LogFAQs > #976584512

Their days were numbered once 2D Platformers stopped being king.

It used to be a cheap and easy way to pump out big money - the studios could have loads of platformers ready to go, and all they had to do was give it a lick of paint to make it look vaguely like whatever film/show they had bought the rights to after the fact. The most notorious example is probably the Crazy Castle series, which went through an insane number of different licenses (with some entries even being the same game with a different license depending on which country it released in); the laziest example probably being Home Improvement where they put so little effort into making the game fit that you had Tim fighting mummies and dinosaurs.

But as games got more cinematic, more story-driven, more cutscene-filled and more 3D, it got harder and harder to just paste a set of characters and an existing movie plot over a pre-existing set of levels. Ironically, for a game to successfully be recognisable as being based on something else, it had to become more unique. Couple that with longer development time meaning that if you wanted to hit that sweet spot of releasing when the hype for the license was still high, you had to start making the game much longer before the release of the movie etc., so you weren't even sure if the film you were making a game of was going to flop.

And as gaming has become bigger business, the price paid to get the licenses has skyrocketed, so rather than being a cheap way to make a quick buck, putting out a licensed product became a huge financial investment, and thus a huge risk (doing exclusively licensed games is literally what put OG Telltale out of business, because the rights were so expensive that their whole business plan was based on selling enough of the early episodes of their games to be able to afford to make the latter episodes).

The risk/reward ratio just tilted far too far in the other direction to make the idea of pumping out loads of licensed games consistently viable.

It's no coincidence that the most consistently successful licensed games now are the Lego ones, where they've made a USP out of the fact that they actually lean in to making the franchises they have fit into their pre-existing game formula rather than trying to make their game formula fit their franchises - when the same cowboys-on-a-train level shows up in The Lego Movie Game and Lego Marvel Superheroes 2, it actually works because the whole point of Lego is that you reuse pieces to make something else.