In case it wasn’t clear, The Last of Us made it obvious: at their very best, big-budget video games should be comparable to prestige television, so much so that adapting one for HBO is a relatively straightforward affair. This bar-setting exercise is further exemplified by other PlayStation franchises marching toward adaptation: Ghost of Tsushima is set to be a film and anime, God of War has Prime Video aspirations, and Horizon Zero Dawn, previously on its way to becoming a Netflix series, is now being adapted for cinemas. It’s not an accident: games at this scale are a high-risk affair, too expensive to just be games.
Some developers, how …