cross-media crossed-out

Spider-Man, Star Wars, Suicide Squad. They didn't perform as expected, sales or critic scores or both were underwhelming. Why? Because they are over-cooked.

I am a Spider-Man fan, but I started with the comics. My favorite Spider-Man is a clone whose largest threats are imposter syndrome and existentialism. The do-good, positive mental health, Peter Parker archetype that Miles plays so well is ok, but so thin that the comics had to keep changing it. Miles is just the Ubisoft version of Nintendo's Peter Parker. Wardrobe doesn't extend the character's depth.

That is largely the problem with cross-media content. There isn't enough source material to spread across all of this media. Geralt in the books is actually a pretty terrible Witcher that makes more mistakes while fighting monsters than he does when making partner choices. Book Geralt largely gets by with talking and empathizing. It doesn't translate well in the games, and even worse in the show. 

Video games struggle to explore character complexity within the confines of waypoint, beat boss, level-up. Shows and movies can explore a single character, but only as much as the average fan will allow. Comic books struggle to be serious at times, give in to the campiest of tropes, and generally manifest a zealous fan base that quickly falls out-of-touch with reasonable writing approaches.

All of these things combine to create a divided demographic that is constantly disappointed with something. Like game development, it is unsustainable. Instead of making IP that will work across all of these mediums, studios should just make video games that work as video games. Pac-Man didn't need to be a book. Flappy Bird didn't need to be a movie. Vampire Survivors doesn't need a comic book.

It is so incredibly easy to enjoy playing 10 hours of a great video game without a ton of lore or story. In fact, by rules of successful game design, it is better if there isn't a lot of lore or story that stands between the player and gameplay. 

It is pretty obvious that most developers in the video game industry didn't take an actual game design course or read a game design book, at least one with any useful research in it. If they had, they wouldn't start by making a movie into a video game. They would make a video game, then stuff some babble about the 501st into it.