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NYT on Big Media Games Interest 11

The New York Times (registration required) has an article entitled Blockbuster With a Joystick, discussing the recent interest big media companies have had in game developers. From the article "What is driving the flurry is Hollywood's newfound respect for the profits earned by video game makers. Until recently, movie studios were happy to license their films to game developers...But as the profit margin on video games has remained around a healthy 25 percent - three times that of the average motion picture - the interest of companies like Disney has increased."
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NYT on Big Media Games Interest

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  • I haven't played Kingdom hearts, but Stunt Island was advanced for its time.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    February 7, 2005
    Blockbuster With a Joystick
    By LAURA M. HOLSON

    OS ANGELES, Feb. 6 - Ten years after being burned in their first attempts to combine movies and television with the video game business, media companies now seem willing to press the play button again.

    Wall Street is rife with speculation that various media companies are on the hunt to acquire a video game maker like Activision or Electronic Arts. Studios are more aggressively licensing their television and movie properties to game makers. And th
  • Funny, I subscribe to the NY Times and was just reading the article a minute ago.

    Before the inevitable "video games are replacing movies" posts, it's worth noting that this has already been attempted and didn't go anywhere. Disney and Dreamworks (and others, to a lesser extent), sold off their movie divisions last decade. And these video games are clearly being driving by the movie market, rather than movie studios having decided they're in the wrong industry.

  • One part of TFA that made me wince: "'There will naturally be culture clashes if they try to move these cultures together," said Neil Young, the executive in charge of production at Electronic Arts. "There is not a culture of fear in our industry. We are not afraid to fail.' The big media companies - where fear of failure is almost a job requirement - ...."

    Either fear of failure is not so troublesome for media companies as the article supposes -- for Disney, the media company around which much speculation

  • It doesn't appear that registration is required for this one. It loaded just fine for me without registering.
    • Re:No Reg (Score:2, Informative)

      by brian.glanz ( 849625 )

      Post gave us a nice link, from the RSS feed. If you had navigated to that article otherwise though, you would have been asked to log in and/or register.

      BG

  • Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mitaphane ( 96828 ) on Monday February 07, 2005 @05:12PM (#11600535) Homepage
    So in other words a huge media conglomerates might be interested buying a huge game publishers so they don't have to worry about accquiring the rights to big game franchises to make crappy movies from them.

    Not that I have a problem with this. I just hate huge media congloms talk as if there's going to be tremendous cinergy between a huge movie studio and game studio. There is potential there in theory. Video games are a mix of all kinds of media( gameplay, music, video). Having a great game is made even better if the cut scenes have a great story and and a cinematic element to it. But in practice film makers, making a movie from a game, and game makers, making a game from a movie, are usually content with resting on the popularity of the big name they've accquired and just making a mediocre game or movie.

    All I'm saying is that movie makers should worry about making a good movie first and game makers should worry about making a good game first before they attempt to cross over any elements between the two.
  • For better or worse I think it's inevitable that Hollywood is going to start sucking face with the game industry. I think that the reason the two industries didn't blend well the last time was because games lacked the visceral qualities of film, so turning movies into games always fell flat. The games always felt like ten pounds of lame ass when compared to the bigger than life blockbusters. And the story lines of games weren't deep enough to turn into a film. Not to mention that a decade ago the averag

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