Another interesting finding from EEDAR's presentation is that the number of licensed IP and sequels brought to market is far outpacing original IP. Now, that in and of itself is not very surprising since sequels and licenses historically have driven the games business, but as you can see from the chart below, the trend has been accelerating.
“Traditionally you see more new IPs coming out earlier in the console life cycle in comparison to sequels and re-releases. Companies try to get things like Gears of War established early. I think you could even say that the Call of Duty franchise was really reborn on the Xbox 360 with Call of Duty 2 being a launch title, doing really well and solidifying itself as the shooter franchise for the console market. So I think what we're seeing in this life cycle in terms of where we are in the cycle and the age of the franchises in the cycle and the economy... it's normal to see more existing IPs than new IPs, but it seems to be accelerating. Look at Guitar Hero and how many SKUs there are, or the Imagine franchise [from Ubisoft] and how many SKUs there are for that,” Short said. “What we're really seeing right now is a little bit of a step away from people really investing in non-branded titles... So my only concern is that if the life cycle continues to go on the way it's going, are we going to see real innovation and creativity with new IPs or is it slowing down and we won't see anything major until the next console cycle, which is still 3-4 years out at least?”
He added, “Obviously, we will see new IPs, but from an industry perspective, one of the things that's always a lagging effect when you have these [poor] economic times is it's not going to be this year when we see the crunch of new IP. It's going to be next year and the year after... And I think there's a challenge there too – looking at Mr.Divnich's article on your site about the music genre and how it's starting to hit the ceiling in terms of features, it's the same thing we're seeing with some of these sports games. So I think existing IPs have this 'time bomb' in them, meaning depending on what the IP's based on you can very quickly hit a feature ceiling, which can really start to cut into the franchise itself. And if you're dealing with pop culture licenses, you can't control the strength of those either. If you've already invested significant money in next year's title and the pop culture interest in it diminishes, then you're exposed.”
1 Comments
August 19, 2009
I do think that certain franchises (guitar hero) are going way overboard with their sequels but it should be normal to see the number of sequels accelerating since existing franchises will continue to produce games while previously new ip will also spawn sequels.