I got a call from Wired Magazine today. Seems like they were looking back at all the coverage they gave the recent Matrix movies/game, and couldn’t quite understand why the game has not faired as well as expected (critically and commercially)…

Among many other questions, the journo wanted to know why publishers always figure that a licensed game was the safer bet, despite the fact that historically original games are the big money earners. Big question.

Interestingly enough, I had just been chatting with Scott Miller about this - being one of his favorite topics to rant on. To some extent, it boils down to a gamble on stats:

- Revenues generated by licensed games are, for the most part, clustered tightly together (think of a tall/thin bell curve). Despite a few outliers to the left (ET) or right (GoldenEye), most licensed games fall within this tight cluster of revenue figures.

- Revenues generated by original games are, for the most part, all over the map. While you may get a few extremely profitable outliers at the far right of the curve, you’ve got just as many utter bombs (revenue wise) at the left of the curve, and everything spread along (think of a very wide/flat curve).

So, what’s the conclusion? Publishers see much less risk in licensed games because they can predict with some certainty that they’ll hit within that tight cluster of revenues. Trying to predict where an original game will land is much tougher, no doubt. Or, as Scott puts it, publishers use licenses to save their butts…

Still, is that an excuse?

(On a related note, I found this Hollywood style mock-pitching editorial to be quite amusing…)