Modern consumers crave “events”, and the games industry needs to provide them | Opinion

For almost as long as the games industry has existed, the conventional wisdom around sequels has remained the same: strike while the iron is hot. If you have a hit game, ensure you get a sequel out the door before the public loses interest. If you have more than one hit in a row, that’s a franchise, and those need a steady release cadence to ensure the brand’s momentum doesn’t falter.

No amount of eyerolling about endless sequel-itis or pining for more original games has ever made a dent in that relentless logic. Successful games got rapid sequels; really successful games spawned franchises that publishers would go to great lengths to turn out on as regular a schedule as possible. On some of the biggest franchises, publishers would even swap different development studios in and out across different iterations to ensure that when a new game launched, the next instalment was already deep in development.

My use of the past tense here is deliberate, because over the past decade or so, that approach to sequels and franchises has wavered significantly. Franchises aiming for yearly releases have largely disappeared. Outside of a few remaining sports games that have stuck to the annual release cadence, Call of Duty is essentially the last annual franchise standing. Time between sequels has grown significantly, too. It’s now common to see five or six years elapse between a successful game and its follow-up. Not so long ago, there would have been three or four instalments on the market by that stage (or, in many cases, the franchise would already have died on the sharp blade of diminishing returns).

Some of the reasons for this change are practical. Games take longer to develop than before, and the ability to create post-launch DLC means that full-price sequels need to justify themselves beyond just being new content that doesn’t significantly change the core game experience. You could also reasonably argue that some games have gone in the opposite direction – rather than backing away from the rapid release cadence, they have leaned into it, becoming live service titles that launch significant new content multiple times a year.

Even without those factors, however, it’s also apparent that audiences’ preferences around sequels and franchises have changed significantly. It’s not that the voices calling for fewer sequels and more original content have “won”. The change is, if anything, more deep-rooted – the fundamental way in which audiences evaluate media and decide where to allocate their money and attention has shifted in a way that’s inimical to regular franchise releases.

This shift in consumer behaviour goes well beyond games – in fact, it’s arguably easier to see its direct impacts in other media, chiefly movies. This year’s major summer releases are a case in point. Cinemagoing itself is clearly still resonating with audiences; in the past few months we’ve seen massive tentpole releases hurtle towards the billion dollar mark (The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day), indie horror movies earn orders of magnitude more than their budgets off the back of incredible word of mouth (Obsession and Backrooms), and strong showings for sequels to movies from years back (it was seven years since the last Toy Story instalment, and 20 years since the original The Devil Wears Prada).

On the other hand, it’s clear that there’s not exactly a well-honed formula at work here, because the summer has also seen a lot of major movies failing to get audiences out to multiplexes. Some did fine commercially – Minions & Monsters is only disappointing compared to box office projections and prior releases in the series – but others, like The Mandalorian and Grogu, Moana and Supergirl, have almost certainly lost money, and have cast doubt on entire franchises and cinematic universes.

You can certainly go through each one of those individually and come up with reasons why it did or didn’t do well, but there’s a through line on all of these, I think. The successful movies felt like events – a self-fulfilling prophecy once they really start taking off, of course, but for the big tentpole releases at least, there was a genuine sense of their release being a major event.

None of them is a sequel to an especially recent movie – the closest is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, but it’s appearing a solid five years after the last Spider-Man film, which is a pretty long break for the most bankable superhero property in existence. The Odyssey built its event status around the profile of its director and stars, and the scale of its technical ambition. Backrooms and Obsession, meanwhile, whipped up incredible word of mouth and somewhat organically became major event movies in their second and third weeks on release.

By contrast, the poorly performing films lacked all sense of being an event. Moana is a remake of an animated movie from only ten years ago, and Disney has been pumping out these live-action remakes at a rate of at least one a year for the past decade (last year there were two, one of which was the pretty terrible Snow White). The last movie to star the Minions (Despicable Me 4) was only two years ago. Supergirl is coming a year after a Superman movie. And The Mandalorian and Grogu is from a franchise deep in the throes of audience fatigue, as well as being a sequel to several seasons of Disney+ TV shows (it’s hard to be an event movie when you’re setting homework assignments for your audience).

Game consumers are motivated to engage with something that can genuinely grab attention in a cultural landscape cluttered with demands on their time and attention

That’s a lot of talk about movies, but I think the parallels to the situation with game franchises are clear. Game consumers, like cinemagoers, are motivated to engage with games and movies that feel like events – something that can genuinely grab attention in a cultural landscape that’s increasingly cluttered with clashing demands for people’s time, money, and attention.

There are many different ways to be an event – extraordinary ambition, well-timed nostalgia, star power, and striking gold with word-of-mouth are all on the menu, and there are no doubt countless other ways to turn the launch of a game or movie into an event. A prime example, of course, is “Barbenheimer” – the collision of two very different blockbuster movies in the same summer release slot, which perhaps unexpectedly elevated the fortunes of both. (Disney and Warner appear to be hoping for a similar effect from launching Dune 3 and Avengers Doomsday on the same date in December this year; lightning seems unlikely to strike the same spot twice.)

Undermining event status, though – that’s easier to see before it happens. Franchise fatigue is a major part of it, of course, and the games business is no stranger to that – the unspoken corollary to the “strike while the iron is hot” rule has always been “and then flog the franchise’s corpse until it stops twitching”.

Franchise fatigue doesn’t have to have kicked in to rob a launch of event status, though. All it takes is for something to feel over-familiar or insufficiently exciting; the slightest sense of “seen it already” poisons the well. Event status is inherently a social, community-driven phenomenon. Even if you know you’ll enjoy a game or a movie, if it doesn’t feel fresh, exciting, and big, then it’s probably not going to make a cultural dent, so you might as well just wait to enjoy it when the film is on streaming or the game is on a subscription service.

GTA6 could have come out three years after GTA5 and done fine; but it would never have received the level of attention it is receiving now

This is now what the games industry is chasing, whether it fully acknowledges the shift or not – publishers who once valued franchises with reliable release rhythms over all else are now locked into a desperate hunt for games that have the right elements for the poorly understood and highly stochastic formula that makes them into events.

The recent massive success of legacy sequels and high-quality remakes owes much to those old games and long-fallow franchises being a rich seam of nostalgia-driven events. CD Projekt’s finely honed understanding of what makes a game into an event, meanwhile, helped to lift Cyberpunk 2077 from its disastrous launch state into being one of the most celebrated games of the decade. The lengthening timelines between sequels helps them to stay fresh and avoids the trap of feeling like something players have seen already. And taking a hard left turn with a sequel, as Remedy is about to do with Control Resonant, is a pretty ingenious way of giving it the sense of freshness and excitement that an event game needs.

Then, of course, there’s the biggest event of them all. GTA6 will arguably be the entertainment event of the year – move over, Dunesday – and it’s appearing an astonishing 13 years after the last game in the franchise. Rockstar arguably grasped the importance of a launch being an event earlier than anyone else, having left eight years between Red Dead Redemption and its sequel. Leaving the GTA franchise without a new game for more than a decade after a commercial hit like GTA5 would have been unthinkable in earlier eras, but it may be precisely what has allowed the game to cut through the ceaseless cacophony that is the modern entertainment media landscape. GTA6 could have come out three years after GTA5 and done fine; but it would never have received the level of attention it is receiving now, and keeping up with that cadence in the intervening years would probably have seen the franchise seriously diminished by this point.

Turning a game launch into an event is a nebulous concept at best – there’s no hard and fast rule for how to do it, any more than there’s a straightforward rulebook for turning a game into a bankable franchise. What’s clear, though, is that this new reality does rewrite the old rules that the industry used to play by. Quick sequels look stale to consumers whose neurons are burning out on endless microdoses of novelty. Franchise fatigue kicks in almost immediately when your customers are drowning in choice paralysis. Good IP is still valuable, but it’s now a long-term investment rather than a quick buck or a steady revenue stream. Few companies would ever hope for an event on the scale of GTA6 – but there’s certainly a brighter future for those that can learn and adapt to a market where the event itself is everything.