Monday, March 26, 2007

Market Research Schme'search

via MSNBC

A video game start up from a producer of "300" and some rich dot com dude has generated about $150 million in equity. The raison d'etre? "The startup, Brash Entertainment LLC, is developing games that will be licensed with major movie, book and music titles."

"We hope to be one of the biggest game studios in the country," Altenbach said.

"The safest, most lucrative way to sell a video game is in tandem with some kind of movie that is already heavily marketed," Ellis said. "Your downside is protected by the co-marketing."

Other than GoldenEye (which was a long time ago), I can't think of a single damn movie-licensed game I'd actually want to play. A moment of silence please as we mourn the passing of $150 million...

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Is your comment about the quality of the games that are spawned out of those titles or are you saying the concept of movies (or other Intellectual Property) + video games doesn't make sense?

If the former, you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but if you're saying the latter, I heartily disagree.

If the game play is as good as the best in its genre, additional emotional connection from a heavily promoted (or just plain good) IP can only add to the experience, no? And with the addition of more personalization taking place within games these days, game players will be able to do what I always wanted to growing up -- be IN the movie, be a character, do the things I see in the movies.

Ken said...

Of the movie-inspired games I've played, almost all have been junk. For some reason, this industry just doesn't do this right.

The concept is sound and probably why we keep seeing attempts. If I remember the numbers correctly, GoldenEye the game actually delivered more revenue than the movie showing that in sheer dollar numbers, people wanted to BE Bond more than watch Bond.

Now that I think about it, one of the Matrix games wasn't too bad either. It wove the game story around some secondary characters in the movie.