Ubisoft to spend less on licensed product, prompted by Avatar: The Game sales

Good ideas are good.

Dear Video Game Publishers/Developers,

When Hollywood comes knocking at your door with bags of cash for a quick turn around on a movie game, JUST SAY NO! Problem solved.

less IN licensed product and ON licensed product seem to have a different connotation. ie, ubisoft seems interested in spending less ON IPs themselves rather than developing the game based on IPs. i would assume that's why licensed games suck in the first place: a big chunk of the development money goes to obtaining the license.

Huzzah! Death to licensed games!

(Except for Batman. You're still cool.)

Not to defend Avatar: The Game here, but I'm amazed at what constitutes a "success" nowadays. 2.5 million sales below expectations? The Beatles: Rock Band 1.7 million disappointing? I'm worried about where this seems to be leading.

2.5 million people bought this game?! good lord! did this outsell uncharted 2?

I don't think the problem is licensed games so much as it is developers doing a crappy job with them. For the movie games, I imagine a tight schedule probably screws them. But other licensed titles *could* do well if they put enough effort into them. I mean, look at Batman: AA. Hell, look at the old Konami arcade games (TMNT, X-men, Simpsons). I would guess sometimes the publishers are too fixated on dollar signs and getting the game in stores than on a quality product. But who knows.

good..maybe they will make an actual rayman game again...not this rabbids crap

Well its a bad game....hell they just did it badly....

All this says is that Ubisoft expected it to sell 5 million copies based on nothing but its name. Which pretty much tells you what their priorities are there.

Realistically, that was never going to happen... Not for $60, not in this economy and not with the reviews it got.

The first thing I thought after seeing Avatar was that it would make a good game. Poo on Ubisoft for making a mediocre game.

Ubisoft Learn for Batman. I am playing through it again on hard and having a blast. Good Games = Good Sales. Not Licenses just ask THQ and their licensed garbage.

I played this game through on both sides and while the universe and Pandora is well reproduced and at night it is specially impressive (Looks like in the movie), the combat while good at first quickly becomes repetitive due to limited options and the story is very clumsily told at times and rather weak. And speaking of combat, if you did not like Far Cry 2 with the incessantly respawning enemies, you will not enjoy this as some fights have infinite enemies that respawn instantly the moment you look away. I even had enemies spawn right on top of me at one point. This does not make the game more challenging, it simply makes it a chore as dispatching a group of enemies is very easy, and it makes no sense to have to run through a segment of the game just to progress in the story.
The game has it's few moments, like flying an Ikran (Banshee) from the floating mountains and down to the village in a dive, riding the Thanator or Turok (Leonopteryx), and herding Sturmbeasts with missiles while riding a vehicle in the jungle, but these are so few and far between that the rest seems like a filler. Also most of the other vehicles are junk and it feels like you are fighting the controls to drive them. You can get used to it, but it should have had a better design in the first place. The fact that you can't aim weapons up or down on most of them is also mind blowing. What good is a machine-gun if you can only shoot where you are facing?
And at the end on one of my playthroughs, a character I had killed during the course of the game came back. That in itself is absolutely inexcusable for a game of this supposed stature (Has someone even played this game from start to finish at Ubisoft, it's so short I can't fathom how or why this mistake was missed), but the fact that my character said "Where the hell have you been?" made me burst out laughing.
I'd recommend it to people who enjoyed the universe of the movie, because that is definitely very well done in here, but even not at this price. It is definitely not worth 60$ for anyone. If it was 20$, then yeah, consider it. But until then, rent/forget.

End review.

I wish they would expand on Avatar, because they certainly nailed the feeling of being on Pandora in this game, the jungle is very well done thanks to the Dunia Engine. I wish the game's flaws weren't present though, and that they would improve on that. It seems like they won't however.

What is the deal with Ubisoft?

Why are they suddenly good?

How can I high-five Mr. Yves?

I read that whole post with the idea that Activision was stopping licensed games but I just read the title wrong

If Ubisoft fixed the controls for Avatar, maybe this game would have been better

I bought it and have to say it's a decent game.
But honestly had Ubisoft bothered to make it a GOOD GAME.
That diodn't revolve around just doing the same shit every levl, they would have seen better sales.

Sometimes Dev's need to blame their product's quality rather than what it's based off of.

I bought the game and enjoyed it. It's pretty run-of-the-mill, but I don't think it makes it a bad game, just nothing groundbreaking. However, I did play through it with nVidia 3D Vision glasses and I can easily say that it was the most immersive gaming experience I've had. I had more fun just exploring than actually playing due to the 3D experience and how well it was done in the game. Pandora @ 1600x1200 in 3D is beautiful thing. :)

There is no problem with licensed games, other than the fact that they tend to be rater bad. A fact I chalk to shorter development times and good games tend to take time to develop.
I wonder if this change in strategy will mean that we will see Beyond Good and Evil 2 finally.

Good point, but I'm admittedly a fanboy, and as such, enjoy almost every Star Wars game that comes out, no matter how terrible it may be (I'm looking at you Phantom Menace for the PS2). I feel as though my biased opinion shouldn't be placed here.

I would like to see a developer at least experiment with the notion that a movie licensed game does not have to appear on the shelves in exact alignment with the theater release date. Perhaps concurrent with the DVD release instead? The point is, give it time to get the game right.

In the case of Avatar, they had the Christmas season, the movie release date... all these artificial deadlines that warped the development cycle. Not a big surprise that the game came out rushed and incomplete. I would love to see a developer show the stones to release a movie licensed game when it's ready to be released, and see if the (hopefully) corresponding increase in quality outweighs the boost a game supposedly gets from matching the theater realease date.

"Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,"


Oh yeah ? I got an idea. How about you guys just make a better game? Here's another thought, treat them like your precious, " high end franchise"!!!
That could help, well that and what you suggested.. this game HAD potential, thanks for killing the series for gamers like me..

why don't they delay these licensed games for when the dvd comes out? more development time and its still has the advantage of riding the home video advertisement wave

Just stop making movie games, period. Only a few were really any good..