Wars game.
We can see an even better application of this philosophy through Telltale’s licensed properties. Once again, they aren’t simply trying to make a cinematic adventure game based on choice out of any property that comes their way. Instead, they ask “what license fits this game?” Thus, we get The Walking Dead , a universe in which your choices can get you killed; Game of Thrones , a universe in which your choices can get you killed; Fables , a universe in which your choices probably got someone else killed; and Borderlands , a universe where every choice kills someone somewhere.
Money is the root of all evil, so yes, crappy licensed games probably won’t stop being made. But licensing is becoming more and more fluid these days, with properties crossing over into each other all the time. As properties cross over into new and unknown territory, better fits for these properties are found. It’s quite natural for The Predator or Jason Voorhees to be in an ultra-violent fighting game, because they came from ultra-violent movies. It’s a more natural fit than, say, a Star Wars racing game. Pod Racing, I’m looking at you. As long as we keep these licenses flexible, we will find better fits for licensed characters in the future.