Indy joins the Notre Dame football team?!?!
It seems unlikely that Disney would agree to an Xbox exclusive. Why cut off such a huge chunk of potential audience. Also presumably this has been in the works since well before the Microsoft buyout.
I would assume it will be out for free to Game Pass subscribers though. I am curious how that would work for Disney though. How do they determine how much of a cut Disney should get from something thatâs given out for free to some consumers. I guess itâs kind of like the shenanigans they go through to determine key actorsâ and directorsâ cuts when a movie ends up on a first-party streaming service, instead of going up for a biding war.
Warner Bros this week announced that they were going to redo the payments to ensure that all the pertinent people (those with a % of the box office take in their contracts) will get fully compensated now that the box office numbers are going to take a massive hit due to all those movies being released directly on HBO Max this year.
Figure MS will do the same. Itâs not that theyâre short of money.
Folks keep saying this⌠and the answer is the same as every other exclusive title.
Also, itâs not like Disney is making this game. This game is being made by a bethesda subsidiary. Lucasfilms games is just a branding, so itâs essentially just that a game developer paid Disney for the rights to the Indiana Jones IP.
Spider-Man is exclusive on PS4/PS5, Disney has no issues with exclusives. The 2nd point could be relevant but MS probably working on renegotiating it if it originally was for contracted for multiplatforms.
Signing an exclusivity deal for the market leader with a 100M unit install base is different from signing one for the distant third place platform. And Sony had additional leverage from their interest in the film rights for the character, no matter how much the execs pretend thatâs not a factor.
Again⌠disney isnât making any games. Lucasfilm games is not a development house. It is purely branding. Disney is not putting any money into this.
This is a company, paying disney to use their IP. Then that company decides where to release their game.
And exclusivity deals come from the same place as anywhere else⌠from being paid money for them. Or, in this case, being owned by Microsoft.
Brad, come on man. You are being silly thinking that Microsoft isnât going to get any exclusive games. You need to tone down the fanboyism a touch.
Hmm, I just assumed Sony owns the rights to Spider-Man in games, just the same as it does in movies right now.
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Again, most license holders donât give a shit about exclusivity. They care about getting paid and they care about not harming the IP. Generally, the only exclusivity deal some IP holders care about would be something that limits the product to some garbage platform that by its nature harms the IP. Even then, if you pay enough to the IP holder, they will look the other way. Battlefront 2âs negative launch social media blowout wasnât something Disney could ignore. Note the difference between that response and the NBA or FIFA response for even more rapacious in-game purchases.
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Of course Microsoft will get exclusives out of the Bethesda deal. Itâs weird to think otherwise. Those exclusives may or may not include this game, but none of us know the terms of the Indy deal which likely happened a while ago.
License holder do sometimes dictate multiplatform I think, which is why MLB The Show from Sony is coming to non-Sony consoles at some point, possibly this year even.
Sure. I wrote âmostâ and MLB The Show may be the rare outlier. Itâs not inconsequential that it wasnât multiplatform before.
Platforms for release are absolutely part of licensing contract negotiation. It is, however, inextricably linked to what others have mentioned above - money, and the potential to earn money. Limited platforms will decide viability of the deal, minimum guarantee paid at signing, and royalty percentages.
As for the early timing of the release, I can guess (grain of salt) at two potential reasons - either to gain publicity for Bethesda (and by extension MSFT), or because the deal wouldâve showed up in some public facing investor thing (either by Disney, or because theyâre finishing up the Beth acquisition). Given the lack of Xbox attachment to the announce, the first guess is likely not applicable.
tl;dr version - while platforms are certainly part of the deal, we canât really infer anything based on the IP holder.
Being an âXbox exclusiveâ these days also means coming to PC/Steam, which very likely combines for a larger potential player base.
We also donât know if this even constitutes an exclusive agreement for the IP, like EA have with Star Wars. I doubt Bethesda intend to have multiple studios cranking out Indiana Jones games like EA have.
If this game is a few years off, Iâd be shocked if itâs a multiplat. Microsoft didnât spend $7.5 billion dollars just to get big into the third-party publishing game, or to get a series of timed exclusivity agreements, or whatever.
If itâs much sooner than that, then who knows. Either way we wonât know until the sale closes, since neither party can legally discuss that stuff yet.
Itâs truly been odd to me, to see how many people think Minecraft is some kind of bellwether for Microsoft bringing Bethesda games to PS5, and not pretty clearly an exception to the rule.
Spencer already shut down bringing more games to Switch in the near future, saying it was creating confused expectations about their games coming to Switch eventually. And that was just for smaller stuff like Cuphead and Ori.
They didnât spend seven and a half billion dollars on Zenimax just to get some preferential treatment or timed exclusivity agreements on Xbox.
Itâs hilarious isnât it, yet weâll probably be doing this for every Beth game announcement until the first one after the Microsoft deal is concluded comes out, and shock of shocks itâs an Xbox/Win10 exclusive.
Where do I say they wonât get any exclusive game? Of course they will. I just doubt this new Indy game will be one of them, for the reasons I stated. Exclusive game deals being more expensive (or unobtainable) for a platform with the smallest install base isnât even a controversial statement.
This is not really true. Most of these deals will in fact dictate platforms the game will be available on and will figure addressable market into the contract from the start. After all, they arenât just cashing a check, theyâre managing a brand, of which game products are expected to synergize with other products and media.
But being multiplatform basically doubles your potential sales.
Itâs probably a one off deal. Disney has said they are pursuing that approach after the Star Wars thing went a bit pear shaped. They want to repeat the success of Spider-Man by more carefully matching the right dev with the right property.
Itâs like some crazy circular logic for PS fans- xbox is the smallest install base because it doesnât have any exclusives, but it canât get any exclusives because it has the smallest install base. How do you get exclusives then? Well, do like Sony does, and own the developers, publish them yourself. But then when MS buys the developers and publishers (for 7.5 billion) , weâre back to square one and thereâs no way theyâd be that stupid to just release on xbox- it has the smallest install base!
Seriously, though. Do we really think this is coming out on the Xbone/PS4 generation? How long were high-profile games (non-sports) still being released on the old gen last time? We all think this is a few years out. Do we think that Sony is still going to have as much of an advantage?
Itâs a curiosity, for sure. It seems unlikely that Disney would want to exclude a platform for their game - on the other hand, Iâm sure they could have gone with many developers and they went with Machine Games and Bethesda - and I seriously doubt they would have signed that deal without disclosure of the Microsoft deal, if it hadnât been announced at the time they decided to make the Indy game. Though I suppose thereâs no reason they couldnât have signed the contract with the stipulation that theyâll sell the game for other platforms. Who knows?
That was in response to you mentioning that itâs one thing if Sony has a licensed exclusive with 100+ million users.
If only the perceived sheer awesomeness of the phrase âmarket leaderâ secured exclusives and not money or first party studios.