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Games Entertainment

Making Franchise Cross-Overs 31

Posted by Zonk from the oh-lion-king-you-could-have-been-much-better dept.
Gamasutra has a piece exploring how to make a great game out of a franchise, with information from a CES panel on the subject. From the article: "'The durability of a franchise is great,' countered Microsoft's GM of franchise development for Xbox Kevin Browne. 'Look how many crappy series it took to finally kill Star Trek.'"
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Making Franchise Cross-Overs More

Making Franchise Cross-Overs

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  • ... to deserve such a cheap shot from MS no less?
  • Two? Doesn't seem all that durable to me.

  • Goddamn marketing-speak (Score:4, Insightful)

    by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday January 19, 2006 @03:07PM (#14512442)
    It really bothers me how meaningless marketing-speak has invaded video games. This is a complete misuse of the word "franchise" - it doesn't mean what these marketing guys think it does, or what most people who now subscribe to this marketing-speak outside of marketing think it does. Here's the definition from dictionary.com:

    franchise Audio pronunciation of "franchise" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (frnchz)
    n.

          1. A privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government, especially:
                      1. The constitutional or statutory right to vote.
                      2. The establishment of a corporation's existence.
                      3. The granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation.
                      4. Legal immunity from servitude, certain burdens, or other restrictions.
          2.
                      1. Authorization granted to someone to sell or distribute a company's goods or services in a certain area.
                      2. A business or group of businesses established or operated under such authorization.
          3. The territory or limits within which immunity, a privilege, or a right may be exercised.
          4. A professional sports team.

    Somewhere along the line, one of these marketdrones probably confused "the granting of certain rights and powers to a corporation" (i.e. the right to distribute games based on Star Trek, for example) with an actual line of games all bearing some relation to each other. That is not a franchise!

    It just bothers me how games are now called "IP", series are now called "franchises", etc. and people just accept it. Speak English, people, not the language of marketing. Because more than half the time these people don't know what they're talking about to begin with, and they don't even know the meaning of the words they're using.

  • It all boils down to gameplay... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rubberbando ( 784342 ) on Thursday January 19, 2006 @03:20PM (#14512614)
    Developers need to focus more on the gameplay being fun and relevant to the characters when making these kind of games. There have been too many bad games that sell because they use a franchise be it from a movie, comic book, or a cartoon show that will make kids hound their parents until they buy it for them. Every once in a while we get a nice game that actually makes sense but IMHO I feel that they are too few and far between.
  • "The durability of a monopoly is great. Look how many crappy releases it took to finally kill Windows."

  • No, false (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MilenCent ( 219397 ) <johnwh AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 19, 2006 @05:00PM (#14513490) Homepage
    How many crappy series did it take to kill Star Trek? Is this a relevent question? How many crappy movies did it take to kill Star Wars? (That one's easy: not enough.)

    But even so, I'd say that the question is not relevent. The Stars, Trek and Wars, are atypical examples. How many franchises are there of Trek's calibur? The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out. That's a potent boost to a series' fortunes.

    And it needed it. Next Generation, need I remind you, looked damn embarassing in the first episodes. (I still have horrifying memories from then of Troi demonstrating her empathy, read, overacting.) But the show was given time to find its legs, and before long became rightfully seen as a better-defining vision of Trek than the original show and the yardstick by which all Treks are based.

    Now, how many series have died in that time? Quantum Leap was popular in its day, but who talks about it anymore? Who remembers Beauty and the Beast, not the Disney cartoon but the once swooned-over, quasi-bestial network series? Moonlighting was once adored, and it had a hip comedic sense that would play well today, so why aren't people still remembering it? How about Lois and Clark? There were once people, it is true, who adored Space 1999. Until certain recent series Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who would both have qualified as well. Many people thought Galactica was dead, well and truly, until the Sci-Fi Channel's unholy blood was pumped into it.

    So anyway, Kevin Browne's statement given should be amended to, "It takes a lot to kill a freakishly popular franchise. And even then, don't turn your back to it."

    (What, he's a manager of franchise development? How money does being Rick Berman pay?)
    • "The 60s series built up sticky fanboy steam for two decades plus before TNG came out."

      No, the 60's built up fanboy steam for about 15 years until "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" came out. After that, there were three more motion pictures released over the course of the slightly-less-than-a-decade between TMP and TNG to give fanboys their Trek fix.

      In fact, TNG came out shortly after the massively popular-for-everyone-not-just-fanboys Star Trek IV. TNG was largely riding the wave of popularity from that mo
      • Hm... you have good points there, true. But ah-ha, they show that it is very easy to kill a franchise, take that!

        (I'm gonna be smug for a good fifteen minutes after that one, heh)
  • So then how many series will it take to kill Battlestar Galactica? The first series was awful. Why they would want to remake it is beyond me. At least Buck Rogers had a sense of humor, BG was just plain depressing.

    • Re:Battlestar (Score:2, Informative)

      by Supurcell ( 834022 )
      The original Battlestar Galactica had a few things going for it. The Cylon Centurions had to be the coolest looking robots, ever. Lorne Greene kicked ass in Bonanza. The dogfights were pretty cool at first, then they just re-used the same ones over and over again. The opening theme music had to be one of the best and most epic of all sc-fi television.

      They took almost all of the coolest parts of the original and multiplied it by about a thousand. They got Edward James Olmos, who kicked ass in Stand and Del
  • I thought the article would be about characters crossing over to different franchises. Like all those Capcom VS SNK games and Smash Bros. On gaming forums across the net the question is asked "Who would win in a fight _____ or _____?" That's why Super Smash Bros was so great. Sure it would have been a fun game to have all original characters, but with all the old favorites you feel an attachment to you characters that might not otherwise be there. You swung Bowser around by his tail, you plunged the master

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