Slashdot Mirror
Call of Duty - The Annotated Contract
Gamasutra offers up yet another unique feature: an annotated contract for a big-budget game. The document, part of a legal dispute between studio Spark and Activision, was released to the public. Game developers Tom Buscaglia, Chris Bennett, and Dave Spratley have chimed in with some insightful commentary on the particulars of game development in the major leagues. Particularly interesting is page twelve of the document, which lays out milestone payments for the project. "Payments totaling $8.5M USD are spread over the initial game milestones. Since these schedules are incorporated into the Agreement, the Notes to this milestone schedule are as important as the other provisions of the agreement. Here the requirement of approval before payment is reiterated. Also Spark is required to do monthly code dumps to Activision throughout the progress of the Game pre-Alpha, and then weekly builds thereafter. It also includes Activision's detailed requirements for the Final Milestone Schedule (FMS), Technical Design Document (TDD) and Game Design Document (GDD) that are very informative."
It was part of the court battle, and the judge unsealed the exhibits. (First line in TFA)
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
The quoted selection in the post, detailing milestone payments etc., is nothing out of the ordinary, and quite standard.
Spark and Activision probably weren't planning to work with each other in the future again anyway, if their contract dispute had to go to court to be resolved.
This is about Call of Duty: Finest Hour, developed by Spark.
CoD 1 and 2 were made by Infinity Ward, CoD: Big Red One by Treyarch/Gray Matter and CoD 3 by Treyarch.
There was also an expansion pack CoD: United Offensive, from Gray Matter.
Infinity Ward are also supposedly working on CoD 4.
So, Spark hasn't worked on CoD since this.
I quit!