(One exception in the sports world is pro wrestling games, which I will count in this exercise because it's not really a sport, they're sold on colorful characters and storylines as much as any licensed title, and the genre absolutely had a terrible track record of adaptation over a long stretch of time.) To the contrary, they've been well-received mainstays in video games basically since video games existed. I'm also ejecting sports, racing, and flight sim games from the discussion because they have never really shared the terrible reputation that licensed titles have had over the years. With the Terminator, the Joker, Rambo, etc., does Mortal Kombat 11 belong in this discussion? To that end, I'm limiting the definition to games that were based on properties that were popular in other media, and the license is a key part of the appeal. This required some judgment calls, and in those cases I'm trying my best to stick to the type of games that are at the heart of that narrative about licensed games getting better. There's also the question of what counts as a licensed game here.

(Yes, tallying up and averaging every last licensed game review from the past couple decades would probably be a more effective way to answer this question, but this is a weekly column, I have other stories to write, and my curiosity on the issue only runs so deep.) Also, Metacritic only includes games with a minimum of 7 critic reviews in these lists, so there may be titles with worse scores that just didn't get enough critical attention to appear in the numbers.īe that as it may, if licensed games really are getting better, it stands to reason that we should see more of them among the very best reviewed games each year. We would have gone back further, but Metacritic doesn't even have 100 games with enough reviews to get an average score before that. To that end, I looked at the top 100 games from each year since 2000. I'm just indulging curiosity here, not looking to get published in a peer-reviewed journal with a respectable impact factor. Yes, that's a deeply flawed way to measure the quality of a given thing for a host of reasons, but it's at least consistently flawed and there are going to be a load of caveats here anyway. MethodologyĪs in those columns, we're going to use Metacritic averages as a rough proxy for quality. So let's poke around at this idea that licensed games are getting better and see if it withstands a little scrutiny, much as we did when asking whether Electronic Arts made better Wii games than Nintendo, or if the 'Fewer, Bigger, Better' trend in games actually led to fewer titles, and if they are any better. I also think about some licensed stinkers I've played on modern consoles, games that accurately replicated the look and perhaps sound of the source material, but failed to reproduce the key appeal of it. 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 back then.

Licensed games are good now: Exhibit Aīut 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. 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. Given the subjective nature of whether or not any given game is good, it's an impossible thing to actually prove. Joe character Snake Eyes, he would seem to be a domain expert on the quality of licensed titles.īut 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. 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. Check back every Friday for a new entry.Įarlier 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. 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.

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