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To brand or not to brand your next video game

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 26 min

To brand or not to brand is one of the oldest discussions in video games. Adding a popular brand like Harry Potter could be just the thing for Niantic’s next game, coming on the heels of Pokémon Go. But Electronic Arts once focused a huge amount of resources on brands like James Bond and Harry Potter, and it encountered oversaturation and consumer exhaustion.

We discussed these topics at a panel I moderated at the recent Montreal International Game Summit. Brands in games are cyclical. Sometimes they work in the early stage of a platform, and sometimes they do better amid an explosion of titles, like with the mobile game ecosystem.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.