In the past few weeks, two games based on big Hollywood movies launched on digital store shelves. To coincide with the release of Renfield, the Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage horror comedy, Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood hit early access on Steam. And 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tron: Identity, from Bithell Games, is offering a cyber noir mystery on Steam and Switch. Though these games are working with well-known IP, each was made by a small team and sticks to genres that allow for keeping development costs low. For Renfield, that means a top-down bullet hell. For Tron, it's a visual novel.
This kind of tie-in game has become more common in recent years. In 2017, the Tom Cruise-led Mummy movie received a pixelated adaptation as The Mummy Demastered, which reimagined the Universal monster flick as a throwback Metroidvania. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance got a turn-based tactics adaptation in 2020. This isn’t even Bithell Games’ first licensed game: back in 2019 the studio released 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:John Wick Hex, a tactical game based oဣn the Keanu Reeves action series.
Licensed games didn't always look like this. When I was growing up in the early aughts, many TV shows and movies, regardless of how ill-fitting, got interactive adaptations. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Desperate Housewives, Over the Hedge, Lost, and more became PC and console games. Tie-ins were so common that even decades-old movies were fair game. The Thing, Scarface, The Godfather, and From Russia with Love got a second life in the sixth console generation.
But game development has changed a lot in the past 20 years. While gamers tended to look at tie-ins as cheap cash grabs in the 2000s, many made today are anything but. 168澳💎洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Avengers, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hogwarts Legacy, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gotham Knights are all huge, expensive, triple-A games,and consi🧔dered tentpole releases for the studios and publishers behind them.
But the tie-in games that now get released commonly don't fit neatly into the indie or triple-A categories. Instead, they're usually phone games. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia got one called Always Sunny: Gang Goes Mobile. Rick and Morty got Pocket Mortys. There are multiple tie-ins for Game of Thrones, Steven Universe has Attack the Light, and South Park has Phone Destroyer. Games like Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood and Tron: Identity will get more attention from games press like myself because launching on PC or consoles implies a certain level of legitimacy. These are "real games." But, the vast majority of licensed games are on iPhone and Android, which makes sense when you think about who the audience is.
The short answer is: everyone. People who don't think of themselves as gamers, but need a diversion during a flight, or while they're in the waiting room before a doctor's appointment, or when they have 30 minutes of downtime between classes — all of them have a gaming platform in their pocket. When I worked as a sports reporter before this career, I did the same thing during half-time or while sitting in the bleachers during day-long tournaments. I was playing more "serious games" like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or the mobile port of Chrono Trigger, but the impulse that had me reaching for my phone was the same. I needed to kill some time.
If your audience is casual gamers, it makes sense to offer them the things they may more consciously think of themselves as fans of, like Game of Thrones, or Rick and Morty, or South Park. Many of these games are bad, pay-to-win, and produced without the time or budget necessary to make something worthwhile. But, that doesn't matter much if your audience just wants to see their favorite characters in between obligations. If our favorite shows or movies can live on our phones, why shouldn't their adaptations?