Why spin-offs from games are a terrible idea - The Michael French column

Anyone who plays games is regularly asked to put their hands in their pockets and pay up to maintain their membership in the increasingly popular global club we call 'gaming'.

It might be as your yearly payment to be part of the Call of Duty or FIFA club - or a monthly payment into their add-on subscription services; it might be as a daily microtransaction in an iPhone or Facebook game - free to play for a bit, pay to keep playing; or it might be as DLC - get another nibble on the plot of something like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Assassin's Creed.

Usually that's all you need to do to be part of the club. And even then it can be a fairly costly 'hobby'.

The more committed can pay that little bit extra if they want. They buy the collector's edition game, the t-shirt, the poster, the animated 'inspired by' movie. Merchandise for games has become big business. Online-only game Minecraft, for instance, has never been available to buy in a box but you can get a foam pickaxe just like the one in the game.

Today those items are common for games. But, worse, game execs are pitching them as part of the main event - the novels or comics or downloadable videos are just as valid a part of the game as the game itself. And they want you to pay for them, of course.

They even have a damn ugly word for it: transmedia.

The suggestion is that everything counts. A game world now exists across different 'platforms' and 'mediums'. And apparently if you want to engage in a game world, you'll want to engage with more of it, scattered across books, comics, movies and videos.

In a publisher boardroom somewhere, there's a big chart for how these things hang off the game like dollar-grabbing tendrils which 'continue the story'.

But the thinking here is flawed. Because transmedia, Mr Publishing Executive, is a load of old bollocks.

Firstly, transmedia poses a huge creative burden.

In the transmedia world all these materials share characters, plot, themes and settings. I find it hard to believe that you will find the comic book guy, movie guy, and novelist who all want to stick to the message as dictated by a games designer. Not because the designer won't be respected - in a world where a game like Call of Duty can make $775m in five days, they will probably bow down before him. But because any creative medium requires a bit of flexibility. A comic book artist won't want to necessarily draw the heroine the same way as she's shown in the game (ironically, they'll probably want even bigger tits), or a costume just might not be feasible in a movie.

Even if somehow a publisher did balance this all out, a bigger problem emerges: the power of the source material - that is, the games - is lost.

The whole point of spin-off books and the like is that they are spin off books. They are a second level to being a fan. You engage in them to tickle your interest in something. In the past, fans of Star Trek, Star Wars and the like have debated the value of tie-in novels and whether they are canonical, or 'canon'. The question they ask is, Do they count in the overall continuity? Often they don't because, frankly, most people don't give a shit what colour the walls were in the the house Spock bought between seasons two and three. These things move stories sideways, not forwards. However a few do care, so the spin-off keeps them happy without clogging up the source material.

In a transmedia world, everything is canon, says Mr Publishing Executive. Except at this point, the only canon you need for them is the one you'll fire the marketing bastard out of. If everything is canon, then by the same logic the game doesn't matter as much as it once did. And that's very, very bad thinking. I recently ploughed through Assassin's Creed: Revelations, for instance, to play Assassin's Creed. Not take part in the collective dismantling of its narrative - an act that would pose to evaporate the story it does have into nothingness.

As a gamer I've never bought a spin-off item – and I never will unless there's a good reason to look beyond the points above.

Transmedia, Mr Publisher, is a lost cause.

And the biggest reason why, however, is this: most of us don't have the time or the money to be 100% committed to 100& of every franchise we enjoy 100% of the time.

We don't want to miss out on a seemingly-minor-but-actually-significant plot point because you buried it on page 14 of issue 9 of the official comic - because if we do we'll feel instantly excluded from the fan club. And it's at that point we'll stop coming back for more, and stop giving you any money, let alone our 'gamer subscription'.

Michael French is Editor-in-Chief of games industry websites Develop-online.net and MCVuk.com and magazines MCV and Develop. Read his previous columns for made2game here:

Why reviewers should criticise what a game is, not how it's made.

Why HD remakes are bad news.

How the 'big three' publishers are being naive in their view of the iPhone/Android/browser-based gaming revolution.

Follow Michael on Twitter @Michael_French

Please register or login to post comments