For the last few decades a growing trend has been fans of either a licensed property or video game franchise stepping up to make their own ideal vision of a video game based in said property’s universe. These games are either original storylines or follow the canon of the respective universe, however watching these rookie game developers and the process of fan-made games as a whole grow has been an amazing ride.

Not caring for the most recent Namco DBZ games? Maybe the fan-made Hyper DBZ will be your fancy.

For years fan-made games have gained the attention of gamers who play along with the AAA developed counterpart, and for good reason, nine times out of ten these games ate better than the retail version which had thousands upon million of dollars pumped into it’s eventual release. There’s nothing more insulting than a proverbial bitch slap to an AAA developer and all that money when a team of 1 (yes a single entity)- 20 people end up building a much better game than you, and to add even further insult to injury these developers for the most part don’t even spend a single cent on development for these games unless they’re paying for a game design program or fancy engine.

Meet “Earth’s Special Forces”, another fan-made DBZ game that has been in development for 10 years, and it looks amazing.

With mod support and simple to use game makers it’s easier now more than ever to create a classic tie in of your favorite film, anime, video game, or whatever your heart desires to build into game form. Time and time again it has been proven that licensed games can work and don’t need to be a quick cash in job, but when fans always get it right it’s time to wake up and realize that you’re both wasting money on something that you’re very likely to not get back, as well as screwing fans out of a great gaming experience.

An example of a great licensed game.

Fan-made games should inspire these developers to drive and create licensed titles worthy of the $30-$60 price, instead they get something else. Cease and desist letters telling them to drop their hard work or face a nasty thing called a lawsuit. That’s right, these fans are asked to just drop their efforts at bringing a great gaming experience to both fans of the property and gamers as a whole. It’s rather embarrassing to say the least, though these days cease and desist letters towards fan games don’t happen very often thankfully. Often times developers and property owners will show support for these fan made games and their developers.

Super Smash Flash, a fan-made game inspired by Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. franchise.

Fans being better at creating the games they want than trained professionals is always going to show some flaws with major devs and publishers. And as the software grows & becomes more available to the general public, it’s going to make these AAA designing devs look even sillier when a game made by a team of one to six people looks like it came out of an office building full of over 100 highly trained developers. That’s not to say every licensed game is crap, there’s more than a few diamonds in the rough. Look at the LEGO games, look at Rocksteady’s Batman franchise, the possibilities are there, but budget and timing gets in the way of most of the potential these games have. The industry needs to seriously re-evaluate how they budget games built from a license IP, or these titles will lose out to games made by normal everyday fans for fans.