Superhero films are in a bit of a weird place at the moment. They seem too big to fail, then they come out and we judge them as failures, then we see the box office returns and most of the time, they were too big to fail. The bubble is constantly threatening to burst, but it might hold steady into this new dawn of DC – if we can stop fighting over Superman for ten minutes.
With superhero games, it’s different. These too have major budgets, big studio backing, a lot of promo, and some of the most famous characters in history, but their path is less secure. Some monumental misses have been nestled between the hits in recent years, with Marvel’s Avengers and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League two that instantly come to mind. But maybe games should take a lesson from movies, and start playing around with superheroes we haven’t heard of.
Superheroes Need To Take Risks To Survive
I am not, despite what the comments section of various articles may tell you, an idiot. I understand that the reason we get games based on Batman and Spider-Man is because everybody knows who Batman and Spider-Man are. Licenses for comic book characters are expensive and difficult to obtain, but if you get to sell Batman to people, it’s worth it. If you’re buying the rights to a character nobody even knows, you’d be better off just making an original character.
I know that. I understand that. I don’t care… that. While I realise there are budgetary restrictions, I would love to see a studio walk into Marvel’s offices and pitch not an Iron Man game, not a Deadpool game, but a Stepford Cuckoos game. A Jocasta game. A Beta Ray Bill game. I would love to play something creative and unrestrained by established versions of the characters, and I think there are enough gamers who are general fans of comic books and superheroes at large, rather than just specific name brand caped crusaders, to make it work.
This would open the door to a much broader range of games. Right now, it feels as though studios need to bet the farm on superhero games, causing them to strain under the weight of expectation and demand for constant revenue streams. There was something to Suicide Squad – the character designs, the personalities of Boomerang and Shark, the Batman’s dead/no he isn’t drama (which hit real hard if you didn’t think of Batman as your own father and his ‘death’ as a personal betrayal) all had some sauce. But the underlying gameplay and structure let them down. It feels as though a game with Pixie or Howard the Duck would be under less duress to make a battle pass stick.
The Weirdest Characters Have The Best Stories
We’ve already seen this work in movies. The Guardians of the Galaxy were C-list nobodies before the MCU arrived. Shang-Chi made them over $400 million in a pandemic. Echo and Moon Knight got their own TV shows. They made people cry when they killed off Agent Coulson. If you let audiences care, they’ll care. The recognisable name helps, but it’s not everything.
It’s not just Marvel, either. No one read The Boys‘ comics, but it became one of the biggest shows on TV because it made itself matter more than a mascot. Ditto Invincible. People like the idea of superheroes, and giving them something new is itself an exciting prospect, arguably more exciting than ‘we are doing Batman again’.
In fact, you don’t even need to look beyond gaming itself. Squirrel Girl, Cloak & Dagger, and Luna Snow (the latter of which originated in video games anyway) have all had a major boost to their stock post-Marvel Rivals. Stepford Cuckoos are still top of my far out, never-going-to-happen-but-asking-anyway wishlist, but a Squirrel Girl game now feels like a distinct possibility. A slim possibility, granted, but distinct nonetheless. If that happens, the mildly popular, once had a TV show cancelled after a single episode, mostly a meme character would owe a considerable debt to Marvel Rivals.
As long as they’re not live-service trash, I’m still excited to see what the future of superhero gaming holds, and sooner or later they have to show us the Wonder Woman game again. But I’d love for games to move on from the big ticket heroes and tell a wider range of stories. Man cannot survive on bat and spider alone.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
59/100
- Released
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February 2, 2024