The Hunger Games

David Cameron has a reputation for taking things easy. He plays games on his iPad; he revels in family life; an anonymous friend told his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning that “if there was an Olympic gold medal for chillaxing, he would win it.” If any chillaxing time was scheduled into his four-night, three-city tour to the U.S. last week, it was mostly on the executive jet that ferried Britain’s Prime Minister and an assortment of advisers and journalists—including TIME—across the Atlantic and from destination to destination.

The mobile gaming tie-in to Universal’s Fast & Furious 6 launched on the iTunes App Store last week and is #1 among free apps in 45 countries. Created with SF-based studio Kabam, it’s also the #1 overall game in 69 countries, the top racing game in 112 countries, and the #1 action game in 85 countries. Its iPad app version runs comparable if even wider in saturation as the top free app in 81 countries. By contrast, Paramount‘s Star Trek: The Game – tied to the release of Star Trek Into Darkness – stayed in-house and it’s doing lousy since it came out last month. According to VG Chartz, unit sales in its first three weeks are only 140K to date across PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 consoles. It’s also considered a failure because it’s very buggy despite years of development. Critics and users alike gave it poor reviews.  So what happened? Insiders say the game originated under Paramount Digital Entertainment president Tom Lesinski who made the decision to develop and produce it in-house vs licensing the intellectual property to a 3rd party publisher like Electronic Arts, Activision, or Ubisoft. When Lesinski was fired in September 2011, his domain was absorbed by the studio. The Star Trek gaming project was picked up by Paramount Promotions’ Brian Miller, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Partnerships and ... Read More »