Call of Duty - The Lawsuit

Gamasutra is running a follow-up to their annotated contract piece from last month. As you may recall, the contract became public knowledge because of a court case between Spark unlimited and Activision regarding the title Call of Duty : Finest Hour. The article also covers a legal dispute between Spark/Activision and EA during the formation of the troubled development house. Now, the site is running an in-depth look at their legal dispute. The article explores some of the problems that can face any developer/publisher relationship, and how the legal case has affected that already strained situation. "A constant source of friction was Activision's desire to see a fully functioning game early in the development process. 'At Electronic Arts', he wrote, 'the level vision was able to be constructed without the constraints of frame rate, or memory to get the body of the game in and working,' a process which left polish until the end of the development cycle. 'However, under the more risk-averse Activision system, polish happens through the entirety of the process and there is a consistent desire to have the game playable on disc and running at 30 fps.'"

Comments

Am I following this right?

[Brigade]

Former EA employess decide to create game studio (Spark)
Spark signs deal with Activision for 3 games and US$1M advance
Spark hires other EA employees for art/development
EA sues Spark over ghost and zip files (theft), Spark says it's EA IT's fault (incompetence)
EA/Spark settle for nothing.
Activision advances Spark cash to cover legal fees.

That's just getting the studio off the ground. At this juncture, I feel bad for Spark and angry with EA ('course, who needs much reason these days to be angry @EA). Also, Activision is acting cool (or protecting their investment) and helping bail them out of trouble.

Spark starts development work on "a AAA title" for Activision (CoD)
Development crawls, Activision gets antsy
Activision outsources a lot of the dev work for game, and sends over contractors to help
Activision advances more money to Spark for development
Spark CTO quits and sues Spark(?) (unclear in article, assumed)
Game finishes, ships, and sells pretty well

Ok .. so fiasco over. Activision got their game, Spark got it done (amidst great turmoil)everyone happy right?

Spark proposes another game to Activision
Activision thinks it sucks and tells Spark to take off, contract released
Spark gets pissy and demands a cancellation fee (US$500K)

WTF is wrong with these guys? I can't stand most publishers (EA or Activision), but this little dev studio that could who was plagued by drama (and got bailed out, pretty clean to boot) decides to bite the hand that fed em? I say let em' burn (unless this isn't the WHOLE story)

Re:Am I following this right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked at EA for 4 years and it beats the hell out of the various studios I was at for 5 years prior. It was pretty rough here the first year or so before the major changes that occured after easpouse.

About a year and a half ago, on a whim, I did some interviews at some other studios (Sony, Activision, and some independents) just to test the waters. The work environments I saw, and general hours and other procedures that were explained to me, were like EA PRIOR to the easpouse deal. The pay and benefits weren't as good, either. I've had friends come back to EA after leaving for various other companies, because it's better here.

The way it's portrayed in the gamer media and among gamers in general is not reality anymore. People still talk about EA as if there are horrendous working conditions; we weren't the only ones at the time to put up with some pretty bad BS (I put up with worse at independent developers who had nothing to lose), but while we've changed, many other companies haven't.

writing code: easy.. making a game: tough!

[mabhatter654]

This really shows how tough the game industry is... it's a lot of work and discipline to get stuff done on time and on budget. Worse is that the best programmers and artists are usually very undisciplined outside their art ... very good ones can have no shred of business sense. Unlike the usual industry stories this one sounds pretty positive... Activision seem to have worked really hard to make the business work.. they got the first product out almost on time!! Unfortunately, it looks like Activision took too much of a hit and didn't want to continue the relationship... it happens.

Most game companies are based on "labor of love" in that the core "owners" usually have the tools and projects lined up on their own dime and want to sell it. That makes the hard stuff like code and content management, bug tracking and all the "busywork" of making a game at least partly taken care of. Spark was selling only their work... their ability to get projects done... and they didn't deliver. After millions of extra dollars from activision to settle lawsuits and cost overruns they still didn't have their act together. They sold themselves as a content house.. with minimal programming then tried to reinvent the programming wheel and lost focus.

As far as Activision requiring playable games why not? 80% of the work in a modern game is content, not coding. Any house worth it's salt should be able to have a playable test bed in a reasonable time frame. That's a business choice Activision wanted...deal with it. EA might allow "pie in the sky" development of the content, but if you get to the end and have to cut features it's a disappointment. Activision has a much more solid plan to get the basics working and build on it... you can always trim cost on textures, models, levels, etc... That's what the customer wanted... it's a hard lesson to learn to do your work how somebody else wants it... as opposed to being owned by the guys paying for the game... but that's business.

Sounds like they need some boring business analysts in there to straighten them out! When you have to comply with SOX, ISO, HIPAA, IRS, big 3 auto, TS, banking, EDI, etc. you spend most 75% of your time following other people's rules and about 25% doing actual work! Sounds like gaming is finally ready for grown ups to run the place!!! That sounds like FUN!!!

Re:Agile Game Development

[mikael]

Thats the way I used to develop and write software - identify and solve the hardest problems first, then go to town on the rest of the project. For game programming this would mean getting the AI to work first with placeholder graphics, then work on improving the visual effects and gameplay.

Unfortunately, this philosophy has the risk of being abused by management who try and pigeonhole you into solving hard problems all the time ('we thought you were happy') and giving the interesting work to their mates. Since everyone is also thinking about what they are going to be doing on the next project, this usually means the visual effects get done first and the gameplay/AI is left to the last minute.