Are licensed games actually getting better? | This Week in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Friday 18th March 2022

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check back every Friday for a new entry.

Earlier this week, we ran an interview with Atomic Arcade GM Ames Kirshen that was pretty firmly premised on some conventional wisdom in games: Licensed games used to be terrible in some unspecified previous era, but they're much better now.

That's certainly Kirshen's view. And given his decades of work with Warner Bros, DC, and Marvel on gaming adaptations of comic book licenses, and his current gig working on a new game starring the G.I. Joe character Snake Eyes, he would seem to be a domain expert on the quality of licensed titles.

But the track record on conventional wisdom isn't exactly flawless and even experts can be wrong, so let's try to test the idea a bit.

Given the subjective nature of whether or not any given game is good, it's an impossible thing to actually prove. But it feels right, doesn't it? Acclaim going out of business almost single-handedly makes it a defensible claim, and the very existence of Insomniac's Spider-Man games practically makes it a slam dunk.

Licensed games are good now: Exhibit A

But when people talk about licensed games having been terrible in the past, the first thing I think of is all the exceptions, many of which are so cherished they get re-licensed, re-released, and even remade on a semi-regular basis. Aladdin, Duck Tales, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, X-Men, and The Simpsons arcade games, just about everyone's Batman games were good