But you can’t keep a good slop merchant down, as Puck recently reported ( per GamesRadar ) that Microsoft and Xbox are apparently doubling downs on plans to try to match the Hollywood success of Nintendo’s Mario movies or Sony’s The Last Of Us . The report states that Microsoft has been taking meetings with multiple studios and streamers in recent weeks, trying to spark interest in a whole greatest hits collection of the company’s gaming brands, including The Elder Scrolls , Diablo , Warcraft , and, hilariously, Halo … again. Puck claims Microsoft is trying to sell the whole thing as a package deal that’ll bring a number of its gaming projects together in exchange for a big payday.
And, let’s be fair: It is a list of massive game franchises—but also one that speaks to the problem Microsoft has dug for itself here with the kind of gaming projects it tends to emphasize. Unlike Last Of Us or Mario , or the upcoming God Of War show, or any number of the more successful video game adaptations of this most recent wave, none of the games Microsoft is reportedly peddling here are rooted in iconic and instantly recognizable characters. Movie fans already rejected the generic fantasy trappings of Warcraft a decade ago; the Elder Scrolls games are all about player freedom that will struggle to manifest in non-interactive forms; and Diablo , shorn of its compulsive gameplay loop, is less a collection of stories than it is a moving gallery of heavy metal album covers. It feels telling that Halo was the most narratively developed out of any of these projects in gaming form, and its two-season TV run demonstrated that there wasn’t enough heft to either main character Master Chief. or the source material as a whole, to support a multi-season arc without a lot of oddball invention on the showrunners’ parts.
None of these are a deathknell, obviously: Minecraft doesn’t have a plot or real characters, and that didn’t stop it from chicken jockeying its way to nearly a billion dollars (and a planned sequel) last year. But it does speak to why Microsoft and Xbox’s hard sell to Hollywood might not be the obvious slam dunk that you might assume when talking about gaming brands that have made literal billions of dollars between them.
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