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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.'"
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If this proves to be true, anywhere near the level of the complaint, i think it will really tarnish Activision's name in the industry when it comes to working with indie development houses (which has been pretty good so far.
Of course we only have one side as we get the usual corporate response of "we dont comment on pending litigation", but this looks pretty calculating on Activision's side. Hire the developer, feed them BS after they develop a top selling game, make they sign reduced agreements, slowly break them down, have them submit ideas, reject them, then hire away developers and cancel their contract... I am surprised they only sued for $10million...
You can fool some of the people all of the time
I have a feeling that Spark's main goal in doing multiple expansion packs would be to get the consumers to buy into multiple games with similar content, with the next two expansion packs costing a lot less than the first... To which I would have to say... Ugh. Call of Duty fanboys must be even more nuts than Sonic or Transformers groupies.
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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they just induced the readership into delaying certain rights by falsely promising they would edit the article summaries.
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Things like this really make me wonder why anyone but the big studios WANT to develop big budget titles anymore. It's a huge risk and if your game happens to be a hit you're still going to get f'd in the arse by your publisher and not see the majority of the profits. It just sounds like a horrible business idea to do this.
It's painfully obvious that people want to play simpler, well done games... why don't the studios tell the big publishers to screw off and go make something that's not going to require huge amounts of funding?
Unfortunately (to answer my own question here) I have a feeling that lack-of-creativity isn't just isolated to the big publishing houses... this is what I'd imagine if a modern game studio tried this.
Boss: "Ok guys, we need to come up with a small game that's going to be fun to play and different!"
Programmer 1: "I know.. how about an FPS with... grenade launchers!"
Designer : "Pah... that's TOTALLY been done before!... we need something ORIGINAL like.. an fps with high tech microwave weapons."
Programmer 2: "I had this weird idea once. How about a game where you roll stuff up into a little ball... and the ball gets bigger and bigger until you're rolling up stuff like buildings!"
Boss, Designer, Programmer1: "GHEY!!! What's WRONG with you?!? Go back to kindergarten n00b"
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Activision induced Spark into reducing and delaying certain of its rights under the contract by falsely promising...
Assuming this is true:
Shows what you get from relying on promises from managers. Never give something away without getting the promises in writing.
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