Marvel Snap, Marvel Contest, CoD Mobile: What makes them a mass market hit?

What does the stellar mass market success of games like Marvel Snap, Marvel Contest of Champions and CoD Mobile share in common? No, it’s not just that they are all popular IP/Franchises. Find out in this guest post from Om Tandon – industry specialist, game consultant and UX Director.

Why aren’t movie tie-in games, especially those that are a story adaptation to the movie’s story they’re loosely based on, really a common thing anymore since the beginning of the last decade?

It’s mostly because mobile devices became the platform du jour to publish movie tie-in games and other similar shovelware-style titles. Development costs are lower, turnaround time is faster, expectations are lower, and audiences are larger on mobile, so it makes sense that licensors would go there.

In addition to the rise of mobile, the relationship between a movie tie-in console game’s development cycle and the movie itself was already fraying in the mid to late 2000s. Back when AAA games could be developed by a fairly small (

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Got a burning question you want answered?

Does a licensor offer the developer benefits beside the use of the IP, such as reference assets or facilitating the use of original voice actors?

Sometimes they do! Back when licensed movie games were a thing, I worked on one. The studio I was working for was actually developing two different licensed movie tie-in games at the time and the dev team relationships with the different movie studios …