Originally published at: EA's mysterious Iron Man game starts production | Boing Boing
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between the recent Spider-Man games and the criminally underappreciated Guardians of the Galaxy game, Marvel has had a bit of a hot streak with their forays into gaming lately
There have been a bunch of highly-rated “Marvel” (which is to say, made by various studios using licensed Marvel IPs) games, and a few of them have actually made money, emphasis on “few.” Avengers, total disaster. Guardians, despite being well reviewed, was a financial disaster for the publisher. Midnight Suns apparently also not doing so well, despite what I believe are positive reviews, but it’ll probably be profitable in the end. I suppose it could be a “hot streak” for Marvel, in that there are a lot of licensed games, and their only participation in all this is cashing the checks for the licensing fees, regardless of how the games actually sell. From everyone else’s perspective, not so much. In fact, right now it’s probably a bit risky to invest in a big “Marvel” game, at least until the stink of the Avengers game fades from memory.
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Hard to believe any disaster that Squenix quotes, considering they thought Tomb Raider performed poorly with 10M copies.
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If they could capture the look and feel of Anthem in an Iron Man IP, this could be gold. Anthem wasn’t a great game, but I miss the experience of it so much.
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Thing is, it very well might have done. I don’t think it was so much lifetime sales (though also possibly lifetime sales), but it was sales from the first month they were counting on - they expected six and got three. Given that the Tomb Raider games were costing them up to $135 million to make and market, that meant they weren’t so much as breaking even in the first month, and the total sales weren’t that great, either, given the risk involved (many of those sales were at a fraction of the full price). There’s a reason they sold off the IP.
With Guardians, on the other hand, the sales didn’t just “fail to meet expectations,” it has apparently lost a substantial amount of money, overall. When your “hits” are like Tomb Raider and your failures are like Guardians (and those are your games people think are good) and Avengers, you go out of business pretty quickly. (There’s not remotely enough profit from that hit to pay for the losses.)
They just started offering a 3 hour trial for it that carries over your save to the full game.
I think a lot of people that would really enjoy it have been turned off by the card aspect of it, but I think it is the thing that really makes the game work. Hopefully this will get some people on board.
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Seems like all Marvel-licensed games (that aren’t sequels, like Spider-Man) are facing the uphill battle of having to convince people to pay enough attention to allow them to distinguish themselves from the Avengers game. I guess if they can get over that initial hump and persuade people to put in the three hours, it’ll work…
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