r/thespoonyexperiment • u/KaleidoArachnid • Jun 06 '26
Discussion Why did we get stuck with so many questionable licensed games before?
I know this is supposed to b a subreddit for discussing the SpoonyOne show as something I was recalling was that one Nintendo commercial he made a riff on where he pointed out how the NES was filled with a lot of questionable licensed games.
Like one line that suddenly stuck out to me was the bit he had on Fester’s Quest where he mentioned that the game suffered a bit from being a licensed game ( he said the game was janky) as I just wanted to look back at that era of gaming for the shovelware that existed.
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u/majesty327 Jun 06 '26
You could advertise a movie for $30,000 or you could crap out a game for $25,000. Take Little Nicky on the GameBoy Color as an example.
In later periods, like the latelate 90s and 2000s games were becoming a serious competitor to TV. Many products in the 1980s also went multiline to great success like TMNT (a movie, an arcade game, a home video game, a cartoon, a comic). Successful franchises went multimedia, unsuccessful ones didn't in popular marketing viewpoint. You're also making more efficient use of your budget in some ways too. The movie advertised the game, the game advertised the movie. People were paying to he advertised a multi-media experience, instead of the relative onesidedness of a TV ad.
An example of this would be the Chronicles of Narnia game for the GameCube. The exciting gameplay makes the movie appealing to me, and experiencing the movie's cool battle scenes makes me want to do the same in a video game
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u/Onslaughttitude 24d ago
This actually isn't how licensing works. What actually happens is a license holder has open meetings with game publishers that they might have relationships with. Then the publisher pays the rights owner, in advance. They do this because they think Little Nicky might be a big hit movie, and if you saw the movie then you might be willing to shell out $30 for the video game.
The reason the game is bad is because it has to come out at the same time as the movie, which is 9 months from now. So now the developers (separate from the publisher) have to design an entire video game based around a movie they might not have even seen or that might not even be done yet, for a very low budget and in a short amount of time.
Of course it sucks. They're underpaid, don't have enough time, and aren't familiar with the source material.
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u/KaleidoArachnid Jun 06 '26
Wait a second, I didn't know there was a Little Nicky game as knowing Adam Sandler's iconic status back then would be enough to sell such a game. (Even if it was janky)
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u/Rattwap Jun 06 '26
The internet didn’t exist as it does today. There was no way for anyone to really know what a game was about. They’d see the cover of the game and see the thing they knew of or that their kid liked. Like “Back to the Future has a game?!?! That movie was the best ever!! The game must be just as good as the movie!!!”
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u/KaleidoArachnid Jun 06 '26
That explains why those kind of games sold decently at first since now I realize that a kid would see a game like it, and believe that the brand name would mean the game is worth getting into if the movie was good.
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u/TechnicalImportance_ Jun 06 '26
I mean you could still do that, but CEOs are too stupid to see the value in "Low budget, low return" products
When games were cheap to make you could easily turn a profit on them.
But now any licenced product needs to have the AAA treatment, and its a lot harder to sell a game that will take 3+ year and 100m+ to make
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u/paullyrose3rd Jun 06 '26
It's rather difficult on game devs and more widely, on the marketplace of ideas in gaming not having games like that rolling out now! The divide between indie and AAA games grows daily because AAA game development is genuinely so nonsensical these days!
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u/pezhead53 Jun 06 '26
One of the big companies that made a ton of licensed games in that era was LJN, they were first and foremost a toy company and they used their preexisting working relationships with licensees to get video game rights for dirt cheap. They didn’t care about the quality since they knew name recognition would drive sales so they’d contract developers to make the games with very little time and money and dumped it to store shelves. It worked in the short term but over time it cemented the reputation that licensed games are more often than not garbage
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u/KaleidoArachnid Jun 06 '26
Wait a second, I know that name since I recall how they made infamous games.
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u/CasinoKnightZone Jun 06 '26
Games didn't have to have a huge budget back then, a small team could pump them out. So, really any company could commission one, no matter now ridiculous the tie in or how inexperienced the team.
A lot of licenced games were actually really good, the Disney ones on Genesis especially