[TheGameBusiness / Ampere / IDG] The impact of video game and movie tie-ins (Minecraft, TLOU, Mario, Fallout, Sonic, Halo, Borderlands, GT..)

[Vault-Tec]

What does the Minecraft movie and Last of Us TV show do to game sales?

Minecraft game sales jump 30%, plus we meet a new 'modern' games studio and check in with a new Indian games business show

www.thegamebusiness.com

Minecraft user numbers jump over 30% on movie launch

The Minecraft movie is breaking Box Office records, and it’s having a positive impact on the video game, too.

On Saturday, the day after the movie appeared in theatres, Minecraft daily active players rose 9% week-on-week, and on Sunday players were up 17% week-on-week. This is according to data from Ampere Analysis.

That may not sound like a huge leap, but that’s because Mojang ran a bunch of activity, including releasing some free Minecraft movie DLC, the week prior. The Saturday before the movie, daily active players were up 25% week-on-week, and Sunday numbers were up 14% week-on-week. That’s two consecutive weeks of double-digit growth for a game that already boasts around170 million monthly active users.

In terms of sales, Nielsen/GfK reports that sales of the Nintendo Switch version of Minecraft rose 25% the week before the movie came out, and then again by 8% when the movie released.

What happened with… Sonic The Hedgehog 3?

• The third Sonic movie released before Christmas last year and grossed nearly $492 million worldwide
• Sega released a game in October designed to tie-in with it called Sonic X Shadow Generations (Shadow featured in the film and game)
• During the movie’s release month, Sonic X Shadows Generations saw a 46% increase in monthly active users (Ampere data)
• Sales of the game jumped 47% across Europe (GSD figures)
• But, it wasn’t the biggest Sonic game of the month. Sonic Frontiers was included in PlayStation Plus and was played by over 1m players. Big month for Sonic.

What happened with… the Super Mario Bros movie?

• The Mario movie released April 2023 to huge success, delivering $1.36 billion globally and is in the Top Five most successful animated movies of all time
• Nintendo did a number of console hardware bundles and marketing activity around its games starting in March.
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sales rose 25% from February to March and rose again by 2% in April (European sales data, GSD).
• Super Mario Odyssey sales rose 94% between February and March (going from No.72 to No.39), and then it rose again by 20% in April (peaking at No.22).
• New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe rose 25% from March to April (rising from No.56 to No.29)

What happened with… Fallout?

• The Fallout TV show was a mega hit for Amazon, with 100 million viewers. Second biggest TV show in the streamer’s history (behind Lords of the Rings: The Rings of Power)
• All TV episodes were released at once
• Bethesda released a small update to Fallout 4 and heavily discounted the game across all platforms. It also featured in various subscription services.
• European sales exceeded half a million in a April. IDG Intelligence says peak sales were 345% up compared with pre-show sales. The sales boost lasted a month
• The huge activity around Fallout 4 resulted in 10.5 million monthly active users in April. A rise of nearly nine million over March (Ampere data)
• In May, it still had 9.55 million monthly users. The MAU figures didn’t return to March levels until September

What happened with… The Last of Us TV Show?

• Series 1 Aired in January 2023 to March 2023 to widespread acclaim. HBO’s most watched debut series ever, with episodes averaging 32 million viewers
• It resulted in two spikes in sales for the game. At the launch of the TV series, sales jumped 38% compared with pre-show levels (IDG Intelligence) and then it jumped 75% vs pre-show sales at the end of its run. Possibly the result of people binge watching, or turning to the game after finishing the show
• In terms of monthly active users, The Last of Us Remastered hit 1.8 million MAUs in January (Ampere data), a rise of over 1,000% month-on-month. Last of Us Part 2 rose 440% in MAUs with 1.4m monthly users, and The Last of Us Part 1 rose 347% to nearly 600,000 players
• That success continued into February, Last of Us Remastered players jumped 417% again to over 2.2m monthly players, while Part 2 jumped to just shy of 1.6m players, up 178%. However, The Last of Us Part 1 dropped by 62%. The show finished in March, and things began slowing down then, but its monthly user count didn’t drop back to pre-show numbers until the summer.
• Season 2 arrives next week

More in the link about:
- Halo
- Gran Turismo
- Borderlands
- Five Nights at Freddy's

 

[KarlRemarx]

This is IMO Capcom's biggest failing right now. Their entertainment licensing has an utterly awful track record with Netflix' Devil May Cry having the best chance of being an exception. As far as I know they've had the same person overseeing the licensing business forever despite their track record consisting of turning the Resident Evil license into straight-to-DVD junk. Likewise, Sega were about to release a complete flop of a Sonic movie until external licensing partners saved the first Sonic movie from disaster at the last minute and turned it around into a successful series, and their other licensed work since then (Yakuza) has failed.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

Fallout 4(and other Fallout titles) really got a huge boost from the huge TV success compared to most.
Shame that we're not likely to see a new title in the franchise before we're all in retirement homes.

This is IMO Capcom's biggest failing right now. Their entertainment licensing has an utterly awful track record with Netflix' Devil May Cry having the best chance of being an exception.

Capcom has never really care about storytelling/writing in their games, so they couldn't possibly spot quality in that aspect even if it hit them in the face.

Looking at their main IPs:
Resident Evil has always been shlock nonsense.
Street Fighter is a fighting game and I'm fairly sure Street Fighter 6's lore/writing has mostly been done by the Game Director himself and not an actual dedicated writer or writing team(no writer is credited in the credits)
Monster Hunter... They've been trying with the HD ones, but pretty much agree the emphasis just detracts from the overall experience.
Devil May Cry? Lmao.


At the same time....

As far as I know they've had the same person overseeing the licensing business forever despite their track record consisting of turning the Resident Evil license into straight-to-DVD junk.

Ironically the Paul W.S. Anderson collab was actually fairly lucrative in spite of its mediocre quality. Generated 1.2B at the BO with all of them. Always on time and kept budget tight meant the venture was quite profitable, there's a reason they made so many. It is their biggest success and looking and what's on the horizon, I'm pretty sure it'll stay that way for quite some time.

 

[KarlRemarx]

Capcom has never really care about storytelling/writing in their games, so they couldn't possibly spot quality in that aspect even if it hit them in the face.

Looking at their main IPs:
Resident Evil has always been shlock nonsense.
Street Fighter is a fighting game and I'm fairly sure Street Fighter 6's lore/writing has mostly been done by the Game Director himself and not an actual dedicated writer or writing team(no writer is credited in the credits)
Monster Hunter... They've been trying with the HD ones, but pretty much agree the emphasis just detracts from the overall experience.
Devil May Cry? Lmao.

This is also true of Sonic, Mario and Minecraft though. Series which have either had awful storytelling (Sonic especially) or "story" as a barebones framework for the gameplay without dedicated writing staff or any commitment to narrative. A competent entertainment licensing business can make up for this (you're paying talented people to make these things work somehow), Capcom's problem is the insistence on doing it poorly and cheaply and with zero professional consequences for failure, because their attitude appears to be that the licensing doesn't really matter (they are probably content with the revenues from selling the licenses). Which is fine, I don't think every publisher has to do the TV/movie thing, but if they insist on having a licensing business it would be nice if they could do it right, and it does appear in the OP's examples to give benefits to their main line of business if done competently.

Ironically the Paul W.S. Anderson collab was actually fairly lucrative in spite of its mediocre quality. Generated 1.2B at the BO with all of them. Always on time and kept budget tight meant the venture was quite profitable, there's a reason they made so many. It is their biggest success and looking and what's on the horizon, I'm pretty sure it'll stay that way for quite some time.

These are "successful" in that they make some degree of box office return but that "success" is on the basis of the license being used so that the director can cast his own wife as the lead (even across multiple Capcom licenses!), poor quality to the point where audiences are now trained to be wary of Capcom licensed movies/shows generally, and has achieved the sum total of nothing in regards to increasing brand engagement in any measurable terms when compared to the OP's examples. It's in Capcom's interest to use the licensing to generate additional game sales because that's where they achieve the highest margins (especially catalog sales of titles that already paid for themselves years ago), not making relatively meagre amounts from whatever their share of revenue from mediocre RE movies is.

 

[Evilnemesis8]

These are "successful" in that they make some degree of box office return but that "success" is on the basis of the license being used so that the director can cast his own wife as the lead (even across multiple Capcom licenses!), poor quality to the point where audiences are now trained to be wary of Capcom licensed movies/shows generally, and has achieved the sum total of nothing in regards to increasing brand engagement in any measurable terms when compared to the OP's examples.

I feel like this may be a bit hyperbolic? I'll give you the Monster Hunter movie though, that was something.

We've got way worse with Capcom, IMO.
I'd take the Husband and Wife duo over most of the Capcom detritus. The bar is in hell, I know.

The many Street Fighter projects, beginning in the 90s.
The culmination being the 2009 Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, a movie so bad it's likely there isn't a single defender that exists on the whole world. And no, a couple dudes that found Kristin Kreuk attractive don't count.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is just horrible and worse of all, actually includes a lot of the long time iconic characters. That's some real brand damage. Xzibit is calling you, do you want to put a reboot in your reboot?

Also very recently was the 2022 Resident Evil Netflix TV Show that lasted one season.
The only good thing in about that thing was whenever Lance Reddick(R.I.P.)was on screen.

 

[fiendcode]

This is IMO Capcom's biggest failing right now. Their entertainment licensing has an utterly awful track record with Netflix' Devil May Cry having the best chance of being an exception. As far as I know they've had the same person overseeing the licensing business forever despite their track record consisting of turning the Resident Evil license into straight-to-DVD junk. Likewise, Sega were about to release a complete flop of a Sonic movie until external licensing partners saved the first Sonic movie from disaster at the last minute and turned it around into a successful series, and their other licensed work since then (Yakuza) has failed.

Would've been a good time to finally put out DMC4SE on Switch (and pave the way for DMC5SE on Switch 2).