Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In today’s multi-platform reality, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small game franchises.
Fifteen years ago, while I was a producer at Ubisoft developing the game that would later become Assassin’s Creed, we devoted an entire year to building a franchise structure that could act as the ongoing narrative engine for later games and platforms. We were committed to giving the professional creative teams who would eventually make later games, films, books, and comics the freedom to adapt the Assassin’s Creed mythos and universe for their own platforms, and to take ownership of what they created. So long as professional developers chose a key historical moment and told the “real story” of Assassin and Templar involvement in events, their work would still belong inside the franchise. That model succeeded: Assassin’s Creed turned into one of the fastest-selling IPs of the last 20 years.
Today, though, that “fastest-selling” measure is mostly beside the point. Many of the methods we used to drive the original Assassin’s Creed brand — carefully shaping the game’s “X factor,” building anticipation for launch day — no longer ensure success. The truth is that players now are fundamentally wired differently from the gamers of the aughts: they’re more discerning, more inventive, more social. Above all, their identity is bound up with many micro-tribes they are constantly in touch with. That is what games are about now, first and foremost: they are a place to spend time with the micro-tribe you choose in a world you build.
The objective of a game is no longer to be the loudest subject of conversation at launch; it is to become the setting for loud conversations. Put another way: if the original Assassin’s Creed was preparing to be the opening night of Hamilton, we want future IPs to be a neighborhood bar where people discuss whatever the newest Hamilton is: the spot that is always cool, relaxed, and inviting — because the customers are steering the discussion and, in fact, are the ones starring in the show.
We are at a pivot point in IP development. It is no longer sufficient to simply hand franchise keys to professionals in other media while game studios tightly manage character arcs and story. The hit franchises of the future have to be built to preserve quality and canon even when — especially when — ownership is passed to fans. Fans will have the creative authority to guide the story, shape the game universe, and generate virality from the inside out.
Fan ownership goes beyond fan service
In 2021, the sign of a successful blockbuster franchise is not one that spins out a huge number of sequels. Nor is it when a game successfully becomes transmedia, producing best-sellers across media categories. Today, a franchise is genuinely successful when fans begin writing fiction … and making art showing your two hetero male lead characters kissing. For fans, that imagined liplock signals personal investment — there is a deep appreciation that goes hand in hand with this kind of fan reading.
When fans fall for characters or a particular narrative, the franchise becomes part of who they are. Over the years, both the film and game industries have been slow to recognize this, carefully protecting the creative process and the narrative. (Meanwhile, music has understood this phenomenon since at least the invention of the blues.)
Many franchises slipped into, or developed into, fan ownership, mostly by accident. Star Wars, for instance, had been taken over by fans long before George Lucas made peace with its fandom. In a misguided effort to protect the brand, in fact, he and Lucasfilm went to considerable lengths to discourage and suppress fan fiction. But fans loved Star Wars so deeply that they were going to “own” the story no matter Lucas’s limits. Of course, Star Wars eventually became one of the most fan-friendly franchises ever.
Although preserving a franchise’s integrity is still essential, today rigid continuity — refusing to adapt or react to fans — is the real threat. In this era of mobile, social mechanics, and games as pop culture, franchise owners are rapidly discovering what can happen when you accept the audience as the true owners of your IP.
The first time I saw the magic that can occur when fans take control of an IP was when I was working on The Sims in the early 2000s. Whether it is middle-aged Sims players enacting the ideal suburban life they wish they had or core gamers inventing a twisted frat scenario, tens of millions of Sims players use the game to build and share their own original stories and extend the ones suggested in the game. In some ways, it is the absence of a narrative in The Sims that makes the IP so powerful. Fans can invent their own explanations for Bella Goth’s disappearance — and that builds a richness in the brand from the ground up that no creative team can match or plan from the top down.
When players build their own communities, expand a game’s mythology, and eventually create their own language and codes of conduct, that is when you know you have fan ownership. Making a roller skating TikTok may signal membership in an in-group, but recreating your wedding lehenga for Animal Crossing — where a lively community has formed around fashion design and influencers—truly develops a shared personal history and culture. Thanks to the many forms of interactivity in games and the modding tradition, fan ownership can reach new forms that are not possible in other media.
Developers today understand that letting fans own their IP benefits both sides. The question is how to encourage that level of engagement intentionally, from the outset.
Why now? Continuous partial engagement
The steady spread of screens and content streams over the last 20 years means that we have moved from a world of undivided attention to one of nonstop multitasking. Even in the early days, we recognized and designed for screen proliferation when building Assassin’s Creed — we knew that the key to succeeding across screens was to have games and narratives optimized for their distinct platforms, not ports or licenses.
Since then, we have quickly moved from a world of multitasking and continuous partial attention to continuous partial engagement. (Most readers probably have at least four other windows open right now, bouncing back and forth between this post and other tasks. I am not even offended.)
This new way of living is not just about the splitting of cognition. Being connected all the time means that endless amounts of computing power and data are available everywhere. While smartphones presently act as thin-clients to the endlessly powerful cloud, we have still not fully understood their implications as a rich, real-time sensor platform spanning the earth. And most importantly for game makers, all of these connected devices have only just begun to reveal the basics of their role as personal, social beacons.
The relationship between game developers and their audiences used to look more like traditional media. The old model — the creative director (“author”) and the players who would consume the content or “beat the game” (“audience”) — was one to many. Over the last 20 years, most media moved to an engagement model: Content creators talk with their fans and adjust content accordingly, while the community creates content alongside one another and the OG creator.
The shift of many of the game industry’s biggest franchises from premium launches to the games as a service (GaaS) model — Grand Theft Auto to Grand Theft Auto Online, for example, or Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six to Siege) — was one important move toward two-way engagement, but the fully developed vision for this new generation of highly social, tech-savvy, creative multitaskers is a network model.
To keep people’s attention now, you need the power of the network. Game content needs to matter to people at their core. How do you make content truly matter to your audience? You make it all about them; you let them become the creators themselves. Game studios are no longer closed creative teams broadcasting to millions of faceless “consumers.” In this new world, the way to become relevant is to invert that model — to network it — so that fans are now co-creators driving the content, building the narrative, and guiding the creative team’s pursuits.
Networks as a framework for building fan-driven IPs
If making a great IP were simple, then every school teacher would leave their job and write the next Harry Potter series. There is no formula for creating a blockbuster IP, but I would argue there is a new framework taking shape for how to think about it, one where creative teams are not “creating an IP,” so much as building the rails for fans to create.
The best way to explain this approach is through network theory. A network is made up of many nodes in many roles, with links of different strength between them. In entertainment, a node is a person, whether a creator, a fan, a journalist, a thought leader, or otherwise.
There are two kinds of connections one node can have to another, strong or weak. Strong links stand for close associations and high content-generating, high-investment interactions; weak links stand for low content-generating, low-cost interactions.
A franchise’s strength depends largely on how many robust ties it has. A network’s power comes from its scale — the total count of nodes and the number of links between them. Weak ties are simpler to establish and keep going. That is why you may have more Twitter followers than Facebook friends, and more Facebook friends than real friends. For the same reason, network power usually tracks how easy it is to make weak ties — links between existing nodes arise more readily, and adding new nodes is easier.
To build a blockbuster IP for an audience raised in a socially networked era of continuous partial engagement, you have to support low-effort engagement, welcome UGC, and create approaches through which nodes can form fresh links across social media channels. Early Facebook games such as FarmVille were strong examples of this kind of low-friction interaction; tending a friend’s farm was the game-world version of “liking” their newest Instagram post.
But what is the game-world equivalent of today’s viral TikTok remixes? Games can offer what the remix generation wants most: a shared experience that is fully immersive, live, competitive or cooperative, and above all, genuinely personal.
Lightweight co-creation with 5,000 friends
The sandbox survival game Valheim shows that games can greatly deepen online social interaction, not just because they can unfold in immersive shared worlds, but because they create social permission: “lightweight” ways to connect and signal care without needing to arrange a 30-minute video call or a four-hour raid. Constructing a shared shelter and stocking the chests with useful supplies builds a base for social bonds that matter. When you can’t have people over for a barbecue in the real world, you can start up a cooking station in Valheim.
This lightness is what helps sustain engagement in games, not endless leveling or social spamming, despite what many believe. Some call these lightweight engagement systems “social obligation” exploits. But although obligation does keep people playing a game, that is no different from Guild Progression in World of Warcraft, for example.
What is different is that you now have something to do with your 5,000 friends that feels neither intimidating nor intense. It is a slower-paced moment or activity that leaves room for conversation or lets people say “I’m thinking about you” in an in-group language, with the context adding extra layers of meaning.
Whether in Valheim, Animal Crossing, Fortnight Creative, or Minecraft, the past year of quarantine has shown that shared creative play is the glue that holds communities together. By making lightweight engagement and self-expression possible, games can preserve mindshare and emotional commitment with thousands of friends, even in a world of partial attention and engagement.
Micro-tribes and self-expression
Game designers once believed features had to have stats before gamers would care about them. We used to think players were mostly drawn to items that would help them win, level up, and perform better. Recently, we have learned that for the new generation of players, cosmetics — with no gameplay advantage at all! — can be an even stronger kind of social proof, meaning they push fans to try and copy the same behavior as others. Cosmetics and “skins” (a graphic or sound that alters the look of your avatar) let players reinforce their place in an in-group by presenting their identity in a language that means something to members of that group. Skins have gone wild, but if we can extend that idea to group identity and amplify distinctive creations through streamer endorsement, you raise social proof to a level that badges and stats never could.
In the early days of making the first Assassin’s Creed, we spent a great deal of time devising proxy reward loops to stand in for social permission (community acceptance) and social proof (community adoption). Games once depended on these kinds of mechanics to drive engagement. Now we can actually use social dynamics to create variety and provide real social permission and social proof. The new hyperconnected social world means our audience expects to be able to express themselves and share who they are. Games can deliver social proof and social permission in a way that is immensely compelling.
Social’s gone digital. What does that mean for IP?
It’s meaningless to remark that “the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation” when the entire games industry has been digital since its inception. For someone who creates games and IP, the acceleration of digital is not novel or surprising. However, the horizontal expansion of games over the past year — to serve an ever-growing number of player needs and have a significant and meaningful role in people’s lives — is noteworthy.
As we began creating a new brand with the aim of spanning generations, our objective is to imagine an IP that can function as a creative sandbox for fans, not only for professional teams. The main feature game studios need to design for now is extensibility — the built-in capacity of the IP to be flexible, to expand and evolve together with its fan base.