When Licensed Games Go Bad

by Gabriel Ang

Some of you may not belive it, but people will buy licensed games no matter how much they suck. Yup, it's almost a fact of life. There are thousands of licensed games sitting around out there being bought by the gaming masses no matter how techincally inferior they are. For those of you who don't know, a licensed game is a game which uses names and content taken from another source. These sources can be movies, books, TV shows, sports etc. Most of these licences are very famous in their own right, like Marvel and DC Comics, and it would be obvious to say that the game's sales are very much affected by the originals popularity. However, that does not ensure that the game would be generally become a good game.

What most call as the most horrific way that a license would be abused and almost utterly destroyed is none other than Superman64. Titus was considered insane by some gamers for creating this game. This game had horrifying graphics. The controls were so unresponsive that no amount of button mashing could do. There are so many visual bugs that no amount of the game's ridiculous fog can hide them. The game involves nothing more than going around through rings, and then when you are actually able to control the man of steel through them, you go around trying to beat up goons with poor A.I. and even poorer collision detection. Now add a paper-thin story and you've got one of the worst games in history by anyone's standards.

By comparison, take a look at a licensed game done well: The Tony Hawk Series. Here Neversoft knew that it had to do the opposite of everything Titus did. They brought you a game with great graphics on a good framerate. The amount of tricks to do and their graphical execution were lighyears ahead in its heyday. The controls were nothing short of exact and tight that executing tricks were never a problem. The levels were large and very imaginable, and every and all surfaces could be skated in more ways than one. Now add in a killer soundtrack and you have a license done right.

Now I'm not trying to bash games and praising others, I'm simply drawing a comparison between two games that were based on non-video game licenses. I'm trying to delve into the root of why certain licenses are abused.

What is the root? Greed. Yeah, pure and simple lust for money. Look at this: Companies know that the licenses they tried so hard to get will attract a lot of people for the value of the name, and the majority of that will buy the game no matter how poorly it's made. With that in mind, those who plan to capitalize on this instead create a poorly made game in a short time and a small budget (Superman64). They use little effort and little money, but in return thousands to millions of people will still buy them, thus earning the company millions of dollars for a poorly made game. Only then will the people who bought the game scream in terror on how their favorite idols were utterly brutalized and how they were suckered into buying the game.

On the business sense this is a good strategy: spending as little money as possible for maximum returns. These companies may have that "mission and vision" thing to create quality games, but they're still a business unit and as one, will do what it can to make the most money it can for the least spending and effort. There are some companies who are still bent to make the best games, but this is the ugly byproduct of capitalism. As long as there are people out there who can't discern that the game's quality is in the game itself and not the brand license it's based on, companies will continue to churn out bad games for these people to buy.

As the saying goes: "If you build it, they will come."