Where Do These Idiots Think IP Comes From?
Luke Plunkett
As video game executives grow ever more cowardly, and ever more indebted to the whims of shareholders to keep their unsustainable businesses in the black, they are retreating further and further into the comfort of what they would call "established IP", the IP standing for "Intellectual Property". Or what you or I would call the Undying Games.
You know the ones. The major series, the big names, the reliable tentpoles. The sequels and spinoffs that come out year-after-year (or year-after-second-year these days), with credits in the thousands and budgets in the hundreds of millions.
Let's list some: Grand Theft Auto. Call of Duty. Assassin's Creed. Halo. The Last Of Us. Far Cry. The Legend Of Zelda. FIFA EA Sports FC. Final Fantasy. Pokémon. Resident Evil. Battlefield. You get the idea.
These series are all part of the furniture, and for younger readers may seem like they have always been here, but they haven't. Believe it or not, there was a time when video games were good and healthy without them, when many of these games did not yet exist. They all, at some point, were new games, untested, unproven, a risk for their publishers, a shot at something fresh.
Logic would dictate, then, that in order to keep creating blockbuster new IP, publishers would need to keep investing in smaller studios and weird new ideas, right? Hahaha. Haha. Hah. No. Instead, as we see week after week, publishers and their executives have pulled up the ladder, concerned only with short-term gains and the reliability of milking tired old cows for every cent they can.
Even they must know, deep down, that they can't keep this up forever. With just a few exceptions, all the series I listed above have long been in some form of decline. They're out of ideas, weighed down by decades of expectations and history. People are bored of them, because they're old games! We've done all that shit already, it's time for something new!
At one point, though, all those series were new. Whether it was Zelda in the 80s, Resident Evil in the 90s, Battlefield in the 2000s or The Last Of Us in 2013, every "major IP" we recognise today was at one point just a new video game that someone took a risk on. And this is where the problem lies today: the industry simply isn't investing in the next generation of games that will join them, or even take their place.
It feels like every time you look at the internet a video game studio is being closed down, its staff laid off in the dozens, hundreds and sometimes even thousands. Just this week Xbox shut down a number of storied and successful developers, all so Bethesda could get back to "prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda's portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades".
Quiz time: what do you think the newest piece of AAA video games IP is? I'll define this as something that a major publisher puts some money behind and routinely hypes, that gets sequels and spin-offs, that still pays for a TV ad. You know, the kind of stuff that gets Geoff Keighley really excited. I would say the last piece of wholly original content--so not a remake, reboot or license--is probably Horizon? And the first Horizon game came out in 2017. That was seven years ago.
(I don't think 2019's Death Stranding qualifies just yet, but with a sequel due soon it's probably very close! It's also a very isolated case seeing as it's a Hideo Kojima joint, which eliminated a lot of the risk!)
To be clear I'm not saying we need these AAA blockbusters. It'd be extremely cool if nobody ever made a video game sequel ever again! But if major publishers are going to rely on them, and historically that's been the case from Nintendo on down, they need to do better at not only cultivating some fresh ideas, but looking after the people ultimately responsible for those ideas.
Every layoff is a personal tragedy. It's easy for us all--whether we're continually writing the stories or continually reading them--to get lost in a sea of statistics, 600 people here, 2000 there, but every single one of those numbers is a person. Someone with bills to pay, maybe a family to support, maybe they had to move and uproot their lives for the job, maybe their health care is tied up in employment that no longer exists.
And who knows how many of those people--many of whom will be lost to video games forever, as the industry keeps shrinking--could have made the next big thing! As Cara Ellison said in the wake of the Microsoft layoffs: "May as well say it out loud: GTA 1 was made in an attic in Dundee, Scotland. If you're not funding one of those smaller games now, you won't get a GTA V later."
It might help every asshole in a suit, whose only care in the world is answering to shareholders, to remember this. Because if something doesn't change, they're going to start running out of IPs to milk, right after they run out of people to lay off.
