Video Game TV Series: New Study Reveals What Streamers Should Adapt

Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” Paramount’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” HBO’s “The Last of Us” and Netflix’s “Arcane” are just the start of a new wave of movies and TV series based on popular video games and table-top gaming IP.

From “God of War” and “Warhammer 40,000” set up at Amazon Prime Video to “Twisted Metal” for Peacock, everyone wants a piece of gaming IP in the battle to gain new subscribers and reduce churn.

But instead of fighting for whatever is popular and hasn’t already been adapted, new data provided by fan-community platform and entertainment company Fandom suggests what titles streamers including Netflix, Amazon and HBO Max should be focusing on based on the gaming fanbases of their respective subscribers.

These insights are based on Fandom’s first-party platform, cross-visitation data pulled using its proprietary data platform FanDNA, and tracks Fandom’s top 10 gaming wikis for fans of each streaming platform.

Per Fandom’s findings, which are derived from behavioral data for Fandom’s users vs. a study among a sample asking about attitudes and self reported information:

● Apple TV+ viewers WAY over index for God of War. There’s a God of War series in the works already – but for Amazon Prime where it doesn’t register in the top ten.
● Streamers should consider Starcraft or Half-Life adaptations. These are both decades-old franchises with huge followings, stronger-than-average narratives, and the opportunity for great visual effects.
● Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls could be sleeper hits for a streamer. Similar to The Witcher and Wheel of Time.
● Final Fantasy, Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout could be “serious” adaptations
● The Rainbow Six video games are based on Tom Clancy novels, which have long been a source for successful film & TV adaptations (Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan.)
● Freddy Fazbear (from the Five Nights at Freddy’s game series) popped up for Hulu — this series is very popular with Gen Z and it’s been rumored WarnerMedia is working on a film adaptation already
● Some of these IPs were already films of varying degrees of success: Angry Birds, Doom, Resident Evil, Mortal Kombat

“We started thinking about how, right now, all of these streamers are trying to figure out what they can produce that’s going to be unique and differentiated,” Fandom CMO Stephanie Fried told Variety. “There’s been a real focus on continuing existing franchises because there’s this belief that you have a much bigger leg up. ‘Super Mario Bros.’ just came out and did huge numbers, likely due to the ability to lean on an IP that’s been part of people’s lives for a very long time.

“For a while, the way that this was happening was through comics, like Marvel and DC, and through books like ‘Harry Potter.’ And all of a sudden, gaming was the next place. There are so many games, different types of games. And we’ve seen all of the ones that have actually been developed into franchises on other screens that have been successful. And yet I feel like they’ve only tapped the surface there because comics and books have always been a little bit more connected, but now gaming, it’s going both ways, both developing from a gaming franchise into TV movies and vice versa.”

While several of the game titles that show up in these findings have already been adapted for screen — many by different platforms than the ones they align with best in the study — Fandom’s data suggests “it’s important for studios to consider what’s a good content fit for specific platforms/streaming services, whether it’s built from scratch, getting the rights to existing content or carving out a space to develop a different part of the franchise.”

See below for the Fandom’s data broken down by streamer. For example, Fandom found that visitors to the Peacock Wikis “are 37x more likely to engage with Angry Birds than other Fandom users; 29x more likely to engage with Sonic than other users; and so on.”