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.'"

Comments

Looks like yet another reason...

[RM6f9]

...to support independent (or at least smaller) game makers.

Re:Pretty damning...

[The Evil Couch]

I don't think it'll have quite as much impact as you think.

It doesn't really matter if their name is tarnished and developers feel that they're a bunch of bastards. It's not like the beginning of the graphically-oriented games, where there were only a few people that could code something that people would play.

decent game programmers and artists are dime a dozen now. it's no longer an arcane art understood by few. hell, they have college courses for it now. instead of publishers scrambling to pick up developers, developers are fighting to get someone to publish their work.

this fits in with the problems that all skilled-laborers have run into before. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a programmers' union in the next few years.