The opportunity costs of NFT madness are still being paid | Opinion
What have been the most successful licensing arrangements in games industry history? It's easy to pick out individual success stories – Rare's GoldenEye is the classic example, and some licenses like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars have produced a solid number of hits alongside various misses.For a really consistent success story, though, you generally have to turn to sports licenses. EA's long-running but now defunct partnership with FIFA certainly takes the crown, spanning as it did almost 30 years and hundreds of millions of games sold – but a tip of the hat is due to Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, a six-game series spanning Summer and Winter Olympic Games from Beijing in 2008 to Tokyo's delayed 2020 games.Using a license from the International Olympic Committee, and developed and published by a once-unlikely partnership between Sega and Nintendo, the games were by no means a challenger to the commercial success of something like FIFA, but they sold pretty handsomely nonetheless, and were remarkably successful and well-received given how tricky this license is to work with. Read more
What have been the most successful licensing arrangements in games industry history? It's easy to pick out individual success stories – Rare's GoldenEye is the classic example, and some licenses like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars have produced a solid number of hits alongside various misses.
For a really consistent success story, though, you generally have to turn to sports licenses. EA's long-running but now defunct partnership with FIFA certainly takes the crown, spanning as it did almost 30 years and hundreds of millions of games sold – but a tip of the hat is due to Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, a six-game series spanning Summer and Winter Olympic Games from Beijing in 2008 to Tokyo's delayed 2020 games.
Using a license from the International Olympic Committee, and developed and published by a once-unlikely partnership between Sega and Nintendo, the games were by no means a challenger to the commercial success of something like FIFA, but they sold pretty handsomely nonetheless, and were remarkably successful and well-received given how tricky this license is to work with.
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