Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...games-why-they-dont-make-em-like-they-used-to
Highlights:
Highlights:
- Marvel 's Jay Ong starts off by noting that these days, they only sign partners who want to make big hits, and are willing to invest in the projects with lots of money and their high end game development talent.
- Jay proceeds to note that with each new major game they announce, they're able to get better and better partners who are interested in making games with their IPs, as they feel that Marvel is really serious about their initiative and actually delivering results.
- Marvel no longer wants to sign exclusive deals with publishers. They talk about how they signed a 13 year deal with Activision in 2005 where only Activision could release dedicated Spider-Man console games through 2017, and these days, they just do their deals one game at a time. They feel this is better for both sides because everyone wants to continue a successful collaboration, but doesn't want to continue an unsuccessful collaboration, and there's no need to make an exclusive deal to guarantee content gets made.
- Marvel tries to make less games these days, but have them be notably bigger and better. Also, they try to ensure that their titles aren't competing. For example, they don't want to have both Insomniac and some other developer making open world Spider-Man games because they feel that causes customer confusion and also causes their partners to have to compete with each other. Similarly they also wouldn't want two Marvel MOBAs on PC or whatever.
- Marvel prefers to hand licenses out to their entire cast of characters these days (feel free to exclude the X-Men and Fantastic Four from this discussion for a second) because they like to avoid putting limits on what characters their developers can use. A lot of this was driven by their partners' desires, especially on mobile where the business model revolves around collecting characters, and because both Marvel and the developers like to have tie-in events for new movies (i.e. Guardians of the Galaxy content in mobile games recently) and new comic initiatives (i.e. the Women of Marvel content last year). They're still open to doing more focused games if their partners want to however (see Spider-Man).
- 100% of Marvel's development partners want to have significant post launch content and games as a service elements in their games these days. Jay mentioned that no one has come to him in years and years without requesting that. This is self evident for most games, but feel free to write down that a significant DLC plan for Spider-Man was just confirmed. Marvel Games has an entire team dedicated to supporting publishers' plans for games as a service content.
- Separately, Bill Roseman, Jay Ong's boss, mentioned that they also want to use games to build up their lesser known characters, especially given games reach a lot more people than comics do.
- They ended with a variety of comments on Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite which is covered elsewhere, but hit up the link if you're interested.