With TV A Mess, Should Hollywood Be Making More Games?

With the town shut down by two strikes that look likely to last many more weeks, if not months, it’s time to look at what else Hollywood’s big media companies can do to secure their messy future.

Turns out there’s a huge entertainment business that appeals immensely to younger audiences who have largely tuned out broadcast and cable TV, and don’t go to theaters that much. Even better, that industry is shifting toward huge intellectual properties, streaming and subscriptions.

It’s the $180 billion-a-year videogame business, an industry that Hollywood has erratically engaged with since the 1980s. Disney, Warner Bros. and other studios have launched game-development studios and divisions, killed them off, licensed out their film and TV IP repeatedly and licensed game IP back. Sony, of course, has made far more money over the years from its videogame division and PlayStation consoles than its movie, music and TV units.

So far this year, the biggest movie in theaters wasn’t Indiana Jones or Marvel and Fast & Furious’ 312th installment. It was Universal’s exuberant animated The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which has generated $1.3 billion in global box office since its April release.

That’s the year’s best performance by far, topping the totals for the No. 2 film, Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, by a whopping half a billion dollars. That’s a stunning number to contemplate, and it’s not the only big one tied a game franchise this year.

HBO/Max had a huge hit with The Last of Us, a TV series built around a decade-old, much-lauded adventure game from Sony. The TV version of the post-apocalyptic game has since scooped up 24 Emmy nominations, including nine acting nods for Pedro Pascal, Melanie Lynskey, Murray Bartlett and other stars.

Sony Pictures Entertainment also will wave the green flag Aug. 11 on a movie version of its biggest PlayStation franchise, Gran Turismo, which first debuted in 1997. New versions the verite’ racing simulator have accompanied each new PlayStation model, collectively selling more than 90 million copies.

The film stars Orlando Bloom, David Harbour and Djimon Hounsou, plus lots and lots of race cars. But don’t expect a big checkered flag for GT at the box office; with actors and writers on strike, the studios won’t be able to promote much of anything through many of their traditional channels, such as red carpets, talk-show appearances, star interviews and the like.

But the real opportunity here isn’t just to make more movies and TV shows based on video games, though that’s a perfectly good idea, now that we’ve actually seen some good adaptations. A caution flag is advised, however; the history of terrible filmed game adaptations is far longer than the big hits. And besides, no one’s producing much of anything during the strikes.

The real opportunity might be to follow, again, Netflix’s lead. The Big Red N has been experimenting with the game sector for the past few years, hiring a veteran game executive and rolling out a string of mostly mobile games.

Those games aren’t particularly sophisticated, nor expensive to make. They’re available for free download for subscribers, designed to give audiences more reasons to stick around on Netflix-owned territory. It’s clear the company is trying to build its facility with games, audiences, and the way those can fold into a broader subscription offering that may prove stickier and less susceptible to churn.

Many of the titles so far have been built around Neflix’s mega-franchise Stranger Things, a natural choice given its 1980s throwback vibe, boss-level bad guys, and general sci-fi sensibility that in some ways mimics a game’s structure.

But it’s not hard to see where Netflix might go next with its game ventures: big,immersive subscription-based interactive experiences built around a hit franchise. Diving into a Stranger Things ongoing game experience, or perhaps one built on zombie franchise Army of the Dead, seems like a natural step at some point in the next few years.

Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard to guarantee access to big game franchises such as Call of Duty, Diablo and Overwatch, to beef up its multi-game subscription service and to better compete with Sony’s formidable PlayStation+ streaming subscription service.

Game industry analysts DFC Intelligence this week suggested the impact of the $69 billion Microsoft acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, now likely on its way to regulatory approval, may not harm the rest of the industry as much as feared when it was announced 19 months ago. That’s because the industry is shifting in important ways that might actually open opportunities for TV- and film-based franchises to get the widest possible audiences when they become games/experiences.

“Microsoft and Sony’s push towards a multi-game subscription model is no longer looking like the future," DFC noted. “The problem with game subscription services is they don’t account for the unique nature of video games. Video game content is different. Unlike movies or TV shows, a popular game can be played over and over for months or even years. The average consumer does not play that many games, so a multi-game subscription service is not as valuable as originally assumed.”

Instead, fans are opting to pay a small amount of money regularly for extended access to a regularly updated game experience. DFC cites Roblox (now the No. 3 game publisher) with subscription plans starting at $5 a month for its millions of user- and brand-created games and experiences. Epic’s Fortnite Crew subscription costs $12 a month (for a game that’s otherwise free). Minecraft has a $3.99/$7.99 “Bedrock” subscription.

I’m a particular fan of Bungie’s lore-rich sci-fi loot shooter Destiny 2, which has been running since 2017, with substantive quarterly updates featuring new story lines, weapons, gear and other goodies. These days, the game’s base version is free to play on multiple platforms, relying on subscriptions for extra content and experiences, sales of digital and physical goods, and other monetization to boost the bottom line.

Sony thought so much of Bungie and its approach to what’s called “live-service” games that last year it bought Bungie for $4.4 billion. Now Bungie is working on a live-service version of one of its earliest hits, a sci-fi shooter trilogy from 1994 called Marathon.

At the other end of the budget scale is Telltale Games, which this week releases a new story-driven game based on The Expanse, originally a series of books that became a TV show on NBCUniversal’s SyFy network for three seasons. There it attracted an ardent fan base that happened to include Jeff Bezos. When SyFy cancelled the show, Amazon Prime Video picked it up for three more seasons.

Telltale was a storied game studio known for a specific kind of point-and-click narrative experiences (including multiple titles based on The Walking Dead, Law & Order, Back to the Future, Game of Thrones and CSI) before closing suddenly in 2017.

Jamie Ottilie bought and revived the brand, with an intention to revive that kind of story-driven experience, and move it forward into an ongoing immersive experience that people who love, say, the complex political and cultural worlds of The Expanse can explore more deeply and fully

The new game, The Expanse: A Telltale Series, is something of a prequel, following the story of Belter ship captain Camina Drummer and her crew years before the events in the TV series. Drummer, played by Cara Gee in the series, who also voices the character in the game with the same distinctive Belter patois.

At the same time, the game is a tiny slice of The Expanse’s, uh, expansive canvas, creators said.

“The story we’re telling is big for these characters, but it’s not galactic,” said Dan Ruescher, who produced the game’s many motion-capture scenes. “The stakes are very personal.”

But even small-stakes stories set in a big narrative universe can be compelling for fans, Ottile told me earlier this summer. Many fans want to dive in and live a story, and maybe they don’t need it to be cutting-edge graphics or fast-twitch play mechanics, which can significantly increase development and operating costs. Most importantly, fans will pay for a distinctive experience, even if it isn’t photo-realistic in its technology.

DFC emphasized the opportunity to create more compelling, immersive, and ongoing experiences for fans of specific franchises, like Microsoft’s own Minecraft. If that sounds a lot like what people call the metaverse, that ill-defined thing we talked about all the time before AI and the strikes, well, it is.

DIsney is moving in this direction. In June, CEO Bob Iger joined Apple CEO Tim Cook on stage during his announcement of the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro headset. Disney will make experiences for the mixed-reality headset, which is scheduled to debut next year. That probably means Star Wars, Marvel and princesses of various sorts. But fans of all of those likely will be happy to pay and play.

The question for other studios’ executives as the twin strikes grind on is what they’re doing to prepare their company for a future that looks more like games and Netflix and Telltale than basic cable or broadcast or movies.