The opportunity costs of NFT madness are still being paid | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

What have been the most successful licensing arrangements in games industry history? It's easy to pick out individual success stories – Rare's GoldenEye is the classic example, and some licenses like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars have produced a solid number of hits alongside various misses.

For a really consistent success story, though, you generally have to turn to sports licenses. EA's long-running but now defunct partnership with FIFA certainly takes the crown, spanning as it did almost 30 years and hundreds of millions of games sold – but a tip of the hat is due to Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, a six-game series spanning Summer and Winter Olympic Games from Beijing in 2008 to Tokyo's delayed 2020 games.

Using a license from the International Olympic Committee, and developed and published by a once-unlikely partnership between Sega and Nintendo, the games were by no means a challenger to the commercial success of something like FIFA, but they sold pretty handsomely nonetheless, and were remarkably successful and well-received given how tricky this license is to work with.

Being held only once every four years and spanning a massive range of different sporting events – some of them quite obscure to most people – makes the Olympics into great television, but also makes it vastly more challenging to adapt into a fun, well-made video game than any individual popular sport like football, basketball, or hockey.

For this summer's Olympic Games in Paris, however, there is no Mario & Sonic tie-in.

The IOC chose to exit an unusually successful partnership in pursuit of a fad

There is an under-promoted mobile and PC title, Olympics Go Paris 2024, which is an F2P title with the usual array of in-app transactions; and if you go back a bit into earlier statements and descriptions, you find a lot of focus on the proposed ability to unlock Olympics NFTs through the game.

The emphasis on this aspect was confirmed by a report on Eurogamer this week. The IOC appears to have lost