Ubisoft calls CUT! on movie-game tie-ins

Cut

All you movie lovers who hold out hope of getting a decent game tie-in of your favourite flick, look away now.

Ubisoft have announced, on the back of poor sales of their Avatar game, that they are cutting funding for future film based games, focusing their efforts instead on original IP and their big franchises.

“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,” said CEO Yves Guillemot in a recent call to investors. “So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn’t mean we will stop but we’re going to spend less in licenses in the future.”

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this news. One the one hand it should mean we see less absolutely shocking games that only get out on the shelves because they share the same name as a blockbuster film. On the other hand, it more or less guarantees that any tie-ins produced are crap. There’s been a few films over the years that I’ve felt could be made into really good games, if they were just given the time, money and effort. The last truly great movie-to-game conversion I can think of is Goldeneye (not counting the various Star Wars titles on the ”˜cube/64 as they didn’t really follow the same script as the films ”“ though the above Endor level on Rogue Squadron II was so incredibly amazing I had to change my underwear). What was I on about before I opened those parenthesis? Oh yeah, films to games. So what say you Infendo nation? Do you agree with Ubisoft’s decision or would you prefer to see them spend a bit more money and effort to make sure that the games they produce do justice to the films?

[Source]