No plans for SEGA – published Marvel Games

There won’t be any more Sega-published Marvel games according to TQ Jefferson, vice president of games production for Marvel.

Sega has published five games based off of Marvel movies in recent years: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America: Super Soldier and Thor: God of Thunder.

Most of these titles were slated by critics. The Metascores are as follows: Iron Man (45); The Incredible Hulk (55); Iron Man 2 (41); Captain America: Super Soldier (60); and Thor: God of Thunder (38).

In an interview, Jefferson didn’t directly explain why “there are no current plans for additional Marvel games to be published by Sega”, but he did delve into the reasons why movie-licensed games often “fall down”.

“In my opinion, the biggest afflictions affecting movie-licensed games is the amount of development time and a strict adherence to retelling the story of the film in the form of a game,” he said.

“The former is easy to understand — less development time means less time to design, produce and polish the game, resulting in a poor or lesser-quality experience. The latter is a little more subtle, but I can sum it up thusly: If a development team were to follow a film’s plot line to the letter, then you would have a two-hour experience with a bunch of thugs and one boss fight. That’s simply not how we define ‘movie licensed console game’ now or ever.

“In order to hit the expected amount of gameplay, you need to embellish, add additional characters, story, subplots and objectives to make a more robust and satisfying experience. That’s where a lot of movie licenses fall down – lack of content.”

Marvel has now moved on to other publishers for its video game licenses. Activision is hard at work on a Spider-Man game to tie-in with the upcoming summer movie.