Hurdles to Working With Hollywood on Games Worth Jumping, Conference Told

SEATTLE -- Game developers used to calling the shots may have a rough time adjusting to working with movie studios and other companies with vast intellectual property, but patience pays off, executives said at the Casual Connect conference. Disney, sports leagues and others are lending their IP to developers to build their own businesses, said Robert Tercek, who helped develop Sony’s early online games and until recently headed digital media for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Describing a “really intense” approval process for the rights to a set of Disney brands new at the time, Tercek said an executive told him to “'give it back to us in exactly the same condition or better.'"

"There’s a lot of sensitivity with a brand,” and developers can’t be expected to know all the nuances from the start, said Elliot Solomon, director of business development for Disney Online Studios. A developer of a game with a princess for Disney made the mistake of allowing the character to jump -- a no-no for Disney princesses, he said. And Disney bars development of Facebook games because of the social network’s 14-and-up rule, Solomon said. “The people responsible for managing a brand are scared” of how developers will use the IP, especially in social media, Tercek said. “I don’t think they're intentionally difficult. … But they've got these vastly valuable brands to protect.” Until developers have proven themselves, they'll stay in the “playpen,” he said.

It’s important to educate the brand owner, such as a movie studio, about what the developer plans to do with the IP, said Dave Long, CEO of Exponential Entertainment, which licenses studio content to use across social networks and game portals, including MSN. He created the hit DVD trivia game Scene It? at Screenfilm before Paramount bought the company. Long said he explained to studios the concept of licensing a vast array of clips, the revenue share and the approval rights, and he persistently searched throughout a company’s divisions to find supporters to pitch his ideas to the brass.

Developers should find out early what rights they have to work with, because some brand owners misrepresent what IP they control leading up to a deal and then “their agents will peel back the rights” as development starts, Tercek said. Deals can be full of exclusions, Long said, such as no material directed by Alfred Hitchcock, whose estate wasn’t cooperative at first in a deal that Long worked on. Even when an actor doesn’t retain interactive rights, if he or she complains to the studio about being in a clip used in a game, the studio often will demand the clip’s removal, he said. Some developers don’t even ask, pulling pirated or promotional clips off YouTube for their games, Long said.

Some branded content simply doesn’t work in games, Long said, noting his company’s game versions of Survivor and American Idol flopped because the intended audience already knew the winners. The company settled on pushing “emotional buttons” by reminding viewers of their favorite lines from movies, such as Caddyshack and The Jerk, creating a “social lubricant” between players and spurring Netflix rentals of long-dormant titles, he said. Massively multiplayer online games require a “richly defined universe that goes pretty deep,” which makes Disney’s purchase of Marvel “brilliant,” Tercek said. Movies don’t fit that game style well, and disappointing box-office returns for The Sorceror’s Apprentice, Sex & the City 2 and other budget-busters don’t bode well for game versions either, he said, though Toy Story 3 could be a good candidate.

Disney’s strategy for avoiding expensive duds borrows heavily from social game developers, Solomon said: Release a low-budget beta and build on it over time if demand follows. The strategy worked well for Pixie Hollow, whose players design their own fairies, he said. It costs a lot to develop a full game that will be shipped to retail stores, and sometimes the investment isn’t worthwhile when Disney’s aim is brand engagement, not big revenue from games themselves, Solomon said. The company has been shy in developing virtual worlds despite the success of ClubPenguin.com, a property that had 700,000 users when Disney bought it and whose user base has since skyrocketed, he said. “The industry gasped when they saw the price but it really made sense,” given the brand’s expansion to consumer goods, trading cards and even characters in Disney parks.

Small game developers may have a tough time getting business from big brands as the industry consolidates, said Tercek, citing EA’s acquisition of social game maker Playfish. “If you can handle all game platforms with a full partner, there’s some appeal to that.” But Solomon told developers to build their own IP and show studios their success, saying he wouldn’t have been impressed with the concept for ClubPenguin on paper. Big studios aren’t likely to build their own social games, since the best ideas have already been taken, Tercek said. Just as MTV made a failed bid for MySpace after it lost music-video traffic to the social network, so big brands will buy the games that have the audience they want, he said, pointing to Google’s reported $100 million investment in Zynga, the maker of FarmVille and other big Facebook hits.

As difficult as they can be to work with, big brands need the talent of game developers to succeed in a genre unfamiliar to them -- interactivity, Tercek said. Content creators know linear storytelling, not letting their audience participate in the creative process, and the collapse of DVD sales has been a “tremendously vexing challenge for them,” he said. Solomon made a pitch for developers to consider Disney, which employs about 50 to 100 at a time on a work-for-hire basis and reviews applicants’ submissions regularly. They'll get to see movie scripts early and attend pre-screenings, he said.