We need to talk about Outright Games again ► Ludology Now!

Every parent who loves video games looks forward to that moment their child can experience their favorite titles with them. For me that moment came early – at age three, all my son wanted to play was Dark Souls. Sure, that came from watching me play and wanting to emulate that, but he did well! Astro’s Playroom taught him how to use a 3D camera and the triggers, and he brought that knowledge with him into Lordran.

Of course, it is quite a difficult game, and so we experimented with other things. At the time we had been watching (far too much) PAW Patrol, so we decided to check out PAW Patrol Mighty Pups: Save Adventure Bay. This was my first encounter with Outright Games, but it would be far from the last.

MY PREVIOUS THOUGHTS ON OUTRIGHT GAMES CAN BE FOUND HERE: GAMES MY KIDS LOVED IN 2025

I didn’t know it then, but the same year Outright Games released PAW Patrol Might Pups: Save Adventure Bay, it also put out six other titles: Gigantosaurus: The Game, Trollhunters: Defenders of Arcadia, L.O.L. Surprise! Movie Maker, Zoids Wild: Blast Unleashed, Ben 10: Power Trip, and Transformers: Battlegrounds. The next year, in 2021, Outright Games released titles based on Bratz, DreamWorks Spirit, The Addams Family, Peppa Pig, PJ Masks, and more. The company has cornered the market on licensed products for children, and I’m here to say that they need to take that more seriously.

Most recently, my (three-, soon to be four-year-old) daughter and I have played The Grinch: Christmas Adventures and DreamWorks Gabby’s Dollhouse: Ready to Party. Out of any of these titles, I do think the Gabby’s Dollhouse game tries the most to be enjoyable, but every single product Outright Games comes out with feels undercooked and unseasoned. They are hollow, soulless facsimiles of what a real game with these characters could be, and it all feels like such a painful waste.

In as best an example as I can give, Outright Games published the abysmal Bluey video game a year or so ago.

To be clear, Outright Games is a publisher, not a developer. They have worked with many, many studios over the years, including 3DClouds, Aheartfulofgames, Artax Games, Casual Brothers Ltd., Climax Studios, Drakhar Studio, Graphite Lab, Infinigon S.L., Melbot Studios, Petoons Studio, PHL Collective, Recotechnology S.L., Stage Clear Studios, Tessera Studios, Torus Games, and Xaloc Studios — and those are just the ones Outright Games worked with more than once.

It is wildly interesting to me that, despite all these different game developers, each title published by Outright Games has the same type of trashy gameplay. The same weird collision maps, the same floaty characters, the same half-finished ideas. It’s like every developer in the Outright Games umbrella is given a box of the same shoddy tools and very deliberate instructions to not try too hard.

ALSO RELATED: Outright Games lays off 27 staff via GamesIndustry.biz

The reason I’m bringing it up now is that, for the first time ever, my son is starting to notice. He’s six now and has been playing Ben 10: Power Trip, and the topic of this column was birthed when he said “Dad, why is he floating?”

The “he” in question was a random NPC in the Ben 10 game who was supposedly fishing off a pier. He was holding a fishing pole angled off a pier, at least, although no line was visible. He was also floating about three feet above the ground. “Oh,” I responded. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah,” my son said. “This game is kind of bad.”

That was the first time he had ever said that out loud, to me at least. I think it might have been the first time he noticed a game could be bad. He stopped playing the game about three minutes later and hasn’t touched it since. Instead, he’s been playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 on his Switch.

Therein lies the two fundamental differences a publisher can take when making games for children. No one can argue that, by and large, Nintendo targets the same demographic that Outright Games does. Both publishers are trying to engage with players roughly 3-10 years old. The difference is, Nintendo makes games that are good even when your brain is fully developed.

Perhaps I am being a bit rude, but I myself think it is rude to target children with low-effort content in an attempt to trick them with brand recognition into experiencing a sub-par product. Just because something is for children doesn’t mean it has to be bad. Look at the difference between a movie like Zootopia 2 and a movie like The Super Mario Galaxy Movie – oops, maybe Nintendo is playing both sides after all.