Fallout (New Vegas)

[twiz]

that's harsh... i'm no specialist on this subject, but shouldn't Obsidian have ringed a bell about this before? seems a bit shady though to put into a contract that a bonus is being given based on some random value rather then a part of the gross revenue's.

That seems like the most logical way to do it, and the way most companies operate... profit sharing. Sounds like obsidian got screwed on that contract.

On the other hand, it distinguishes the publisher's job from the developer's job. In the profit-sharing scheme, if the developer makes a wonderful game that doesn't sell because the publisher didn't advertise it well, they essentially get punished for the publisher's fuck-up... and I'm sure this has happened many many times.

And if the developer makes a crappy game and the publisher advertises the hell out of it and still manages to sell a lot, despite being an awful game.. then the publisher deserves the bonus, not the dev.

If they both do equally well or equally shitty, then profit sharing is fair. If one does significantly better, then they get slighted, in a way. They still get more of a bonus, but the bonus isn't as fairly divided.

Ideally it'd be a combination of those things... something like a relatively low fixed percentage profit sharing, and add in a scalar metacritic bonus, so they get an extra percent of the profit for every point their metacritic score is above 80.

The really sucky thing for Obsidian is that they lost a lot of points for bugs.. If you take off the two lowest scores, the two 65's from GameZone and Armchair Empire, they have an 85 average. Both of those review's main complaints is it was released too early and therefore was buggy, in order to be out in time for the holidays... which is a result of publisher pressure. I'm not removing fault from Obsidian, they should be able to meet deadlines.. But it is crappy that the publisher rushed them in order to make more money by having it on the shelves for the holiday, and then the dev doesn't even get a slice because the initial amount of bugs was too much for some reviewers to handle.. due to the rush... and I'm sure they had to crunch really hard to meet that deadline at all.

[Sprony]

Brian Fargo claims in this interview that your story isn't correct. To sum it up, he says the publisher does QA and not the developer so it wasn't Obsidian's fault.

[2d-chris]

Well that partly explains why their games are bug fests

Internal QA, even if a really small team helps no end.

[Serenius]

Bethesda/Zenimax's QA department is really mismanaged. I'm surprised anything they release is playable. I guess it's all about managing expectations.