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They've also announced that they'll be making a new Tomb Raider movie as well. The last Tomb Raider movie grossed about $274 million worldwide so if they manage to not drop the ball on a new one I could see it doing well enough for itself.
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Jan 31, 2023 13:44
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thebardyspoon posted:Eh, you can probably do a decent woman led globetrotting-y adventure TV show if you get some decent writers and try to avoid some of the hilarious pitfalls those kinds of things tended to fall into back in the day (and still do often). The point was that doesn't matter if the show is good or not, it's too late to make people excited about Tomb Raider anymore.
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Jan 31, 2023 13:47
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tomb raider's probably more well known as a mobile game at this point 
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Jan 31, 2023 13:51
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Clarste posted:The point was that doesn't matter if the show is good or not, it's too late to make people excited about Tomb Raider anymore. Well I guess I disagree with that point then? I think you can probably get people excited about anything with the right people and a trailer that looks like it'll be a fun time. Now whether Amazon will be able to do that, I doubt. I just don't think the concept of globetrotting adventure lady is dead in the water.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:10
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Excited to go see grandma Croft in cinema
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Jan 31, 2023 14:17
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Clarste posted:The point was that doesn't matter if the show is good or not, it's too late to make people excited about Tomb Raider anymore. Clearly they must think otherwise considering they could have just bought the rights to Relic Hunter if they just wanted a TV series about a globetrotting female My question is more "Are they just wanting to piggyback off of National Treasure's series with another well-known series" or does someone actually want to make a TV series/film about British treasure hunter Lara Croft? Because I could honestly see it going either way.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:18
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thebardyspoon posted:Well I guess I disagree with that point then? I think you can probably get people excited about anything with the right people and a trailer that looks like it'll be a fun time. Now whether Amazon will be able to do that, I doubt. I just don't think the concept of globetrotting adventure lady is dead in the water. I mean, I'm not a psychic but the impression I get is that the Tomb Raider name at this point could theoretically just be unnecessary baggage weighing down the series. Like, if you had a completely unrelated game with the exact same premise, that could do perfectly well or even better than something that makes a lot of people think "been there, done that."
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Jan 31, 2023 14:24
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What baggage would the Tomb Raider licence have? The series/movie is probably going to be its own thing anyway, so it's not like there already being ~10 different Tomb Raider continuities(none of which lasted longer than the original one) is going to matter.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:33
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Clarste posted:I mean, I'm not a psychic but the impression I get is that the Tomb Raider name at this point could theoretically just be unnecessary baggage weighing down the series. Like, if you had a completely unrelated game with the exact same premise, that could do perfectly well or even better than something that makes a lot of people think "been there, done that." Uhh that's not how brands work. I don't think tomb raider/Lara Croft have a negative brand image. There's a significant value in the name _because people know what it is_. You're emphasizing novelty as important, when novelty is something that is dangerous to product success.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:38
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With the Uncharted series dead there's no real competition in the raiding of tombs setting and there's always going to be a market for Indiana Jones style adventures and Lara Croft is an instantly recognisable character to market a product round. You're easily going to make more money of the Tomb Raider IP than the same exact game with an unknown name.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:43
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leper khan posted:Uhh that's not how brands work. I don't think tomb raider/Lara Croft have a negative brand image. There's a significant value in the name _because people know what it is_. Brands work if people associate them with good things. If people associate them with sequels to reboots that people forgot about, that's a bad thing. That said, I don't actually know how valuable the brand is; how would I? I'm just saying they are not necessarily a good thing 100% of the time. Edit: New IPs regularly come out and become super popular, but corporations are risk averse and don't like to gamble.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:43
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Even if your games aren't actually bad, people also get bored of infinite sequels that come out too often, ie: what happened to Megaman way back in the day. There's only so much juice you can squeeze out of the same IP before you need to reinvigorate it somehow.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:46
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Clarste posted:Brands work if people associate them with good things. If people associate them with sequels to reboots that people forgot about, that's a bad thing. So you think spider man or power rangers brands provide negative value?? I think it's easy to put the value of the tomb raider brand at around several hundred million, because that's a very recent clearing price for it.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:48
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Motto posted:Yeah, CD was apparently a really costly studio which played into their games not being as profitable as they could've been, so cutting losses like the Avengers game probably factored into the deal value for them. Though Squeenix is also pretty notorious for treating its Western IPs in particular very badly, sending them out to die with absolutely absurd sales expectations while cutting their funding and pushing microtransactions, then dropping support. No one was particularly surprised when they sold them off for a song, though loling that it was to go into NFTs right after they crashed.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:53
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leper khan posted:I think it's easy to put the value of the tomb raider brand at around several hundred million, because that's a very recent clearing price for it.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:58
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Tomb Raider still has a lot of recognition even by people who don't play games. The main issue is that the only characters people know about are Lara and her butler. You can do what you like with the series as long as it involves her jumping around ancient ruins while firing two pistols. Any TV show or film that isn't completely awful should be decently successful.
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Jan 31, 2023 17:12
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CottonWolf posted:Haha. Embracer just sold the Tomb Raider IP to Amazon for 600 million after buying it as part of a bundle with several studios and other IP from SE for only 300 million. fyi, the source for this appears to be a fansite I'm not familiar with called Fellowship of Fans, so I'd take this with a huge grain of salt until a more credible outlet reports it. That said, Amazon is publishing the next game, and paid for the film and TV rights, so they're heavily invested in the IP regardless of whether they acquired it outright. EDIT: I just looked at the original Fellowship of Fans article, and in addition to being amateurishly written, it doesn't even say that Embracer sold the IP. I'm pretty sure that part is false. Barry Convex fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 17:42
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That loving Sned posted:Tomb Raider still has a lot of recognition even by people who don't play games. The main issue is that the only characters people know about are Lara and her butler.
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Jan 31, 2023 18:44
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The worst thing about Cradle of Life was it didn't have Chris Barrie shooting people with a shotgun wearing a dressing gown over a bulletproof vest.
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Jan 31, 2023 18:53
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Hel posted:TBF Those two are the only characters that persist across the reboots/reimagining, so it's not that surprising that those are the only ones people know about. Crystal Dynamics threw out pretty much everything when they took over with Legends, and then did it again when they did TR2013. So it's not that non-fans only care/know about those two, the developers/publishers are in the same seat. They did build out a larger supporting cast around her for the 2013 game (similar to the group of people supporting Lara in Legend) but either killed off or discarded most of them between that game and Rise, with only Jonah getting repeat appearances in all three games, I think. It's that old problem of everyone except the title character being fully disposable.
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Jan 31, 2023 20:44
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It was immensely poo poo that after the 2013 game Sam got unhappened so we could be in no doubt that Jonah was the one we were supposed to care about. Then he spent the next 2 games doing basically nothing except being around Lara sometimes.
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Jan 31, 2023 20:47
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There was the one guy who had to go back for a screwdriver and blew up
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Jan 31, 2023 20:51
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The biggest suspension of disbelief was when we meet her Obi-wan mentor, and his leg is hacked to the bone, yet he can still walk around merrily later.
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Jan 31, 2023 20:59
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ErrEff posted:They did build out a larger supporting cast around her for the 2013 game (similar to the group of people supporting Lara in Legend) but either killed off or discarded most of them between that game and Rise, with only Jonah getting repeat appearances in all three games, I think. It's that old problem of everyone except the title character being fully disposable. Yeah, that's my point , it's not that a supporting cast doesn't exist( both the original Core games and the Legends series had them as well to some extent) it's just they keep getting rid of the cast, even within a series. So it's not that people don't care, it's that the creators don't. Even when they brough Jonah back, he was redesigned in every game so it's hard to recognize him. Basically I'm calling this a self inflicted wound, not evidence of lack of recognizability of the IP. Honestly that's kind of a signifier of how valuable a brand itself could be, since 2013 and it's sequels threw out pretty much everything iconic(enjoying tombs, twin guns, shorts & tanktop etc.) about the series and still did decently just by keeping the names, so why wouldn't a move or series succeed doing that as well.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:33
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And the Tomb Raider movies did okay iirc. Sexy lady Indiana Jones is a pretty easy concept to work with, so of course companies find a way to gently caress it up or at least gently caress around with it clearly having no real overarching plan or vision.
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Feb 1, 2023 06:47
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Ghost Leviathan posted:And the Tomb Raider movies did okay iirc. Sexy lady Indiana Jones is a pretty easy concept to work with, so of course companies find a way to gently caress it up or at least gently caress around with it clearly having no real overarching plan or vision. 2001 and 2018 both seem to make a bit of money, the 2003 probably about broke even after advertising and what not. https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Lara-Croft#tab=summary Oddly 2001 and 2018 both made exactly $273 million. Was confusing me at first when saw it through google search info and thought it was just some sort of gently caress up, but no they did seem to actually make within $120,000 from each other. 
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Feb 1, 2023 08:43
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dr_rat posted:2001 and 2018 both seem to make a bit of money, the 2003 probably about broke even after advertising and what not. If they paid 600 million for the IP, then making two movies like that would still be a net loss for them.
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Feb 1, 2023 08:46
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Clarste posted:If they paid 600 million for the IP, then making two movies like that would still be a net loss for them. If they're also making games where they expect to make most of the money it would just be a bit more on top of that though. Like 600 Million still seems a way to high price for the franchise, but between games, movies, and what ever they could do with the franchise it a price that it might be possible to make a profit from
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Feb 1, 2023 09:00
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If you wanted to buy tomb raider why not do it 6 months ago when it was less than half the price
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Feb 1, 2023 09:19
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Going back to the "Epic is not competiton for Steam" thing, one of their big free to play exclusives is shutting down after 6 months. On another note, is there a single porting studio that's faceplanted more often trying to do original games than Iron Galaxy? https://twitter.com/Rumbleverse/status/1620528426670239746
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Feb 1, 2023 10:39
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thebardyspoon posted:Eh, you can probably do a decent woman led globetrotting-y adventure TV show if you get some decent writers and try to avoid some of the hilarious pitfalls those kinds of things tended to fall into back in the day (and still do often). Randalor posted:Clearly they must think otherwise considering they could have just bought the rights to Relic Hunter if they just wanted a TV series about a globetrotting female
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Feb 1, 2023 10:58
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njsykora posted:Going back to the "Epic is not competiton for Steam" thing, one of their big free to play exclusives is shutting down after 6 months. On another note, is there a single porting studio that's faceplanted more often trying to do original games than Iron Galaxy? Literally giving back all the money you made oof
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Feb 1, 2023 11:48
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I was partly involved in the Epic release for MTG:Arena, and it was clear then (Jan 2020) that Epic was never going to be a steam competitor. We had a signed deal with them to use their payment network for our F2P transactions and we had engineers assigned to it. They got it partway implemented and then couldn't figure out how to finish it. Like the Google Play store, epic indicates purchase status with "bought"/"not bought". Google Play has a little endpoint to reset "bought" to "not bought" for rebuyable items. It's a stupid way of doing things, but it works. But the documentation didn't have anything about how to do that on Epic. The engineer assigned to the project kept asking them pointed questions that they'd disappear for a day and then come back with some half answer. Finally, she went into the epic store and started looking at the F2P games. Not a single game on the epic store had any repurchaseable items. It was all battle passes which were different skus every month/quarter/whatever, or one-time-buyable stuff like skins. She finally pointedly asked whether epic had gotten us to sign a contract with them that they couldn't fulfill. We didn't hear back from them for two days. We didn't really hear back from them at all- Epic made a public announcement that they were generously allowing all free to play games on the epic store to use their own payment processor for IAP and that they wouldn't have to pay epic a dime.
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Feb 1, 2023 18:11
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30.5 Days posted:I was partly involved in the Epic release for MTG:Arena, and it was clear then (Jan 2020) that Epic was never going to be a steam competitor. We had a signed deal with them to use their payment network for our F2P transactions and we had engineers assigned to it. They got it partway implemented and then couldn't figure out how to finish it. Like the Google Play store, epic indicates purchase status with "bought"/"not bought". Google Play has a little endpoint to reset "bought" to "not bought" for rebuyable items. It's a stupid way of doing things, but it works. But the documentation didn't have anything about how to do that on Epic. The engineer assigned to the project kept asking them pointed questions that they'd disappear for a day and then come back with some half answer. lol I'm now imagining what kind of backend they have that made abandoning payment processor control preferable to fixing their database/api so that items can change ownership status or even *gasp* have varying quantity
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Feb 1, 2023 18:16
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Insurrectionist posted:lol I have a feeling it was more that last question ended up going to Legal, who very quickly realized that A)Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro and B) Hasbro have much deeper pockets to pay THEIR team of lawyers than Epic has.
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Feb 1, 2023 18:23
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Randalor posted:I have a feeling it was more that last question ended up going to Legal, who very quickly realized that A)Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro and B) Hasbro have much deeper pockets to pay THEIR team of lawyers than Epic has. doesn't sound like it was a legal issue if there was already an agreement in place though I guess it would have turned into one since they couldn't fix their poo poo in time but that's exactly the lol thing actually the most funny thing is apparently nobody at Epic had the idea before this happened that maybe such a tech limitation was going to be an issue if they wanted to use their own payment providers
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Feb 1, 2023 18:45
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Epic won in the end. The updated agreement to not have to pay epic a % also absolved them of the revenue minimum. No idea why we signed it but they made out better than we did on that one.
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Feb 1, 2023 20:13
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Insurrectionist posted:doesn't sound like it was a legal issue if there was already an agreement in place though Legal issues done end at agreements being made.
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Feb 1, 2023 20:29
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leper khan posted:Legal issues done end at agreements being made. Doesn't sound like there would be any legal issues at all if Epic were able to deliver an extremely simple and also extremely important feature though, is my point all along Besides that, it's not like they solely backed down on it because they were afraid of litigation. Magic's entire monetization is based on repeatable purchases, and MTGA had a separate PC launcher since 2018 already so its monetization model was set in stone. So even if Epic was somehow legally 100% in the right, they had no other practical option besides delaying launch. MTGA could never launch without a payment network providing that feature.
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Feb 1, 2023 21:06
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Insurrectionist posted:doesn't sound like it was a legal issue if there was already an agreement in place though The way I read it, the potential legal issue was that there was no way to actually implement a repeatable monetization feature (ie: buying packs of a given set) in the Epic framework, despite being told that they had to use that specific framework and that it would meet their needs. I imagine the full extent of the initial agreement discussion was: Legal: "WotC needs players to be able to buy multiple copies of the same item, can our system do that?" Programmers: "Yeah, it should be able to" Legal: "Sounds good, we'll let them know they have to use our system." I mean, lawyers are not programmers, and if they were worth their salt, would confirm with someone who (should) knows before wording a contract so they don't put the company at risk with a bad contract.
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Feb 1, 2023 21:19
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