Production costs, console cycles spur increased cooperation, panel says.

Mar. 25, 2003 - By George T. Chronis, Video Business - www.videobusiness.com

Making games out of movie licenses isn't new, but making money out of movie properties is a fairly recent trend, as titles such as Spider-Man or The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers have proved.

One reason that film licenses are proving so attractive to game publishers is the ever-escalating production budgets that go handin-hand with every new console cycle or major advancement in computer graphics. That encourages publishers to look for the builtin security of a major license, Activision Inc. director of global brand management John Heinecke said Tuesday during a Digital Coast Roundtable panel discussion.

"Budgets have already doubled or tripled between the PlayStation and PS2, mostly due to the art costs of higher-quality visuals," he said. "Those costs will continue to balloon when we see the next series of console introductions in 2005."

Despite the attractiveness of film properties, publishers have discovered that it's best to be careful when considering an available license.

"As publishers we've learned that you have to have firm criteria for choosing intellectual property based on potential," said Infogrames Inc. VP of marketing Steve Allison. "At any given time, there probably are only five or six properties worth looking at: those action films that appeal to a young male audience and those productions that can likely generate $200 million at the box office." Heinecke agreed that constant console introduction cycles put a premium on the young male audience. By the time the store price of a PS2 or Xbox gets truly affordable--when the consoles reach about 20 million households--and a broader demographic starts getting interested, there will be a PS3 or Xbox Next that restarts the cycle and returns attention to the young males who will pay the premium to own the new systems.

As for the motion picture studios, the publishers say that Hollywood gets games and that current relationships are productive. "A great game can often take more time to produce than a film," Heinecke said. "There is more awareness at the studios that they have to go out three years prior to a theatrical release to license their properties into games and expect that the game must be more than the movie experience. Gamers won't stand for a washed-over repeat of the same experience they saw in the theater."

The high-water mark in publisher/studio relationships is Infogrames' Enter the Matrix game, due in stores in May. The title received unparalleled access to the film production's assets and actors, and its story was written by the directors. While publishers don't see that level of studio investment being repeated anytime soon, Infogrames' Allison said Enter the Matrix is spurring other Hollywood producers to be more forthcoming.

"On the Enter the Matrix disc is a 30-minute making-of feature. Since we are also publishing a game based on Terminator 3, we go to [producers] Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar and say, 'Hey, look what we can do.' Now there is a 30-minute making-of feature on our T3 disc," Allison said, The panel also discussed how publishers are taking different slants on what constitutes a licensed property beyond movies into games.

Although THQ Inc. has a traditional license agreement with the Walt Disney Co. and Pixar Animation Studios to create the Finding Nemo game, which includes 18 minutes of footage from the film, the publisher has a much different arrangement with Nickelodeon, said THQ VP of business development Dan Kelly.

The cable channel asked THQ to review possible franchises that would fit the Nickelodeon audience. These, however, would start off as a game before crossing over into TV programming. "Nickelodeon knows that its main audience is spending progressively more time playing games, so it decided to develop new brands via games first," Kelly said.

One of the first projects in the program is Tak: The Power of Juju from Avalanche Studios. Kelly said Nickelodeon has helped guide the game's development as a full brand from the beginning. Mark Lasoff, art director at Electronic Arts' Los Angeles facility, used the Medal of Honor franchise as an example of another way publishers can work within a Hollywood context.

"Medal of Honor was inspired by Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, but the game series has taken on a life of its own," he said. "What's important is that the Medal of Honor games exploit movie conventions to create a cinematic experience."

Given that such original content games are less expensive to produce and translate into higher profit margins compared to licensed properties, Allison suggested that there is a growing interest in securing film actors and directors to leverage their Hollywood notoriety within original games.

"Real convergence is getting Chow Yun-Fat [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] to star in an original fighting game," he said.

For more information about Digital Coast Roundtable visit www.digitalcoast.org.