Brash: Not such a bad idea after all

(This is the eighth of eight posts going up throughout the holiday weekend tied to an article I have in the forthcoming weekly Variety that looks at the promise of Brash Entertainment, the first Hollywood videogame publisher, and the reasons it went from $400 million to out-of-business in a year and a half. The article and posts are all based on extensive interviews with nearly a dozen former employees, executives and developers who worked at or with Brash, most of whom understandably spoke only on background. The posts here on the Cut Scene will summarize and expand some of the key points from the Variety article and also provide some interesting details and anecdotes that didn't make print.

You can read the entire article here.

You can see all of my related posts, and get all the important background, on the Cut Scene's Brash category page.)

When other people, be they industry professionals, other journalists, or fans, talk to me about the demise of Brash, I often hear something like this: "Of course Brash failed. Videogames based on movies are always terrible. That's the worst idea for a business I ever heard."

By releasing just three games, all of which indeed were terrible, and going out of business quickly, Brash did a lot to reinforce this argument. But in fact I think it's not true. If I were going to invest start-up money in a videogame publisher, I think I'd like Brash's business plan.

I probably wouldn't want the leadership Brash had. Or the first few licenses they bought. But consider this: As a start-up publisher, you don't have any established franchises. Investing in new IP is very risky, as the vast majority don't succeed. When you start a new company focused entirely on original games, you're likely to have a string of failures and end up like Gamecock. The core of the business model of all successful videogame publishers like EA and Activision Blizzard are franchises. It's those regular sequels to brands like "Madden NFL," "Guitar Hero," " Call of Duty," etc. that provide the steady cash flow to support risks on fresh properties like "Mirror's Edge" or "Dead Space" (OK, Activision hasn't taken any risks on fresh IP recently, but that's a separate issue).

What's the next best provider of reliable revenue after franchise sequels? Movie licenses. Sure, the profit margins are slimmer, since you have to pay royalties to the licensor, but they tend to sell well if they're based on successful films. Even objectively terrible games like "Transformers" or, hell, Brash's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" can move units.

Brash's plan was to eventually start moving into original properties. Some said it should have happened sooner, but it was supposed to eventually get there. Theoretically, the steady revenue from licenses would be a great way to ease into that, rather than dive in and hope for some early hits to avoid bleeding cash.

Furthermore, there's a lot of room for improvement in movie-based games. They have a bad reputation that's largely deserved. There are some structural problems, mainly having to do with the relatively short amount of time to produce a AAA title if you can't start until the movie's greenlit and have to release it along with the film. But as games like "The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay" and a decent number of kid-focused properties have shown, it can be done.

Brash execs thought they'd be the one to prove that it could be done. Obviously they were wrong, since the titles they released displayed all the worst pathologies of movie-based videogame (low quality due to extremely short production schedules).

But if they had done things just a little differently, and if other factors -- some directly in their control, some having to do with the market -- hadn't worked against them, Brash might have proven movie-based games could be a little better and had a reliable stable of successful, if not hugely profitable, franchises with which to build the first successful private equity-funded videogame publisher. Makes plenty of sense to me.