How Video Game Publishers Are Evolving into Multimedia Franchises
For thirty years games were adapted by people who did not understand them, for a licence fee the publisher was glad to take. The change is not that the films got better. It is who commissioned them.
For most of three decades, film adaptations of games were reliably poor, and the industry explanation was that games do not translate. That explanation was always weak — the source material is frequently more coherent than the comic books that produced a decade of successful cinema. The real reason was contractual, and once the contracts changed, so did the results.
What a licensing deal actually was
The traditional arrangement was simple. A studio paid a publisher for the right to use a game's name and characters. The publisher received a fee, surrendered creative control, and took no risk on the outcome. The studio then made a film for an audience it understood — general cinemagoers — using a property it did not.
The incentives produced exactly what you would expect. The publisher had no reason to refuse a fee for a property it was not otherwise exploiting. The studio had no reason to preserve details that mattered to players and every reason to broaden the story until it resembled other films. Nobody in the chain was accountable for whether the result honoured the source, because nobody's revenue depended on it.
The films failed, players resented them, and the publisher banked the fee. It was a functioning transaction that reliably produced bad work.
What changed
Two things. Publishers grew large enough that a licensing fee stopped being material, and streaming services grew hungry enough for recognisable properties to accept terms they would once have refused.
The result was a different structure: the publisher retains creative approval, participates in production decisions, and treats the adaptation as an investment in the franchise rather than a sale of it. The financial logic follows — if the adaptation exists to sustain the value of a game catalogue, then fidelity is not sentimentality, it is protecting the asset.
| Licensing model | Franchise model | |
|---|---|---|
| Publisher receives | A fee | Participation and control |
| Creative approval | Studio | Publisher, contractually |
| Success measured by | Box office | Box office plus catalogue effect |
| Audience assumed | General cinemagoers | Players first, then everyone else |
| Publisher's downside | None | Brand damage, which focuses attention |
Why the economics work
A game franchise arriving at a streaming commissioner is an unusually attractive proposition. It brings a built-in audience of people who have already spent thirty hours in the world. It brings a setting, a visual language and a cast of characters that have been tested on players across multiple releases. And it brings decades of narrative material that has already survived contact with an audience.
Compared with an original commission, the marketing cost of establishing the world is largely pre-paid. That is worth a great deal in a market where the expensive part of launching a series is persuading people it exists.
The effect runs in both directions. A successful adaptation reliably drives catalogue sales of games years past their release, which is revenue at almost pure margin on an asset already written off. That feedback loop is why publishers now measure adaptation success partly in game sales rather than only in viewing figures.
The direction of travel reversed
For most of the twentieth century, adaptation flowed from books and comics into film, and games were the last link in the chain — a licensed product made after the film to capture the release window. Those games were almost uniformly poor, for the same structural reason the films were.
That has inverted. Games are now origin intellectual property: worlds are conceived, financed and audience-tested inside games first, then adapted outward into television, film and publishing. It is a significant shift in where entertainment IP is created, and it has happened faster than the trade press has adjusted to.
What this means for European media
- European studios and publishers hold underused IP. The continent has substantial development strength, and several long-running franchises have never been adapted under modern terms.
- The negotiation has moved. A publisher approached today should be structuring participation and approval, not comparing licence fees. The fee is the least valuable part of the deal.
- Broadcasters need games literacy. Commissioning teams that treat a game as a plot summary will reproduce the failures of the licensing era with better budgets.
- The catalogue effect is the real return. Any European publisher entering this should model game sales uplift alongside production economics, because that is where the margin sits.
The lesson is not that games make good films. It is that properties adapted by people who are accountable for the source material tend to survive contact with the audience that already loves it — which was true of comics before it was true of games, and was never really about the medium at all.
Note on data. Adaptation deal terms, participation structures and the resulting catalogue sales effects are rarely disclosed in detail. Publisher statements about game sales following an adaptation are self-reported and not independently verified. The structural distinctions described here are drawn from publicly reported deal descriptions rather than from contract terms.
Sources
The claims in this article rest on the documents below. Each is linked to what it establishes, so you can check any statement against its origin rather than taking ours for it.
- Newzoo, global games market 2025 — revenue of $188.8bn and a 3.6 billion player base — the asset any franchise adaptation is built on
- eMarketer, FAQ on esports and gaming creators — how publishers turn a title into an audience that can be sold elsewhere
Frequently asked questions
Why were video game films historically so bad?
Because of how the deals were structured, not because games resist adaptation. A studio paid a licence fee, took full creative control and made a film for general cinemagoers using a property it did not understand. Nobody's revenue depended on fidelity, so nobody protected it.
What changed to make game adaptations work?
Publishers became large enough that licence fees stopped mattering, and streaming services became hungry enough for known properties to concede terms. The result is that publishers keep creative approval and treat the adaptation as investment in a franchise rather than a sale of it.
How do publishers benefit beyond the production fee?
Through the catalogue effect. A successful adaptation drives sales of games years after release, at close to pure margin on assets already written off. That is frequently worth more to a publisher than any participation in the production itself.
Are games now the source material rather than the spin-off?
Increasingly yes. Worlds are conceived, financed and tested on audiences inside games, then adapted outward into television and film. That reverses the twentieth-century direction, where games were the licensed product made last to catch a film's release window.
Do European game publishers have adaptable IP?
Substantially. Europe has significant development strength and several long-running franchises never adapted under modern terms. The opportunity depends less on the property than on whether the publisher negotiates participation and creative approval rather than accepting a fee.