Games Industry says Devolver Digital corporation is launching a new label for adapting comics and film:
Devolver Digital has formed a new games publishing label devoted to indie games that are based on movie, TV, comic book and other entertainment IP.
The new label is made up of the Good Shepherd team, which Devolver acquired back in 2021. Good Shepherd had already published indie games based on other brands, namely 2019’s John Wick Hex (by Bithell Games) and 2023’s Hellboy Web of the Wyrd (by Upstream Games), and this will now be the team’s focus going forward.
[…] “I love adaptation,” Kruse told GamesIndustry.biz. “So when we were trying to figure out what we specialise in… we are part of Devolver now, but we don’t want to be Devolver 2. Nobody can be. They’re so cool and original. How can we separate ourselves? So I was excited to pitch ‘let’s do adaptations.’ Because that is what is exciting for us and most of our team.”
But don’t original IPs also carry excitement? There was once a time when the prospect of adapting comics to video games was exciting, and I do vaguely recall one of the earliest based on Popeye from 1982 by Nintendo, made at the time Pac-Man was influential. But if they’re adapting mainstream comics, chances are high the project will turn out woke, and that’s why it’s hard to care. The same goes for movie and TV adaptations. On which note:
Kruse says the model where an IP owner goes to a developer and requests a pitch doesn’t always lead to the best results.
Well neither does the management at today’s Marvel/DC. But who knows, maybe video games based on creator-owned comics do have potential. They just need to make clearer whether they’ll actually look around for any. Even then, merchandise shouldn’t replace the original comics.
“There is an art to adaptation,” Kruse adds. “If you haven’t done a lot of it, there are all these little pieces that you can do that you might not have realised would be possible. Even this morning we had a huge call about licensing clips, and there are associated union things that go into that. Not everybody knows that we do all that stuff. Some of it is relationships, but some of it is about being able to block and tackle for the developers, and take as much as the stress of the process off of them as possible.”
Of course there can be art in adapting. But that depends on if you can make an entertaining product without any PC involved, and produce it in a way that’s faithful to the original comics, and even films. And I don’t trust mainstream publishers to be faithful to the source material, nor do I expect the video game producers to retain creative freedom to turn out something that could be worthy without PC interference involved.
Today’s video game industry also isn’t what it used to be either, any more than the comics, and if Marvel/DC adaptations turn out to be as awful as a recent Suicide Squad game was, or even a recent Spider-Man game, that’s one more reason why games don’t make a good substitute for the original comics.
Originally published here.
English (US) · 