Lionsgate’s Peter Levin on how the game industry often botches a ‘straight-forward idea’

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SAUSALITO, Calif. — You can make the greatest piece of gaming technology your mind can muster and market it at the Super Bowl, but it’s still just a hunk of plastic until there is something to play on it.

Peter Levin, the recently named president of interactive ventures and games for the film studio Lionsgate, helped wind down the first day of the GamesBeat Summit yesterday. Speaking with moderator Steve Peterson of [a]list, Levin outlined a simple principle of marrying qualitative entertainment to engaging technology. He then spent the majority of the discussion explaining how often the game industry botches such a straight-forward idea.

The era of cheap license spinoffs was a point of contention, when intellectual property would make the transmedia leap from film to video games with minimal production time and budget. A cyclical pattern began to emerge with these products, according to Levin, because license holders and publishers weren’t seeing the games based on existing intellectual property as their own unique entities.

“Even if a TV show [is canceled] in its first season, there is no reason you can’t make a game on that IP,” Levin said. It was seeing the game project as “a derivative” that caused the glut of poorly made licensed cash-ins.

With augmented reality, Levin sees a possibility for the same problem to be play out in reverse. Emerging technologies always come with excitement over their capabilities, but the rush to get that new idea into the marketplace again produces inferior experiences. Only this time, we are trying to capitalize on platform novelty rather than movie release dates.

“I think … bringing qualitative experiences and marrying them to the technology is where they are failing right now,” said Levin. “How are you going to distinguish between entertainment and promotional materials?”

The Summit discussion ended with a few questions from the crowd. Levin, when asked about the Keanu Reeves-led action film John Wick, wasted no time dropping an exciting promise for its fans.

“There will be a lot of John Wick gaming activity, I can assure you,” Levin said.

The interactive ventures and games president had some harsher words for titles revolving around celebrities like Kim Kardashian. Levin stated that the titles felt like they “… prey on the social anxieties of 12-year-old girls …” with achievements tied to popularity and physical appearance.

So don’t expect the John Wick game to take place in the Hollywood Hills.