Quality Upswing Predicted For Movie-License Video Games

Scott Steinberg has been speaking to Next Generation about movie tie-in games, why they've typically been so very bad and why this is, apparently, going to change:

Hollywood really can throw a grenade to game companies; they'd throw a license grenade over the wall and game companies would have six months to build a game and market it. No surprise the game might not have been the greatest.

As publishers and the different movie studios are recognizing how important videogames are to the marketing of a film to the demographic, movie studios realise that they can't trivialise the interactive space.

In Iron Man’s case Jon Favreau is absolutely a gamer. They don’t want their property and their efforts to be attached to a trivialized game development effort so they’re very involved. The whole industry, both industries, have coupled together and have evolved or advanced their craft to a point where both are taken extremely seriously and that just wasn’t the case two years ago.

I think that videogames still have a lot to learn from movies. Imagine Spider-Man 3 devoid of 99% of the characterisation, human relatability, subtext, emotional content, thematic purpose and authorial point of view. That's roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a very good Spider-Man video game so far. But I'm hopeful - for games with more taste, better developed aesthetic sense and something to say. While people are still obsessing about existing genres, control systems and mathematical-graphical standards, however, this isn't going to happen.