A new breathe of life for movie-licensed games?

A very interesting development in the gaming world took place this week. Warner Brothers announced that games based on their movie licences which receive low ratings by in independant game reviewers will face increased royalty payments. If this achieves the desired result, it will be great news for gamers, hardcore and casual, everywhere.

For nearly as long as I can remember there has been an on going "joke" in the gaming community about the low-quality of games based on movies and television licences. The reasoning was, a game studio could either take a bet and devote its resources to producing an excellent game in hopes it would sell well or it could spend the money on an expensive movie license and make a game that is almost guaranteed to fly off the shelves. In general, games that are based off of movies are sub-par when it comes to quality and gameplay. Whether it is pure laziness or a smart business decision on the part of the gaming studio we do not know for sure (yes smart, game studios rely on a few hits to make up for all the losers -- high quality or not.)

Warner Bothers wants to buck this trend by raising the stakes for game developers. The reasoning being that low-quality games hurt the movie's image. This is certainly well within their rights as the IP owners.

Whats the big deal? The big deal is with the reviewers. The studios are relying on sites which average all the rankings given by independant sites ( Gamespy, Gamespot, IGN, etc ) into one number. I have seen some wildly ranging review scores just in these big three (20% - 70%.) Now add all of the other smaller sites out there and things can really get crazy. Atari's CEO thinks Warner's decision is a joke. The consequences are no joke for either party. A simple difference from one percentage point to another could mean millions of dollars.

This could also encourage cheating as well as an unhealthy relationship between sites and both developers and licence holders. Cash payoffs for good reviews are unheard of but a mailbox full of new games and goodies is not. Game developers will have a greater incentive to encourage sites to give them good reviews. Certain licence holders may actually desire poorer reviews for their games in order to receive greater royalties. My greatest concern is that of "spam" review sites. Anyone with a little desire and motivation can create a web page. This is precisely what I did. As bad as all this speculation sounds I do have a feeling that it will balance itself out in the end.

Will this even work? If it does I'm sure we will see more movie studios move to a reward-based royalty system. For gamers, this means we will have to worry a little less about getting shafted for buying or renting a crappy game. For developers, it raises the stakes. For me, it means this site might just be worth a little more than my two cents.