A Brash [Entertainment LLC] Proposal
I read about these guys a few months ago at Red Herring, where blogger Ryan Olson noticed a story about the company's push to secure $150 million to produce "60 to 100 [major titles] over the next five years." In case you're not hearing trumpets when you read the words "Brash Entertainment LLC," it's a startup co-founded by Thomas Tull, executive producer of the film Beefcake Ballet--err, I mean 300, the comic book derived Spartan boo-rah flick.
Apparently Brash is already cooking with gas. For starters, they've secured not $150 but $400 million from investors like Abry Partners LLC, New York life Capital, and PPM America. What's more, according to the Wall Street Journal today, the company already has deals with five major Hollywood studios and licenses for 40 film properties, including 300 and the squirmy (but mostly silly) Saw horror flicks. The idea, according to Brash CEO Mitch Davis, is to counter the notion that movie-based games suck. He's right about the latter. Once in a blue moon you'll get a Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay--actually superior to the related film--but more frequently stuff like Enter the Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Godfather, which suffer because they slavishly attempt to translate the cinematic experience.
But say Brash succeeds. Is this a sign of things to come?
I think it is, though it has less to do with making better games than resource consolidation. With development costs soaring, the game industry is looking for greater (if costlier) short term security to land long term windfalls. 1994 e-commerce startup Amazon.com took how many years to turn a profit? (Hint: nearly a decade.) Brash epitomizes that sort of business sense overlapping (and perhaps overturning) the model on which the game industry was founded. Instead of high schoolers and college students dreaming up games in their spare time on shoestring budgets, enter the age of the media "event." Contests, mobile phone games, TV spots, in-game ads, cross-media content, games that decipher films that decipher games, and a thousand other ideas smarter marketers than I'll ever be have dreamed up to blitz you...not so much with a game anymore, as an "experience," and one that can follow you around, from dawn to dusk.
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Trouble is, if the Hollywood movie industry has shown us anything, it's that large truckloads of money won't guarantee hits, and as the pressures increase, "events" start to pretty much look the same. Meanwhile, independent productions that cost next to nothing (like, oh, the first "Saw") make back their cost many times over.