This week, the video game industry received a fresh addition of boomer energy with the announcement of a new Indiana Jones game. Meanwhile, there are also a James Bond game at work, and Ubisoft announced that he is working on an open world Star Wars game– the first in a possible flood of new games taking place in the galaxy far, far away as soon as EA’s exclusive deal with Lucasfilm ends in 2023. Big publishers hoping Hollywood can deliver their next huge hit may be smart business or just another fad. In either case, it feels like an ominous sign of creative surrender just months after the next console cycle.
While Hollywood is in a hurry to video game rightsit looks like the gaming industry now wants to lean more into Hollywood’s established blockbuster franchises. These are not the market synergies I was looking for. Both mediums (and their respective corporate overlords) have a lot to learn from and contribute to, but they spend years and hundreds of millions trying to swap the same old (mostly white) stories. Hollywood is already growing full by eating its own tail and creating endless sequels and starting over –Independence Day: Revival, Jurassic World, Ghostbusters. Sto switch it to games feels even more exhausting.
“Some great studios do licensed games,” Game Awards presents host Geoff Keighley wrote on Twitter yesterday. “What is your dream studio / franchise collaboration that you hope to see one day?”
The fantasy of your favorite developer making a game in your favorite genre based on your favorite piece of existing fiction, like Square Enix making an open world RPG based on Frank Herbert’s Dune, is nothing new. These fantasies are increasingly becoming reality as the cost of making big budget games that leave balloonsto seek safer bets. The success of Dark Knight films led to the Arkham trilogy, recently followed by Insomniac’s Spider man and Miles Morales and even Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel’s Avengers: the popular studio behind the Tomb Raider reload, work 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. There are some amazing games that have come out of this pitching process, but it can also be a recipe for the imagination. Hitman producer IO Interactive is moving from its unique agent 47 to the James Bond license. Wolfenstein the developer Machine Games will revive Nazi punch and colonialist Indiana Jones. Meanwhile, it’s been decades since these stories felt creatively fresh and relevant.
Disney takes Lucasfilm’s heritage of video games from the Sarlacc pit with Lucasfilm Games, a sign that the mega-media corporation is likely to aim to flood the market with new licensed games, just as with movies and TV shows. All of this is of course based on existing canon, and all of this is owned by a company whose net worth is more than the GDP of most countries.
EA got a lot of shit for the ten-year deal to become the exclusive publisher of Star Wars games only to release a total of three until 2019. Now it seems that the monkey’s wish has been granted to the monkey, and we’re going to get a lot more.
“We want to work with the best teams that can deliver great games across our entire IP,” Douglas Reilly, VP, Lucasfilm Games, announced yesterday. Reilly in particular said he expects games “across a wide range of platforms, genres and experiences”, with many “professionals” at Lucasfilm Games to ensure developers form the creative vision of the adaptations. An open-world Ubisoft game is just the beginning, in other words. For comparison: during the investor of December last year Disney names nearly a dozen new Star Wars movies and TV shows.
And of course there is also everything Star Wars games EA continues to work. An EA spokesman said Kotaku yesterday that the terms of its exclusivity agreement with Lucasfilm have not changed and will remain until 2023. According to a source with knowledge of the agreement, 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’s Star Wars game will only be out in early 2023.
Some of these games can be great. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019 and 2020s Star Wars: Squadrons was a lot of fun, but I do not know that we still need a dozen big budget games to play in that space. I would just like to see Respawn or EA Motive make something original, including Ubisoft. Despite the eye-roll-inducing name, Fenyx: Immortals rise was pretty cool, even though it made a lot of previous Ubisoft games and Nintendo’s Breath of nature.
It’s easy to figure out how studios can mix and match game genres and mechanics with already established and beloved fictional worlds. It is much more difficult to conceptualize all the ideas and projects that will not see the light of day due to media consolidation.
‘None’, former Naughty Dog developer and The Last of Us director Bruce Straley wrote with a friendly wink in response to Keighley’s thought experiment. “We need all that talent and money to create new content, new IP and innovation in the AAA space Geoff.”
Blockbuster game publishing has never been a stronghold of risk-taking and creativity, but it can become even stronger if it is further monopolized by the existing monoculture for entertainment. No, I do not want to see BioWare make another Star Wars RPG, and I’m still far from delighted with the prospect of Machine Games trying to tie itself in knots to rehabilitate Indiana Jones ’tomb to something less culturally abominable. As always, it would be great to see video games try to make something new. After all, where else would Hollywood’s future movies be? come from?