Christian Fonnesbech is a well-known name in the North European games industry. He was previously head of IP development at Nordisk Film Games, but in 2019 he founded Leverage in Copenhagen to help game studios develop their IP.
Down the years, he has worked as a consultant on games of all sizes, although non-disclosure agreements prevent him from saying much more. What he can say is that among many others, he has worked with the teams behind Dead Island, Metro, Conan Exiles, Dune Awakening, Exoborne, and the Dark Pictures Anthology – although not necessarily on those games. And he thinks there’s one key thing that studios get wrong: switching main characters for a sequel.
Fonnesbech points out that although it’s far from the only component, the main character is probably the most precious facet of any fledgling IP. “Gameplay, first and foremost, is a huge part of every franchise, of course,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “The world is a huge part of it as well. But the character is the easiest thing to own in a court of law. It’s where people connect emotionally. It’s a huge part of the expectations we have coming back to a franchise. So mess with it at your mortal peril.”
His logic is that even getting to the point where an IP connects with an audience is incredibly difficult, so it’s a huge risk to mess with the formula. “I think the baseline challenge is that creative people think they can make hit after hit, but most of them can’t,” says Fonnesbech. “Connecting emotionally with millions of people is so difficult, it’s almost impossible, and you’ll be lucky if you get one hit.”
The press might highlight rare success stories, studios that are able to launch hit IP after hit IP – but that’s not the reality for most developers. “Don’t compare yourself to Landfall or Blizzard: that’s not how the world works.”
For those lucky few studios that birth a hit game, Fonnesbech thinks they should guard the IP jealously. “If you found something that connects, you have proof that, hey, this works: it’s not just success, it’s evidence. And if that emotional connection sits in a character, you should be really, really careful about throwing it away, because what you’re giving up is this thing you found that works, you’re giving up the accumulated time people have spent with that character.
“You’re making a really big bet that you can do it again, and you’re hoping that even if you do do it again, you don’t break what worked in the first place.”
Main draw
The main character provides the player’s chief connection with a title, thinks Fonnesbech. “The gameplay shapes the emotional journey you’re having, but the thing is, when you’ve played that game for 500 hours while in the company of, say, Agent 47 from Hitman, then you can’t really separate those two things in your head. That character has become that emotional feeling. The character is what you relate to.”
The game’s character is also something that travels across the various aspects of a franchise, whether it’s merchandise or movies, so Fonnesbech thinks it makes sense to maintain continuity.
But what about games that have switched main characters? Hades 2 comes to mind, where the player controls Melinoë, sister to the protagonist of the first game, Zagreus. That game has clearly been a big success, so what’s the problem?
“Well, there’s two different things here,” says Fonnesbech. “First off, we have to realise that there’s art and there’s business. And if you make an artistic choice to say, ‘We want to do a female character,’ more power to you. But that’s an artistic choice, it’s not a business choice.
“So short term, it worked fine: they got another hit. But what is the Hades IP really about now? In the first Hades game, which was brilliant in every way, I think they hit every target on the gameplay, on the character, on the world.
“Artistically, I think it was a brilliant choice. Business-wise, I’m not so sure”
“But it was about a young man rebelling against his father and slowly discovering what a messed up family history he came from, and that he had to break the pattern. That was a really clear emotional journey about leaving home – and Hades 2 is about finding home. It’s a different emotional journey. Same brilliant gameplay, but now we are a little unsure what Hades is about. Artistically, I think it was a brilliant choice. Business-wise, I’m not so sure.”
Hades 2 is far from the only big-name to switch main characters: the upcoming titles Control Resonant, God of War Laufey, and The Witcher 4 are all changing their leads. Are they making a mistake?
“I think in some cases bigger mistakes than others,” says Fonnesbech. In the original Control, he points out that main character Jesse Faden had a clear emotional journey where she was looking for her brother, but in the sequel, her brother Dylan takes the lead.
“Millions of people spent a lot of hours with Jesse, so this is an IP asset that has enormous value in the market. So why switch to the brother? Let’s think back: what would Tomb Raider look like today if game two had been about Lara’s brother?”
“The problem is that we are coming for Kratos”
Again, he says, he understands the artistic impulse to try something new. “But from an IP and franchise perspective, you are messing up what people expect from that franchise. Would you be happy to go to the next James Bond movie if it wasn’t about James Bond?”
God of War Laufey faces a similar situation. “The problem is that we are coming for Kratos,” says Fonnesbech. He points out that the series did something “very rare and brilliant in games” by rebooting the franchise in 2018 and giving Kratos a son, which created a fresh emotional journey while keeping the same character.
“And Laufey may be just as brilliant, but it’s not Kratos, it’s a different character. I think even if you said it was Kratos’s brother, that would be a mistake, too. The problem is, in the internet debate, it quickly becomes, ‘Why can’t we have a woman?’ Well, these are two different issues. I think we should definitely have more women in games, but I don’t think we should pull out the tentpole that’s holding up existing franchises.”
Familiar ground
Fonnesbech says the secret to successful franchises is familiarity. “We are lowering our purchase risk by buying something we know,” he says. “We know what we’re going to get quality-wise, we know what it’s about, we know we connect with it, we know this is going to be satisfying.”
Changing the main character generates friction and risks messing with that familiarity, that known quantity. But sticking with the same people doesn’t necessarily mean the franchise becomes creatively stale. By way of example, Fonnesbech points to Hollywood’s periodic reinvention of Batman with different actors and different tones. He thinks we will see more of this in games, with the 2018 God of War reboot providing one of the first examples of a character refresh.
But what about other examples from Hollywood, like Star Wars? Isn’t that franchise an example of perhaps how it’s more important to build the world, creating a place for different stories to be set, rather than reheating the same old characters again and again?
Fonnesbech notes that Star Wars didn’t start out like this. “Originally, it was Luke and Leia and Darth Vader, and for three movies, that was it.” There’s a point, he says, where an IP can stop being about the emotional journey of a handful of characters and instead evolve into more of a brand or ecosystem – but that point comes a long way down the line. “That’s not 10 million fans, that’s a hundred million fans.”
“I think it would be stronger if they had a recognisable tentpole character”
He says that this world-focused strategy is something that Cyberpunk 2077 is trying relatively early in the franchise’s life. “They don’t have a tentpole character, it’s basically an anthology set in Night City, and I’m not sure it’s the best strategy. I think it would be stronger if they had a recognisable tentpole character, but they’re doing different characters in the same city on different media.
“But you have to notice that when Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out on Netflix, a lot of people went back into the game and killed the villain in Edgerunners, so even when you don’t pursue the character strategy, this is what people are latching onto. We recognise humans, we relate to characters.”
Fresh eyes
Fonnesbech notes that one argument for switching main characters is that the game can potentially reach a new audience – but in fact, the opposite can happen.
“I think there’s a real danger that what you’re actually doing is addressing a subset of your original audience,” he says, where you end up slicing your audience “thinner and thinner” with each release.
The key is consistency, he says. “Consistent world, consistent characters, consistent emotional journeys, consistent conflict, consistent themes, consistent gameplay.
“One thing I see quite a few times in my consulting work is people saying, ‘So we’ve got a universe, can we do a different kind of gameplay within this IP?’ And my answer is usually, ‘be really careful about that’, because when Star Wars does it, they’ve got a billion fans. So even if they only hit 5%, they’ve still got a reasonable turnover for that game. But if you’ve only got, what, five million fans, and you now switch from FPS to RTS, what are you going to sell? 200,000? It’s not the same IP anymore. Do we really go to Halo to play an RTS? No, we don’t.”
Developers can get away with making a turn-based tactics game like Star Wars: Zero Company because Star Wars is an absolutely enormous IP, he says. “It’s just a completely different beast.” But from a business perspective, he says, it’s generally not a good idea to keep switching between genres using the same IP, giving the Halo Wars RTS titles as an example. “Everybody agrees they were good games, but it’s not why we buy Halo, is it?”