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Activision Accused Of Trying To Kill Off Indie Studio
Gamespot is reporting on a lawsuit pending between Call of Duty: Finest Hour developer Spark and Activision. Spark claims that Activision broke the contract they had signed with the publisher. From the article: "According to Spark, the agreement it signed with Activision called for it to make three games, the first of which was Call of Duty: Finest Hour. However, in its complaint, Spark alleges that over the next two years, 'Activision induced Spark into reducing and delaying certain of its rights under the contract by falsely promising that it would continue to partner with Spark to develop the second and third titles in the Finest Hour line, when in fact Activision had already decided to bring the development of the sequel in-house at Activision so it could realize an even higher level of profit on the sequels than it had on the original game.'"
Activision does do development; they own multiple studios, but those studios have their own brand name - Raven, Neversoft, Treyarch, to name a few.
It's not much different than EA and Ubisoft, except that Activision prefers to spread their people out, and retain a 'studio' name, whereas EA and Ubisoft prefer to group studios together for shared resources under larger campuses.
The benefits and negatives are different for each: 'boutique' studios like Activision does means there is little room for change at each studio, they will each do 1 or 2 games at a time, tops, and often specialize in the same kind of game (Neversoft doing Tony Hawk, and Raven doing FPS games, for example). The studios and teams are smaller, and there is not much cross-studio tech sharing.
EA and Ubisoft's style allows for multiple teams and therefore multiple titles at one studio, allowing more options for the people at the studios. Building a larger studio also makes feasible larger benefits like on-site cafeteria, sports field, and a gym. The downside is a perceived loss of 'individuality', but the public seems to care about that more than the employees (I know from personal experience, the benefits at the large companies rocks the socks off anything small companies struggle to provide).
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I was reading an article way back (as in four-years-way-back) about the failure of the sega dreamcast. The author mentioned that one contributing factor was that Sega was notorious for stealing ideas from other game developers. They would meet with a game developer, which would pitch a game to them. There would be artwork, digital renderings of characters, and sometimes video. Sega would get interested, feign loyalty towards the game developer, and when they had enough info, they would cut ties with the game developer and make their own knock-off. It obviously became a gamble for game developers to enter into a relationship with Sega. Piss off enough game developers, who are already interested in the next-gen consoles (PS2, XBox, GameCube), and you have a recipe for sucky games and a shortened life cycle.
Related link, but i don't believe it's the one i originally read. Respect the Gord.