Exploring transmedia IP in video games: trends, success factors, and market insights
By Michael Wagner, Senior Market Analyst, Newzoo
Developing a video game based on IP from outside the games industry (we call this transmedia IP or TIP) is tantalizing for many developers and publishers. Just look at the seismic revenue performance of the recent Harry Potter game, Hogwarts Legacy.
As a studio, it’s tempting to see an IP with a large built-in fanbase and think: “A game based on this will be an instant success.” However, licensing IP (before you’ve written a single line of code) is often expensive, labyrinths of red tape, and the occasional legal battle.
Of course, we’re most interested in what the data says about the success of transmedia IP and whether the market is already oversaturated with these IPs. This article looks at how TIP performs against native game IP, compares free-to-play and pay-to-play TIP titles, and covers essential trends to see whether investing in TIP is a worthy path to success.
Let’s get into transmedia IP.
Key takeaways for transmedia IP in video games
Before you dive in, here are the essential findings from our exploration of transmedia IP trends and success factors in the gams market.
- Transmedia IP has made up roughly 10% of total console releases since 2016. Since the pandemic, this ratio has increased due in part to the lighter console release schedule.
- Average engagement numbers tend to be higher for titles with transmedia IP origins than native video game IP, though a few heavy-hitting IPs greatly influence these numbers.
- Transmedia IP tends to cluster into four major genres: Adventure, Fighting, Role Playing, and Shooter. Developers and publishers can see this as an opportunity to distinguish their transmedia IP games in the market.
Transmedia IP has been part of video games since Atari’s 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Transmedia IP (or TIP) has been a part of the video game market since the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial found its way to the Atari 2600 in 1982, nearly collapsing the industry. This launch was so disastrous that we didn’t see another transmedia release until 1988’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on the NES.
While the latter title received terrible reviews and was deemed “unplayable garbage” in a 2004 edition of Game Informer, it didn’t lead to another industry collapse. Game companies weren’t wholly discouraged, and transmedia IP strategies have continued with varying degrees of success.
In Japan, anime and manga have been inextricably linked with video game development under publishers like Bandai Namco for years. Overall, there are many instances of transmedia IP spread throughout the history of video games, with franchises like The Witcher showing how powerful TIP can be as a market force.
Of course, there are many ways to discuss transmedia IP. Here, we define it as source material from outside the video game industry, meaning we won’t cover franchises like Pokémon, The Last of Us, or the myriad of sports titles. We’ll also focus on console TIP games that have taken inspiration from or licensed IP outside of video games.
The state of transmedia IP in the video game market today
Transmedia IP is everywhere in the games market today. However, in contrast to our original hypothesis that TIP would take an increasing share of all game releases over time, the number of transmedia IP releases has kept to a steady cadence of between 180 and 228 releases per year since 2016 (based on the games we track in the Game Performance Monitor). There was a noticeable decline in 2022, with only 150 transmedia IP releases.
Due in part to how easy it’s become to publish games through Steam, Apple, and Google, the total share of transmedia IP releases across all platforms has decreased to under 2% of all game launches.
When specifically looking at the console market (more likely comprising AAA publishers with hefty marketing budgets), we see a consistent schedule of roughly 30–40 transmedia IP releases annually. Though the number of transmedia IP releases stayed constant during the pandemic years, due to the reduction in console releases, the share of TIP releases jumped above 2016 levels (reaching a maximum of 12.5% of all console releases in this period). While we can say that transmedia IP games are on the rise, it is mainly due to a lighter console release schedule since the pandemic.
Transmedia IP games have an average lifetime player count of almost 2.5 million
Interest (and, by extension, the total addressable market) for transmedia IP varies significantly when comparing world-conquering IPs like Dragon Ball and Star Wars to lesser-known franchises or standalone media. Companies hoping to reap the benefits of TIP should understand the size of the core base and TAM of various franchises. Not every transmedia IP can or will spark the same nostalgic playing and paying behaviors.
Here are the lifetime player figures across transmedia video games (console-only and through April 2023):
Looking at average lifetime players per game, we see that transmedia IP punches above its weight class compared to video game IP. The rise in free-to-play MAU is led by Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel (January 2022) and MultiVersus (August 2022) as two notable titles responsible for this growth.
Overall, MAU for both premium and free-to-play transmedia IP titles have outpaced total game MAU growth over the past three years.
In the case of pay-to-play MAU, transmedia IP didn’t decline as much as video game IPs from April 2020 and has been flat since 2021. On the other hand, TIP free-to-play models have seen a significant increase versus video game IP’s decrease since 2020.
Most transmedia IP games fall into the Adventure, Fighting, Role Playing, and Shooter genres
Even though MAU growth for transmedia IP games has remained stable over the past several years, if you break down performance by genre, the picture gets a bit less rosy.
Some TIP games see great success within specific genres, but across the board, many titles struggle against games with IP native to the industry. Additionally, we contend with smaller-than-ideal sample sizes or single IPs dominating their respective genres. For instance, Yu-Gi-Oh! holds significant weight in the Card Battle genre, despite the growth of roguelike deck builders like Slay the Spire and Monster Train.
According to data in the Game Performance Monitor, we also see that certain transmedia games tend to pool into four genres: Adventure (84 TIP releases since tracking began), Role Playing (35), Fighting (28), and Shooter (21).
However, despite the higher concentrations, IP games index at or above their native IP counterparts. All other genres have fewer than ten games in each of the remaining genres, leaving plenty of gaps for developers and IP holders. The small sample size of the remaining genres makes it difficult to tease out more concrete findings.
When we look at the origins of IP to find general success trends, we see that titles originating from books, comics, and manga tend to outperform other TIP on average. However, this can be deceiving as some categories feature a few games that significantly boost the overall performance, skewing the results. For instance, of the 88 games we track in the Books and Comics category, only nine have over ten million lifetime users, while 51 haven’t surpassed one million players.
When we break down these nine high-performing titles, we see six superhero IPs, with the other three coming from the Naruto, Dragon Ball, and The Witcher franchises. This suggests that the popularity of superheroes in video games persists similarly to what we saw in the 2010s.
When you look deeper into the finer details of the broader trends, you can see how much power a handful of games can have in skewing averages.
Which franchises have brought the most players to transmedia IP games?
Looking at the average player counts by franchise-driven titles, most of the top 10 franchises were one-off releases with high lifetime player counts, such as Conan the Barbarian or The Blair Witch Project.
However, performance over several games doesn’t slice up evenly through a single franchise. For instance, despite The Witcher being a top-three franchise by player count, its impressive average is heavily weighted by The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and, to a lesser extent, GWENT: The Witcher Card Game.
Is it still worth it to develop a transmedia IP game?
There is still a sizable audience for transmedia IP, but much of this is highly contingent on several factors. Despite how many titles have already made it into the global market, we see there is still plenty of room for additional TIP, especially as console game releases ramp up toward pre-pandemic levels. However, simply snatching up an IP from outside the industry and transforming it into a game isn’t, by itself, a winning strategy.
Books, Comics, and Manga are widely used categories of transmedia IP, especially as it’s quite susceptible to boom or bust releases compared to other categories like Cartoons and Anime. Different genres are also overrepresented by transmedia IP licensees, creating a void in supply that can be used to differentiate themselves from their competition.
While TIP comes with the massive benefit of an existing audience hungry for more of their favorite IP, there’s always the potential for failure (and lots of contractual obligations to the original IP holders). Knowing the trends helps to understand which types of games and which genres still have opportunities for your transmedia IP concept and how the market may react based on what’s come before.
After all, where there’s nostalgia, there’s (almost) always a gaming audience willing to pay for one more chance to re-live or carve out new experiences with their favorite IPs.
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Explore the data that matters most to you with Newzoo
To get into these transmedia IP numbers and trends, we used our Game Performance Monitor’s metrics across thousands of Xbox and PlayStation games. We also used the Newzoo Games Taxonomy to track the top-performing titles and genres by IP origin. Note that our databases don’t cover every game released, but we’ve captured anything that would be in the top thousand games.
This article is only a glimpse into what our market analysts and consultants, and any subscriber with a keen eye for slicing up and visualizing data, can do with our platform.
If you’re interested in digging further into transmedia IP or exploring other essential topics in the games market, you can work directly with our analysts and consultants. Contact us today to answer your biggest video game questions.
