The rant last week about sequels brings to the forefront a natural problem with sequels. On one hand, in today’s risk-averse development environments, it’s easy to retreat to your licenses as a safe bet, but doing so so often has the potential to burn out those licenses. Companies need to develop new IPs to survive.
On the other hand, the true value in gaming of developing IP is so you have something to build on for the future. Sequels pay the bills more reliably than untested blue sky IP. Until you drive them into the dirt, that is.
So what proportion of a company’s wealth should be devoted to building sequels? I don’t know, but I know that right now, we’re making too many of them. Jason Della Rocca points to very casual research that reports that only 12% of the games we make are not sequels or license-based product. For movies, that number is 77%.
The other interesting balance when working with licenses and building sequels is wondering how far to stray from the source material. If a sequel is exactly like it’s predecessor, then it runs the risk of generating very little excitement (see again the crickets chirping any time you mention Soul Caliber III). On the other hand, you run into very dangerous waters if you mess too much with the formula. Read, if you will, this horrifying and hilarious account of the desperate attempts to get the newest Superman movie off the ground. Included are attempts to make Superman not fly and use gadgets (to rip off Batman), making him use kung-fu (to rip off the Matrix) or making him dump kryptonite into mount doom (I’m only slightly stretching that one). I hadn’t really followed this story since Kevin Smith ran running and screaming from the whole thing.
The Golden Rule of IP is to treat the IP like it’s gold, or soon it won’t be worth gold. That means not throwing out what the IP at it’s core means, and not churning out cheap sequels to milk it fast. Given our media, which has the concept of the expansion pack, doing so is only short-sighted.
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