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There's also the problem of expectations. If you take a bestselling book, and anything else wouldn't make sense from a marketing perspective, you'll have many people that know and love the world, characters and plot. Transferring those from a book to a game will probably leave the fans of the original rather underwhelmed..
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This hits it right on the head. If you try to work inside of creative constraints you will upset your target audience at every turn. Look at the Dresden files tv-show. I didn't think it was that bad, even liked the fact that they gave Bob a body (and I love the actor playing him), but it pissed many fans off royally. Why take the chance when you can create something new, without any licensing fees and zero risk of doing something "you're not supposed to do" which alienates your target audience?
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In other words, the question is not "why don't they do it with books". It is more: "Why on earth do they do it with movies?" :-)
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That's it. Looking back at the history of video games, and the absolute fiascos that licensed games have generally turned out to be; why would you ever want to walk down that road again?
Battlefield 3 is about to be released. It's got 1.3 million pre-orders. It's generated, by conservative measures, $90 millon before it's even been released. It's expected to quadruple that during its lifespan, easily. WoW generates about $700 million with every expansion, and more than a billion dollars in subscriber fees each year. Of course, I'd argue that WoW is derivative to the point of plagiarism but that's beside the point. Bioware simply dropped the dungeons and dragons license since they didn't need it anymore, their own series Dragon Age will have sold close to 10 million copies shortly.
What are book publishers supposed to wave in front of developers in order to catch their attention when they're up against numbers like those from IPs the developers made themselves? The only hope for innovative games based on books lie in the hands of indie developers and small studios, and they can't afford the licensing costs.