WB Using Game Reviews To Calculate Royalties

Thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for its article discussing Warner Bros. Interactive's decision to use average review scores in calculating the royalty rates videogame makers must pay to WB. The article explains: "Games based on Warner Bros. licenses must achieve at least a 70% rating [calculated via GameRankings.com and similar services], or incur an increase in royalty rates", with WB's Jason Hall commenting: "An escalating royalty rate kicks in to help compensate us for the brand damage... the further away from 70% it gets, the more expensive the royalty rate becomes... If the publisher delivers on what they promised -- to produce a great game -- it's not even an issue." However, Bruno Bonnell, CEO of Atari, makers of Enter The Matrix, which didn't include this contract clause, comments: "We sold four million copies. That's $250 million worldwide... and Warner Bros. would penalize us because we didn't achieve 70%? Are they joking?"

Comments

Very reasonable

[JMZero]

At one point, "The Matrix Online" was a game license that was very valuable - a marquee game. There was a lot of goodwill out there. "Enter the Matrix" exchanged a lot of that goodwill for money (as did the last two movies).

Now they could have got money out of that franchise with anything from any developer. But if the game was excellent, they would have retained a lot more goodwill - and possibly helped maintain the franchise in the face of the lackluster sequels. That could have been worth much, much more than these sales figures.

Look at the value Ubi Soft has created in the "Prince of Persia" franchise. PoP was dead, no value. Now it has lots, even if Sands of Time didn't sell as well as it should have. Sega is still milking Sonic the Hedgehog on the basis of a couple good games a decade ago.

These things have tremendous, very real value. It makes sense to protect this value via contract - and pegging things to game reviews is as good of an idea as I can think of.

Oh, great

[0x0d0a]

That is bad for end users.

The consumer is best off when reviewers are impartial and unbiased.

We already have to deal with product managers doing everything they can to convince reviewers to give high rankings to sell product. The video game industry suffers particularly much from this, with game publishers taking reviewers (often young people that are not paid much for their review work) on special trips or given gifts. It's hard to find a good, unbiased source of reviews.

So now, there are two more variables -- reviewers are *directly determining* income of developers, and one movie publisher now has incentive for rankings to *drop* if they are near the 70% mark.

This reminds me of an article I read once before -- I believe that it might have been a MacUser article by Andy Ihnatkno. Andy was reviewing a software package, and was contacted by the product manager at the developer early in the week, asking
how the review process was going. Now, normally Andy wouldn't say anything, but the product manager was insistent, and finally he reluctantly said "Well, I would have liked it if you hadn't forced me to do task X manually." The reviewer thanked him and hung up, and Andy got back to reviewing.

Next morning, Andy recieved a package via courier. It contained a new version of the software package, and a handwritten note from the product manager -- "I hope that you'll consider trying this version". It turns out that this version contained the automation feature that Andy had mentioned that he missed. That afternoon, the product manager called up again and asked "What do you think of the product?" Andy again mentioned something that the product didn't do, and next morning, another brown package arrived via courier. Andy thought "You know, this really isn't how the review process is supposed to work" -- but the software *was* getting better. Some poor developer had clearly spent a frantic 24/7 over the weekend adding and testing code. This continued on for a bit, and finally Andy finished his review -- giving the software package a good rating.

This is, surprisingly, a bad thing for the end user. Yes, the software package had some new features when done, but here is the problem. A reviewer will only find a certain percentage of the lacks in a software package -- some will go unnoticed. The user depends on the reviewer reviewing the entire package based on his analysis of the lacking features and bugginess of a subset of the package. The reviewer's opinion can then be extrapolated to the entire package. If the developer can change things as the review is happening -- something like a student changing stuff as his professor is grading his assignment -- this leads to a disproportionately good subset of the product and an inflated rating.

Furthermore, it's already a hard thing to pan a product, knowing that it will cut into sales -- publically criticizing people is something that humans don't like to do. How much harder will it be to pan the product of someone like Will Wright, which the reviewer might know personally, knowing that there will be a *direct* impact on the income of that developer?

I could see reviewers refusing to review products where their ratings are used in such a manner as a policy. This can only tend to distort ratings and increase pressure on them to mis-review products.

My guess is that this may be an attempt to help compensate the movie publisher if the movie publisher was the one that did a good job. Enter The Matrix, the game in question, has frequently been criticized as being a bad game. The reason that it sold well may be more due to the efforts of the movie publisher than the developer -- heavy marketing effort from the movie, and a good movie coming out.

This pay-based-on-review policy will tend to decrease royalties for licensed games (especially movie releases). These are frequently done on an extremely tight schedule to ensure a game release shortly after a hit movie. This tends to mak

I review games for an online publication,

[bmnc]

and I think in some sense that publishers/developers being punished for releasing shit games is a good idea, simply because it pains me everytime I review some half-assed product that I know many consumers will be burnt by.

Yes, this could lead to the review system being corrupted (further!!!), but I think that readers of reviews quickly learn which review sites are honest, and which ones are being bribed/corrupted, simply because their experience of a game will not match up with a corrupt (or inept) review.

A punishment system is dearly needed to financially cripple "shit development houses", so that they are not in a position to spew force further crap into the marketplace. In a Darwinian sense, we need to select against these houses (and select for good houses).

I would obviously prefer it if it was the norm to return games that one is unhappy with, but I understand that this is not common since retailers have concerns that consumers are copying and returning the software.

My feverent hope is that consumers will increasingly use retailers that have something like a 1-week return policy (without the third degree, thank-you very much) and that the retailer will have a little checklist which the consumer can tick off why the game was returned (if they so choose), which will be attached to the software being returned:

Consumers reason for game return:
[ ] Unwanted present
[ ] Review inaccurate: (review site/magazine)
[ ] Not fun
[ ] Not long enough
[ ] Dated features
[ ] Buggy
[ ] Overpriced
etc

The sooner developers and publisers are financially hurt for releasing titles which are inadequate, the better. Power to the people!

(BTW: I review for http://vgnz.com , feel free to slag my reviews ;) )