That Xbox decides, in a morally questionable way, to cancel the studio developing HiFi Rush but warn that it is going to give a boost to the iconic franchises of Bethesda It is an indication. That Nintendo have the most successful console (and games) of the last decade and invest in Hollywood and amusement parks is another. PlayStation creating a film and series studio; It’s one more. What is the common denominator of all these elements? Transmediality.
Transmedia content has to do with the possibility of offering the same franchise through different formats: that a film becomes a video game, that a video game becomes its own comics, that an animated series ends up being a virtual reality experience. Until not long ago, the transmedia element represented a resource within the infinite range of possibilities that could be used when talking about franchises, but today it seems to be the main strategy of proprietary studios. Because?
Globalization and digitalization of content has reached such a point in the past decade that it is now very common to have access to a franchise. You may not have the purchasing power or the money to buy mainstream products (let’s call it any video game for $70, for example) but you do have the possibility of becoming a fan of an idea that you find interesting.
It is in this context that the public changed and the companies that manage our famous franchises realized something crucial: they no longer need to have such clear objectives. Let’s get specific. 30 years ago perhaps it was not easy to hold an event for horror film fans because you needed there to be a place where a certain number of people with the same tastes would group together. Today, creating an account on a social network allows you to reach hundreds of thousands of people who like horror movies. What’s more, you don’t even have to do it: there are other people who do it for pleasure and as a licensee of a property you only have to pay for the advertising there.
Everything is extremely segmented, turning each audience into an increasingly specific niche and making it easier, of course, to sell things to them. If you don’t know that Suicide Squad It’s going to sell, you don’t make the movie. But if you know that there are millions of fans of harley quinn who are going to buy the ticket just for your presence, you give the green light to as many projects as necessary. Be careful with this: in no way am I judging the fan, at this point I am clearly talking about how the companies that own the intellectual properties decide to bet today.
To this scenario we can add the old and reliable MVP player regarding successful franchises: nostalgia. We all want to return to the place that made us happy and the moments where we didn’t care about anything other than watching a series or a movie. Franchises are well aware of this, and they constantly take advantage of it.
When we ask ourselves: “why are there so many remakes in video games?” or “what about movies that are all sequels and prequels?” has to do with this. Hollywood has been lacking guts for years. It is a conglomerate of multi-million dollar companies that not only want to make money but don’t want to risk losing it. And in order to avoid risks, it is always safer to appeal to an already established franchise, with an audience that wants more, than a completely new story that may or may not work.
Returning to where this note began, where digitalization and globalization are common currency for the user, there is a third factor to take into account that begins to change the balance when a company decides what its next projects will be: the consumer’s time.
Before the limits were much more defined, a speculative projection could be that a person with an average purchasing power could go to the movies a certain number of times, buy a certain number of video games, read certain things, etc. Today the consumer’s time is one and the launches do not compete only against their category. Releasing a video game at the same time as the current series can lead to failure. The consumer’s time today is only one and the cake is shared among everyone. So what’s up with this?
The problem that the consumer’s time is one and that companies increasingly want to risk more towards more established franchises (whether out of nostalgia or because, as we said before, “niches” sell) is that transmediality is prioritized over project diversification.
Xbox does not want to stop investing in its IPs, but prefers to have three seasons of the series fallouttwo video games, comics, and many more things in 10 years than just making video games from various franchises in that same period of time. Nintendo No way, he’s been doing it for decades, but today more than ever he invests outside of video games because what he wants is not to have more investment to make more Zelda either Mariowants to have more investment to exploit them outside of gaming and thus grow the audiences of these franchises.
The same thing happens with cinema. For DisneyFor example, it makes much more sense to invest in Epic Games so that their characters Marvel appear in Fortnite either Fall Guys and then the people who know them through that medium go to see the movies. It is true that there are still producers like A24 They are not guided by this, but large franchises increasingly cover a larger portion of the market, whatever the industry.
The outlook is not very optimistic, especially because this vision of transmediality does a great favor to the fans of each franchise but lowers expectations and the possibilities of seeing original ideas and risky bets in the entertainment industry.
However, this analysis is nothing more than an opinion based on the projects that were carried out and will be carried out in the near future. If entertainment has shown anything, it is that it fluctuates a lot and the consumer always has the final say. So we just have to wait and see what the future will be and if the franchises will really become, almost entirely, transmedia.
