Disney purchased Marvel earlier today and it's the duty of every comic book, film, and video game website to fret over whether this will affect the content that Marvel produced. So, will it?
"On the video game front, Marvel has some smart licensing agreements with some of the best video game manufacturers in the business. As these licensing deals expire we have the luxury of considering what's best for the company and the products," Lowell Singer, Disney's senior vice president of investor relations, said in a statement sent to various gaming sites.
Disney has its own gaming unit called Disney Interactive Studios so one would think they'd scoop up the publishing or developing rights to certain Marvel franchises once they expire. A lot of these agreements won't expire for awhile, though. For example, Activision has the rights to create Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Wolverine games until 2017. Gazillion, the folks behind the upcoming Marvel MMO, have a licensing agreement in place until 2019. By the time these licenses expire, any game in development now will have either been released or cancelled already.
Even if some of the licenses were going to expire tomorrow, so the hell what? The list of good Marvel video games is a short one: Marvel vs. Capcom, Ultimate Alliance, and maybe Spider-Man 2. I'm really not sure what we're clinging to, here. I'll admit that developers are under the gun when it comes to adaptations of films and in some cases they're forced to rush games so they'll arrive in stores once the movie hits theaters. There have been plenty of Marvel games that weren't film adaptations but still felt like an cheap, sloppy cash-in on a popular license, though. The batting average of these studios is poor enough that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if things were shaken up a bit.
