Sega has produced a number of licensed movie games in recent years based around popular Marvel brands, including Thor, Iron Man and Captain America. However, the company will not be making a AAA title based around any further movies, something explained by Marvel vice president of games production TQ Jefferson.

“There are no current plans for additional Marvel games to be published by Sega,” said Jefferson. “We just launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Facebook; which is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the first in a much larger effort to support the Avengers franchise across not just one but multiple video game touch points. The Avengers are bigger than just one game, and we’re planning to allow consumers to enjoy The Avengers regardless of their preference in gameplay style or platform. Look for more announcements in the weeks to come.”

Explaining why AAA movie license games are dying, Jefferson said, “In my opinion, the biggest afflictions affecting movie-licensed games is the amount of development time and a strict adherence to retelling the story of the film in the form of a game. The former is easy to understand — less development time means less time to design, produce and polish the game, resulting in a poor or lesser-quality experience. The latter is a little more subtle, but I can sum it up thusly: If a development team were to follow a film’s plot line to the letter, then you would have a two-hour experience with a bunch of thugs and one boss fight. That’s simply not how we define ‘movie licensed console game,’ now or ever. In order to hit the expected amount of gameplay, you need to embellish, add additional characters, story, subplots and objectives to make a more robust and satisfying experience. That’s where a lot of movie licenses fall down – lack of content.”

When asked about his company’s new MMO and the direction the industry is taking to free-to-play, he said, “I’m not saying anything revelatory when I say everything is pointing toward online and the connected experience. I believe free-to-play is exceptional in that it lowers the barrier to entry to nothing and allows consumers to sample the product before making a purchase. In today’s economic climate, games needed to do something to meet the consumer halfway, and free-to-play is a great first step.”

Marvel Heroes, the first Marvel MMO (massively multiplayer online game) to be launched with our licensee Gazillion, will allow us to reach an entirely new and different group of fans, to tell stories in ways we’ve never done before and get players to interact with our characters and each other in new and exciting ways,” he added. “This is a very different experience from console games, where the interactions are with fewer online characters and are more linear experiences. With Marvel Heroes, we’re talking about dozens of playable characters over many hours of gameplay.”

Source: The Hollywood Reporter