Ubisoft's latest movie-game tie-in, Avatar, didn't do so hot. With that in mind, the studio has revealed that it will cut back on tie-in games. In a recent investor call, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot outlined the company's plan to focus on original IP.

"Our plan is to take more care of our high-end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games," said Guillemot in a recent call to investors. "So the goal is to reuse the investment and licenses and put more emphasis on the making of our brands bigger and make sure they can come more often with high quality. So it doesn't mean we will stop but we're going to spend less in licenses in the future."

This should be good news as it hopefully means we'll be seeing less shovelware and more quality titles. Now if just more companies would follow suit...

Who knew Peter Jackson would be such a big Modern Warfare 2 fan? The legendary director and producer is currently enjoying the game "more than films" at the moment, he revealed in a recent interview (thanks, VG247).

"[Spec Ops] is hard, I know, and to get to that final level, which is what? Echo is it?...I have still got to crack through a lot of things to open up that one level, but it's a great game," said Jackson. "I'm enjoying these games more than I am enjoying films at the moment.

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This subject has been discussed, almost exhaustively, before, usually because the end result is about as pleasant as a lump of buffalo excrement, served between two slices of bread. It just doesn't work. Or does it?

In the past, many of us have been subjected to a flood of substandard games, most of which accompany their big screen siblings, and usually they all end up being absolutely awful. Now, of course, the majority of these adaptations are aimed purely at children. My own son loves to play them, with Shrek 3, Cars and WALL-E among his favourites.  And, being his dad and the owner of the only Xbox in the house, I thought I'd give them a try as well. This, it turns out, was a serious error on my part.

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Before you go calling Cinemaware co-founder Bob Jacob Captain Obvious, he's got some good insight into why exactly movie tie-ins always tend to suck.

"As far as games and movies - there are inherent problems," he stated. "The basic reason why so many bad games have been made on film licenses is simply because of a business reality that no one has been able to overcome yet.

"That reality is that the time it takes a film to [hit theaters after being green-lit] is never more than a year. What kind of a game can you do in a year? Generally a piece of crap.

"EA can get around that a little bit by throwing a few hundred guys at a project. But for the most part, it's been a pretty sorry history, and until we can solve the basic timing issues it's going to be tough."

Hollywood might want to think twice about that Darksiders movie.