Michael's Other Corner: That Which is in a Name

by Michael Harnest

"That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
-Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

I by no means wish to challenge the Bard to his word; I am certain his research validates his conclusion quite well. At the same time, however, if we all started calling roses by different names, a significant degree of marketability in the flower industry would be lost. There would be no name to instantly inform a customer of what was to be expected of their purchase. Putting the floral theme behind us, Shakespeare was never in the marketing department of a video game development company, either.

The financial benefits of a brand name, in any industry, are usually apparent. The sheer number of McDonalds franchises in the world are indicative of its success and how this success only breeds more success. In terms of video gaming, the Tomb Raider franchise has spun a multitude of sequels, inspired a myriad of games with its gameplay mechanics and graphics engine, opened a market for related apparel, and funded the release of a major motion picture starring one of the biggest actresses in the world right now. Looking at the role-playing genre, there are many name brands, the most prominent by far and away the Final Fantasy series, which has spawned a feature film of its own, starring the voices of an array of Hollywood heavyweights. But with an accumulation of corporate riches and market dominance, often comes a vocal group hooked on bitterness and contempt. It is not jealousy driving the reactions, per se, but merely a vindictive response to a universal acceptance that they recognize will eventually lead to overexposure and over-familiarity. Yet, there has to be a degree of open-mindedness about the situation. The rejection of all that is popular can certainly make one feel unique and aid them in finding their own personal identity in the world by doing something to separate themselves from the hypothetical mass market--it is why teenagers are so rebellious--but the reality is that they are just assuming the role of a stereotype other than the media-guided ignorant, ironically conforming to the conventions of the just as stereotypical non-conformist. I don't wish to attack either party, there are positive and negative baggages for both the herd member and the rejectionist, so far be it from me to ultimately decide anybody's approach to life. But I do think there are many objective truths and resultant benefits in regard to video game franchises that should be recognized by everyone.

A brand name means risk reduction. For any development team, there is a need for a financier, someone to front the money needed to update the team's equipment and pay them while they use it to make a game that will hopefully sell enough copies to refinance the financier and help turn a profit. By attaching something of familiarity to the end product, it helps to ease the customer into making a purchase by letting them know to a degree what is in the box. This creates a promise of sales and reduces the risk factor for the investor, and allows them to more confidently put forward the money to fund the game. "A brand or a franchise ... represents safety to a game company executive," and safety to a company executive, means more resources given to a designer and his or her development team (Bates 124). Of course, the resources used to make a game are not always indicative of its objective merits. Financial bombs in the film industry like Waterworld and Battlefield Earth prove that substantial monetary investment does not necessarily a great movie make, and the investor/developer relationship in the games industry is essentially the same (even though other internal relationships are remarkably different). It can be concluded, then, that increased funding does not always produce a quality product. At the same time, however, it is never the cause of the quality slippage; substantial monetary investment does not a bad movie make, either, and the same goes for games. How can it? What a larger fund pool does is expand the palette the artist can use to paint his picture. True, when forced to use only three colors, he must improvise and create unique ways of using them to produce a unique painting, but again, with a larger assortment of colors, he could still limit himself to three if he wanted, except now he could also add a fourth, fifth, or six. The poor use of a game's resources is the fault of the developers, not the resources themselves, even if the presence of the resources in the first place was the temptress that seduced the development team into abusing them. If something goes wrong with a franchise's product, it is not that it is a franchise that is the problem, but that the game was made poorly. In actuality, had it not been a member of a franchise it would have presumably been of even poorer quality: if the game was bad with a large budget, imagine the result if the game had fewer resources.

So, poor quality games may come out tagged with franchise names. On the flip side, however, they can open the door for enhancing the quality of other games by simply fixating them with a particular name. An example would be Squaresoft's Final Fantasy Tactics, of the previously mentioned Final Fantasy series. The game is a strategy role-playing game, unlike its more traditional brethren that make up the remainder of the series. In fact, aside from a handful of trivial character-, magic-, and item-naming similarities, and the appearance of the famed Chocobo, there is nothing relating the game to the series save the name itself. The reason behind naming the game as it has been was not because the inclusion of the Chocobo was mandatory for a particular feature of gameplay (another ride-able, flying creature could just have easily been created). The reason was to simply reduce the risk associated with releasing the product on the market by establishing customer familiarity, and to, as a result, receive more executive confidence and funding to implement into the game to improve the quality of the end product. This concept, in fact, runs the naming of every member of the series. The narratives and battle systems are different enough (and could fairly easily be made more different) that the offering of unique names for each is easily justifiable. The catch is that naming Final Fantasy IX "Zidane's Quest" does not grant the development team the luxury of guaranteed sales, and therefore increased resources that can be spent on creating more artwork, lavishing graphics, and the funding of a large testing team to ensure bugs don't make it into the final product are not made available. In other words, it might as well be named as it has, as this no doubt allows for the quality of the game to go up. The franchise, as all franchises do, creates a certain guarantee of return that creates a secure enough project to be invested in more confidently. This cannot be a bad thing.

Of course, the security offered by a franchise name not only affects that franchise, but also permeates into all areas of the company. There is still money to be made in making smaller, niche market products designed for hardcore gamers that are not as accessible as franchise titles tend to be. Again, I will use Squaresoft as a case study, only because they serve as an effective example and their flagship series is so often attacked. Xenogears is not a game designed for the average gamer. Not that it isn't good, nor is it that it is perhaps too good (as some may think), but merely that it is long, slow-moving, often tedious, and text-heavy. It is not an allegory, it wears its message on its sleeve, but this means that it doesn't have its lighter layer for more casual gamers to enjoy. Yet, it is a good game, and it did make many gamers happy. It appeals to a market that is real, and out there gaming with disposable cash in their pockets. It is unlikely, however, that this would be the basket an investor would put all of his eggs into. Xenogears is not the kind of project you confidently put money behind because of its niche market appeal. There is no guaranteed return. Confidence, then, in the producer to fund the game is gathered through the success of larger projects, where available profits (the larger the better of course) can be used to explore different avenues and appeal to different markets at a lower risk. For Squaresoft, the Final Fantasy series generates a steady income that secures the life of the company, and therefore allows occasional missteps (but aims for sleeper hits) whilst taking risks. This lightens the pressure in taking those risks in the first place, and encourages more to be taken. The film industry works the same way. Independence Day is a star-toting, poorly scripted alien invasion movie that is perfect for the popcorn-eating, casual moviegoer. It produced massive revenues that would later make their way to funding projects like Fargo and Pulp Fiction. Despise Independence Day all you want, but someone else sitting through a bad movie is a small price to pay for you to sit through a multitude of good ones. There is a parallel in nearly every faucet of the entertainment industry. Commercial strongholds like Batman and Superman give DC Comics enough financial leverage to start up new ventures like its Vertigo line and Neil Gaiman's universally applauded Sandman series. This kind of interdependency feeds off of itself, where the existence of each market aids the development of both. No one is saying what movies, games, or comic books you should enjoy, but the importance of each should be recognized. The continued success of franchises is necessary, even in the production of low-key products.

For the more cynical franchise avenger, the mere idea of putting more money into already full pockets sickens them. "Spread the wealth" is a viable argument, but nevertheless, technology is expensive. To be cutting edge is even more so. So, for fans of smaller games with less funding, technological scope and innovation is difficult to come by. The simple resolution is to let the big guys do it, or in other words, the financially secure franchise holders. Video games are the result of a technological curiosity. They are more than that now, but technology is still a major factor in the industry. Ideally, every game would have limitless graphical capabilities, the most dynamic interfaces, and the fastest of processing speeds. This utopia of game design is non-existent. More to the point, big scale projects (with equally big scale budgets) are the only projects in development with the ability to even take a stab at reaching for it. The upside for smaller games is that once these technologies are advanced by the research and development teams of larger projects, they can reap the benefits afterwards, when there is considerably less financial requirements and risk. Whether it be licensing ready-made game engines or following an approach that was most effective in another project, the time and money saved by following the workhorse development house allows for the implementation of the same technologies without the expensive trial and error process endured by the original developers. This dependency is necessary: were it not for the guaranteed income of franchise titles, few investors would be confident enough to invest enough money into R&D departments to push the technology forward in the first place. The resultant trickle-down effect unmistakably benefits non-franchise games, ones with budgets too small to fund a large R&D team, if one at all.

There is something to be said about the corporate world: it is a blood-sucking, money-grubbing, land of vultures willing to watch others suffer so long as their profit margins keep rising. Working just below this, though, are the artists trying to speak to us through their respective mediums. Money is needed to produce a game, be it a blockbuster or not. The need for franchise names is built on this. Nintendo could not have given us a 3-dimensional environment like the one in Super Mario 64 had Mario not been a well-established game icon that would ensure they would at least get some return for what were sure to be expensive production costs; Phantasy Star Online, a franchise in itself, would most likely not have seen the light of day had Final Fantasy VII not familiarized the gaming world with the term "RPG;" and a game like Half-Life could not have gotten off the ground if it had to finance the production of its own game engine instead of making use of a licensed one from id Software and its successful Quake franchise. Guaranteed sales allow for a further exploration of what the gaming medium can do. There is a balance, too, where smaller games, and what could be seen as riskier game ideas, need the existence of surefire hits to produce enough revenue to warrant more experimental and niche market products. The hope for a final Final Fantasy is ridiculous, the death of Lara Croft would be industry suicide, and the desire for only small-scale projects is limiting to the medium as a whole.

A name equals security. What else you got, Bill?

Bates, Bob. Game Design: The Art and Business of Creating Games. United States of America: Prima Publishing, 2001.