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: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.