The movie based games myth

There is a common belief that all the games based on movies and movie franchises suck balls. There are too much good movie-based games around to call them an exception that proves the rule. Two of the games that I consider to be among top-something of all time - Star Wars : Knights of the Old Republic and GoldenEye are based on movie franchises, and the list doesn't end there. The majority of Star Wars games are great - from side-scrolling gems on the SNES, to flight sims like X-wing and Tie fighter titles or the awesome Rogue Squadron, all the way to modern shooters of Dark Forces/Jedi Knight franchise and The Old Republic RPGs. Heck, even the not-so-serious Racer Titles, Battlefront RTSes and The Force Unleashed H'n'Ses were pretty good games. Battle for Middle Earth was fucking epic And while we nowadays praise the Wanted or Bourne Conspiracy for "not being bad movie games", and have to search very hard to find a great one (GoldenEye for the Wii is one. If you haven't played it, do it now), things were not so grim in the past. Disney movie tie-in games were mostly very good (Aladdin, The Lion King), and Batman Returns, Dick Tracy, Jurassic Park and many other titles from the 16-bit era stand as good titles that use their movie tie-ins as a marketing vehicle, and not as an excuse for their shortcomings. So, what makes today's movie games suck more than the games of that "golden age of tie-ins", but still makes Star Wars games (and certain other titles) great? Two things - development cycles and publisher care. Ghostbusters didn't cross any streams, but it was a decent title Development cycle for a movie is around 1 year (from the moment it is greenlit to theatrical release), and in the 16-bit games it took less time than that to make a game. Movie based games had bigger budgets than their non-licensed counterparts and all the pieces for making a good game were in. Today, games take around two years to make, and the developer of a movie tie-in game doesn't have that time. In order to catch the hype train, they have to cut corners and make a game that is at best average (Toy Story 3, Kung Fu Panda, Avatar) or, more often than not, plain bad (Iron Man, Battle:LA). If they decide to completely miss the hype and release the game months or years after the movie, they risk the licence backfire - those who liked the movie forgetting about it, those who didn't like it not being interested about the game, and those who didn't watch it feeling that there is no point in playing the game without watching the movie it is based on. Sure, the game being great (Blade Runner, Chronicles of Riddick) can save the day, but games that are just good (Wanted:Weapons of Fate, Bourne Conspiracy) are more likely to flop than not. The exception to that are the franchises where publishers and producers really care. When a publisher/producer wants not only to make a game that will benefit from the movie, but the game from which the next movie in the franchise will also gain something - great things may be born. That is what happens with Star Wars - the parent company does not publish games, novels and comics just in order to cash in on the success of the movies, but also in order to make fans hyped up about the next theatrical release between the franchise installments. Sixteen years have passed between the third and the fourth Star Wars movies, yet the franchise was never out of the media. With Arkham Asylum and Arkham City the Dark Knight hype train will keep running full speed, and four years between two Batsy movies will pass in a blink of a gamer's eye. The transition from people caring about an individual movie to people caring about the "universe" is what makes long-term cash cows. Once that transition is successfully done, the franchise stays in fans' hearts even if the tie-in material starts to stagnate. E.T. - The father of shitty tie-ins. Ghostbusters were huge in the early nineties (interesting fact: Mortal Kombat's father, John Tobias, was one of the artists on the great The New Ghostbusters comic book series), but the same can not be said for the end of this decade - yet the Terminal Reality's game sold pretty well. The same applies for Telltale's "Back to the Future" episodic games. Built in once established, if a bit neglected, universes, the games still attracted fans. With novels, cartoons, comic books and games, you can increase the market penetration of your movie franchise, making almost everyone exposed to some piece of your universe - thus making every other piece of that universe approachable. It also works the other way around; Microsoft is doing an amazing job expanding Halo's reach (pun intended) by publishing everything from novels (some of which are pretty good) to cartoons, encyclopedias, comic books and action figures, keeping fans interested in the franchise even if there is, like now, no new Halo game in sight. You can publish Battle for Middle Earth years after the movies and expect to sell well (if a game is good), but you can not expect the same from the Prison Break (there is nothing but TV series, plus the game sucks) or the Saw. If you are Rockstar, however, you can ignore my point and earn 35 millions on making The Warriors game years later. Of course, you can decide to cover as wide a market as possible and spend a shitload of money on marketing and still hope to sell good - Scarface:the World is Yours succeeded in that, even if the licence played a really tiny part in that success. It won't hurt you, also, to make sure that the game is at least decent (the first Godfather game sold pretty well, the second one flopped badly). Of all the solutions, rushing the game to release along with the movie, no matter how bad it is, is the worst solution - it hurts the fans, the franchise, game industry, the developer that makes the game,  and does not make a profitable solution in the long run. Unfortunately, that is what we are to continue to expect from movie tie-in games, since the publishers, who are spending a shitload of money on marketing for the movies, don't care about the franchises in the long run; they want to milk that cow until it's dead dry and kick it down the ditch before they go on with their formula to find another creative property to rape. The smart producers and publishers are rare, but their efforts to provide a stream of quality products deserve all respect, and the result of their franchises becoming huge cash cows is a nice reward.