Why did Lionhead's The Movies fail?

[Marek]

At work I'm doing a bit of research on games that incorporate machinima, purely as part of our very broad investigations into various topics.

I was wondering if anyone had any good theories as to why The Movies failed to sell well (that was my impression anyway) and why The Movies Online didn't quite become the phenomenon that Lionhead expected it to be. I had a few theories but I didn't think they fully explained why The Movies wasn't a huge success.

I know this is an old title but I'm curious if anyone played it and what they thought was good or bad about it.

Basically, I'm too lazy to do my own market research.

[Scrobbs]

I played it, and loved it. Also loved the movies that you could produce with it. I think I stopped playing it because there just wasn't enough variety; also whilst plate-spinning is that genre's bread and butter, keeping the actors happy, the grounds tidy, the screenwriters busy, the research up to keep technology ahead etc. and so forth, it was all too easy to let your best actors/actresses slip into alcoholic despair and wasteful drug addiction. It eventually became a chore rather than a pleasure. Keeping the luvvies on a leash between scenes was one of the biggest ball aches - because the crew took so long to move and set up, they would get bored and wander off to the bar. Quite a cool game mechanic you may think, and I did too, except when it happened for the Nth time. Good game, but ultimately frustrating. Maybe I was just crap at it.

Pico-fact #1 - the boyfriend of a girl I used to work with worked as a coder at Lionhead, and one day I spotted her name as one of the actresses. (She signed all the release forms).

[Marek]

Hah that's awesome.

Did you use the movie creator much? It always struck me as a pretty limited feature, in that you are mostly choosing between presets rather than having very open-ended tools at your disposal. Is that an accurate impression?

[DanJW]

Did it fail? When I was playng it the online 'movies-charts' seemed fairly vibrant.

But yes you're right about the presets, which is the reason I stopped playing it. Apparently the expansion pack unlocked the camera position, which was my biggest grief, but by then I had given up and I never got round to getting it. The only way to make your movie looks even slightly different to all the others was with incredibly intense editing - and even then I got tired of watching the same animations over and over.

Another problem is that I think they made it too diffiuclt to mod. Their plan was to release new sets, props, costumes etc online. The problem: firstly you had to earn enough of their virtual money to buy them; secondly it was down to Lionhead to actually release these extras for use - very time intensive for post-release.

If they had just released creation and import tools and not banned custom stuff from the official charts, I think it would have been more creatively exciting. By trying to make it easy to use and accessible to everyone equally, they dumbed it down and restricted what people could actually achieve.

edit: as for the management game - well you're slightly foolish if you try to make movies at the same time as playing the main game. The way I saw it was to unlock stuff in the game and then use sandbox mode to make the actual movies you wanted to publish. Also, in-game time went so fast and 'filming' take so long that your actors would visibly age by the end of a long (>2 minute) movie.

As Norfolk Scrobbs said, it got a bit annoying it places - it seemed a bit too random at times. Even so, there were some things that really impressed my, especially the way so much of the UI was built into the world (e.g. the way each building is a set of buttons when you mouse-over it).

[Thrik]

I did quite enjoy it when I played it, but I believe my epic hard drive failure occurred sometime around then and I never got back into it.

I think it was a bit of a weird one because it was basically two games in one, and I suspect a lot of people who bought it or were hyping it didn't really have much interest in the simulation side — they just wanted to make movies. Thinking back, the movie thing was pretty un-fun and I remember the simulation shit being more interesting.

The interface pretty much blew me away as Dan mentioned above. It's strange that for all of Lionhead's mastery of in-game interfaces (eg: Black & White 2, The Movies, Fable 2), they're pretty poor at HUDs and menus (eg: Black & White 2, The Movies, Fable 2). They're always a bit fiddly, with my most recent memory being the pain of consuming multiple potions/food in Fable 2.

What I'd really love to see is all the principles of The Movies' simulation side applied to a new Theme Park-esque game.

[Scrobbs]

I enjoyed using the movie creator, but for some reason found it really difficult to understand why the dollies (i.e. the things you used to plan the scenes before you used the actors) would switch places, when I'd made a special effort with the story board and made sure the colours of the dollies matched prior to shooting. For instance, the protagonist woudl suddenly appear in a crowd shot, and a backup cast member would appear in the lead role. I remember getting really frustrated with this, and after many many goes to try and get it right, it just got too fiddly. My movies were crap as well compared to the things some people were producing, so I kind of went back to the management game...which was disappointing because I did really like the idea of that. It was yet another nail in the creative coffin over the years which has convinced me I'm much more a technical person than a creative.

P.s. Should I go back to the old name do you think? Is the new one not sitting right?

[Yalbit]

I really wanted to love this game but it's been so long since I played it that I forget what kept me from really getting into it deeply. I do remember playing it for a few days and never going back to it.

[Nachimir]

In response to the question earlier, yes, The Movies is regarded as a failure. I'm not sure what the sales were, but I'm pretty sure they were much lower than Lionhead expected.

P.s. Should I go back to the old name do you think? Is the new one not sitting right?

It doesn't really matter, but Scrobbs is a better name IMO.

[kuddles]

I think, as mentioned previously, the whole idea of the game kind of hit a dull spot in the market. Instead of bridging the gap between casual "The Sims"-type of gamers and more hardcore strategy gamers, it ended up alienating both.

It was also released right in the middle of when traditional PC gaming seemed to recieve the biggest downward slope, where developers focused more on MMOs and WOW became huge, re-directed efforts to making consoles their priority, casual games selling much better, increased concern over piracy in single-player games, etc. I remember there being a lot of talk around late 2005/early 2006 about developers having a lot of confusion as to why almost all traditional games were having sales that were drastically lower than expectations, including The Movies, Rise of Legends, Act of War, Dungeon Siege II, Freedom Force 2 and so on.

After the success of Spore and Little Big Planet, I think you could argue that it might have been just a little ahead of it's time.

[ThunderPeel2001]

At work I'm doing a bit of research on games that incorporate machinima, purely as part of our very broad investigations into various topics.

I was wondering if anyone had any good theories as to why The Movies failed to sell well (that was my impression anyway) and why The Movies Online didn't quite become the phenomenon that Lionhead expected it to be. I had a few theories but I didn't think they fully explained why The Movies wasn't a huge success.

I know this is an old title but I'm curious if anyone played it and what they thought was good or bad about it.

Basically, I'm too lazy to do my own market research.

I'll tell you exactly what it is: It felt like a technical exercise (the machinima creator) with a game tacked on simply because they're a games company. I would have much rather have preferred the game by itself and the machinima creator by itself (or not at all).

It doesn't matter that they were both extremely polished, the game itself always felt like an afterthought. Not enough attention was given the gameplay and it just wasn't anywhere near as balanced or as enjoyable or Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park or Theme Hospital.

In short: Putting the two things together (making you play the game to unlock things to use in the machinima creator/expecting you to spend hours making a short film only to get mediocre 'reviews' in the game itself) left you with two average halves instead of two complete wholes.