While Avatar the movie is a huge hit, it seems that Avatar the video game is a flop. What’s even more interesting is it seems the industry is turning away from licensed franchises. The game industry has a long and lucrative history with licenses, so why are they failing now?

“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,” CEO Yves Guillemot said in a recent call to investors. “So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn’t mean we will stop but we’re going to spend less in licenses in the future.”

In the days of Atari 2600 and ColecoVision game developers rushed to license content. Of course games in those days were sold based on the box cover. Look at E.T. the game compared to the box cover. They couldn’t be more different. But that isn’t what screwed up E.T. the game and consequently killed Atari, it was the game play itself. It’s practically unplayable.

If you make them somewhat playable you could have a major hit as many developers have learned – Spider-Man, Lord of the Rings, etc. Avatar the game might not have the best reviews but it is no E.T. So why are they all of a sudden not meeting expectations? That might be for two reasons, which can be summed up as evolution.

Nick Saint points out that expectations have risen as game developers home grown franchises turn into brands.

But the biggest problems with licensed games is that more and more game franchises have been built into recognizable and beloved brands. No matter how popular a new movie is, a video game version will never mean as much to gamers as a new Mario, Final Fantasy, or Call of Duty title.

Makes sense, the industry has learned to support their own brands. Not only that, but the games themselves have evolved and learned to embrace the medium. Just as you would never see a beautiful sculpture and think “why don’t I make that into a painting”, you wouldn’t see a game and think that would make a great movie. Oh wait, we do exactly that. But the turning away from licenses is a sign that things are changing. I know Hollywood would love to turn every popular book into a movie, but audiences are learning what screenwriters have known for decades – some stories just don’t transfer well. Probably one of the best page for page translations to film was Watchmen, and see how well that did. Mediums evolve to embrace their defining characteristics and as such can’t support all types of stories.

As for games, look at LittleBigPlanet - the world it creates is wildly entertaining. Super Mario Bros. created a similar world with mushrooms, bricks, and sounds. Those worlds doesn’t transfer well to the movie screen as we saw. Most games also can’t support films, just look at Doom or the trouble Bungie has had trying to get Halo made into a movie. They’re two different mediums.

Avatar the game can put you in a similar enough world to the movie but lacks the story, the character development. I remember playing Spiderman 2, which was a very successful game, but being annoyed I had to save people. I know that’s what Spiderman does, but he does that in the movies if I’m playing him I want to take him somewhere else.