Tony Hawk vs Tom Clancy

Tony Hawk recently announced that the upcoming Tony Hawks Ride game turned out to be “better than expected.” Most of the gamers gave negative responses, saying “Tony, you should retire” or “Tony, please don’t ruin yourself with awful games” or “Tony has been a pawn” or so many comments like that (I made them all up, because I can’t copy paste their comments here). On the other hand we all know that a new game from Tom Clancy’s Splinter’s series is coming soon. Everyone said “OMG!!! That is so awesome” or said “Looking forward for the new one” or “It’s about time” or so on (I again made the dialogs up). So what makes people jeer Tony Hawks while people cheer Tom Clancy? They are no doubt two of the most successful celebrities in the world. When it comes to gaming, I guess they are not involved in game development, since it’s the developers’ job to build games. They are mainly for publicity. It is true that the recent Tony Hawk games are getting negative reviews whereas Tom Clancy games getting mostly positive reviews. It is the developers’ and publishers’ fault that they are making bad games. Why should Tony get the blame for it?

 

The downfall of the Tony Hawk series clearly gives a picture of what happens to a celebrity himself/herself when he/she brands his/her name on something that fail. Celebrities have got such a huge aura on people that whatever they do will attract people instantly and greatly. When anything they brand gets successful, people will buy madly and the publisher will receive easy money. That is why there are so many Tony Hawk games out there and Activision tries to milk the franchise by cutting the development time (maybe up to a year) and release these games unpolished. So what happens? These games get negative reviews, but the meager sales are enough to bring them quite a profit, since they price these games at the price of high IP games and also there are loyalists buying these games. So it does not matter to them. However, all the problems go towards Tony Hawk, who is actually branding the product and who had put his celebrity image on stake. Now, he is considered as a joke in the gaming industry by critics and gamers alike. Every people have ups and downs, and people can mend their downs pretty easily. However for a celebrity, these ups and downs take into extreme level. Think about Tiger Woods. Now EA is on talks of his involvement in the Tiger Woods golf series. He has suffered a serious downfall and maybe EA cannot jeopardize their series by continuing with him. As for Tony Hawks, he is suffering due to publishers and developers ignorance in building quality games. I guess he should have stopped branding his game after Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, which brought Tony Hawk to its peak.

 

Tom Clancy is so lucky, not to face the similar fate like Tony Hawks. He put his faith on the publisher (currently UbiSoft) on building quality games and the developers were successful on building quality games. UbiSoft took Tom Clancy games as part of their big projects and put longer development and polishing times, instead of milking the Tom Clancy franchise to get easy money. It is true when you launch good games, you receive massive profit and the profit stays for a long time as good games always have high longevity time factor when it comes to sales. Since Tom Clancy is a well known celebrity, sales are very high. As a result Tom Clancy is a very successful personality in the gaming world.

 

The gaming industry should follow a trend. Those who know physics knows that if we raise the amplitude of a wave provided the wavelength remains the game, the slope of the curve increases, therefore its steeper in both elevation and downhill. Now let’s make this analogous to the development of the games. The wavelength is the timeframe of a game. Let the amplitude be the money and famed earned. The amplitude increases due to a celebrity factor. So how this stands? If Activision follow the short time trend, they will get easy money due steepness of the curve and is easy to go downhill in fame if the game is negatively criticize. Now for a Tom Clancy game, let us increase the wavelength keeping the amplitude constant since he is also a celebrity. So the slope of the curve when increasing and decreasing will be less than before. There will be steady sales over a long period of time and if any of his games is negatively criticized, he would have much more time to get back on track since his fame will not go down that easily. I guess that’s what happening today, Tony Hawk going down badly whereas Tom Clancy keeping himself steady. What Tony Hawk needs to do is to give Activision a warning or just leave the publisher and join another publisher who actually cares about his fame. He can redeem himself if he takes right action as gamers love quality games. They do not like to get ripped off.