Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in English
The 2025 BAFTA Games Awards will air April 8 — just after the theatrical release of “Minecraft,” ahead of HBO’s “The Last of Us” Season 2 and amid Amazon’s high-budget production on the second season of “Fallout.” It’s hard to argue there has been a more exciting time to be part of a project straddling both Hollywood and the gaming industry, or a riskier time to rollout your take on such valuable IP.
The bar has been set very high for video game adaptations across film and TV as the projects — and the games they are based on — rack up awards nominations and critical acclaim, and their success or failure is more important than ever to the gaming industry. It used to be a flop of an adaptation could exist in a vacuum independent of the gaming franchise itself — but now that adaptations like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Fallout” and “The Last of Us” have proven there’s a method to the madness, an adaptation that bombs will be more directly tied to its source IP and the company that owns it. However, that risk does come with the potential for a massive reward.
“I think what people have seen in Hollywood is that video game adaptations, if done right, can actually be very popular, and they scale really well,” PlayStation Productions chief Asad Qizilbash told Variety. “That’s been a big sea change that I’ve seen in the last five, six years, since we’ve really started to come and deliver some great content. Because of that, there’s a confidence level that the film industry is seeing. For one, they’re seeing that some of the great creative ideas of stories are coming from video games — and I truly believe that some of the best stories you are seeing are from video games.”
Qizilbash adds: “But no. 2 is they’re seeing that, if done well, adaptations can really reach a different audience. I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot quicker picking up of adaptations. One thing I would say is you have to strike a balance between establishing it as a video game property first and getting it out there. Establishing an audience, establishing a fan base. In the conversations I’ve had with our film studio, it’s important and that makes it less risky for them, is when there’s an established audience. And so when you have a brand new IP, it may not have an established audience.”
Among the top noms at this year’s BAFTA Games Awards is PlayStation’s “Astro Bot,” a critical darling family-friendly platformer that Qizilbash is “absolutely” looking at for its potential to be added to PlayStation’s growing list of adaptations, which currently stands at at least 10 projects in various stages of development. Aside from the second season of “The Last of Us,” that includes Amazon’s “God of War” TV series and a Sony feature film adaptation of “Horizon Zero Dawn,” which was first set up as a TV show at Netflix. So how does PlayStation decide which of its many titles is worthy of the adaptation risk?
“For us, it’s, ‘OK, we’ve established one of our franchises as a great game. It’s starting to get a built-in audience. It’s winning awards.’ Those are very early indicators for us to want to try and grow that franchise and grow that IP,” Qizilbash said. “So we’re constantly looking at that. And I would say it’s not just sort of awards and nominations that drive that. Sometimes we have IP that’s just got great stories that a creator really wants to adapt it.”
How you adapt it matters too, as Qizilbash notes “Horizon” was found to be a better idea as a film than a TV series when PlayStation was working with Netflix and “it just wasn’t creatively going how we wanted to.” The head of Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studios and “Fallout” producer Todd Howard echoes Qizilbash’s sentiment when it came to the choice to go with Jonathan Nolan’s idea for a TV series over a “Fallout” movie.
“Originally, a lot of people were approaching to do a feature film. And looking at what we wanted to do for this one, that felt too compressed,” Howard said. “‘Fallout’ is such an amazing world — what would we really want to watch in it? Well, we’d like to watch the next story, or new stories in that world, as opposed to, again, in this instance, adapting a story we had told and kind of compressing it down. For this one, we were very much interested in telling new stories.”
What’s also important to the overall success of the video-game adaptation trend is knowing when to quit. For “The Last of Us” showrunner Craig Mazin, that will be when he runs out of source material from game developer Naughty Dog and game co-creator and fellow TV series producer Neil Druckmann.
“We certainly need another season to finish, at minimum, but it may very well be that we need a couple more seasons to finish,” Mazin said ahead of the April 13 premiere of Season 2. “And the length of those seasons, currently, the story will tell us how many episodes it should be, and where we should hit pause.”
But he sees the potential for HBO to want to continue exploring “The Last of Us” world beyond the two games that have been published by PlayStation in the popular franchise with a spinoff series.
“As far as additional source material, as a fan of ‘The Last of Us,’ if Neil has more games, I would love it,” Mazin said. “For me as a writer and showrunner, this is my ‘Last of Us.’ So this will be the last of my ‘Last of Us,’ covering the events of the first and second game. I think there’s always a world where you could see additional material, like the way ‘House of the Dragon’ has thrived after the conclusion of ‘Game of Thrones.’ And I could certainly see myself being somebody that the people making that show, they pick up the phone and call me and say, ‘How did you do this? Or what do you think about this?’ But it won’t be mine to do. Somebody else will be handling that.”
Then there is of course how these traditional entertainment companies begin to think about not just adaptations of games, but what they can learn from the gaming industry — and what the gaming industry can learn from them.
“I think what will be a great development is when people start thinking about the individual media and their individual strengths and how they all sit within an ecosystem,” BAFTA Games Committee member Charu Desodt said. “So games, for example, I think they bring a lot of player agency. They bring lots of player empathy with the characters and the situations. That also means that players are very invested in storylines. But then when you’re watching a film, it’s a contained story, and that’s a really lovely way to to engage with an IP. So people are thinking about that aspect of it as well. And then in general, players are also looking to video games for increasingly meaningful social connections. These are things that developers are going to be taking account of, too.”
“Fallout’s” Howard says there are “a lot of opportunities” for a game and its TV show counterpart to create a feedback loop after the spike in player engagement Bethesda saw for “Fallout 76” when the first season of the TV series came out.
“I don’t want to spoil anything, but obviously we still do a lot of development on ‘Fallout,’ in particular with ‘Fallout 76’ and we’re in the midst of Season 2 right now,” Howard said. “Actually, last week, I was on set a whole bunch and really excited for what’s happening on Season 2. And you have that hope in the first season, ‘Hey, what effect does that have on the larger franchise?’ Obviously, particularly the games, but everything around the franchise. And it had a tremendous effect for both people who already love the franchise and obviously a lot of new new people coming in. So we had done the work for Season 1 to really make the games welcoming to a new audience and have them in a good place. And it was hugely successful. We learned a lot and as we head into future things — knowing when a new season comes out that there’s going to be an audience, both a new one and a returning one to these games — we’re thinking, how do we make it the best it can be for the players?”
Mazin thinks one of the biggest lessons to be learned is how to manage development pipelines across all mediums, as expectations grow with each passing year for the quality of games, TV shows and movies.
“I think Hollywood will be very carefully watching what happens with ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ [this fall] because I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say that ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ will be the largest selling piece of media ever — not including the Bible,” Mazin said. “I’m saying motion-picture medium of any kind. And ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ came out in 2013. The size of these things requires time. And people are getting used to an interesting combination of handmade, super-attentive method of making things married to size, which again, makes things harder to do. And as the bar is raised with production, and as every episode starts to approach movie quality and movie intensity, it does take more time.”
The 21st BAFTA Games Awards will stream April 8 on BAFTA’s official YouTube channel and Twitch.
