All your wallets belongs to Master Chief

The video game industry is huge. The leading video game and interactive entertainment agency, DFC Intelligence, forecasts the video game market to reach a total value of $57 Billion in 2009. (http://www.dfcint.com/wp/?p=222) Naturally, this means video games would become subject to the corporate media and brand licenses that we so willingly crave. And why shouldn’t they? According to Bogost’s citation, “Electronic Arts’ 2004 exclusive licensing deal with the National Football League (NFL) was reported to total $300 million-and that’s just the rights to make the games with NFL teams, players, and stadiums.”

As Bogost excellently claims, “We can think of licenses not as intellectual property in the abstract, but as a network of products that interpret the license in some way.” Bogost brilliantly uses the example of Harry Potter and the different products within the license to show the numerous punctilios that accompany licensed games. This all boils down to one, usually true statement, most licensed games a bad.

Like Bogost claims, licensed games usually have inferior design and implementation due to the stress of release deadlines (usually in the case of games with movie licenses) and a small budget. So if the games are generally bad, why do consumers keep buying them? You would think after the 2nd awful Quidditch game remake people would get the hint, but Bogost once again hits the nail on the head with the statement, “…all licensed products always serve as advertisements for each additional node in the network of products.” In plain English, this means it doesn’t matter how bad the first two games were as they left the player clutching for hope with the release of third terrible remake.

One issue that I feel Bogost fails to mention is licenses created within the context of video games. Take for example, Halo. The original game was just a single excellent first person shooter that essentially put the Xbox on the console gaming market. Today, there are three games, soundtracks, and a plethora of books, merchandise (toys etc) and other miscellaneous sequels and spinoffs. Outside Halo we have World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and the list goes on and on. But who cares right? Video games just get stored away in another bundle of “official” merchandise by the licensor, making them a ton of money, the groups they license to a lot of money, and us consumers feeling satisfied with our limited edition collectors Master Chief action figure.