Business sucks, alright? It's cold and rigid and occasionally unfair. Such is the case with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas contract with Bethesda, wherein the developer only received royalties if the game matched or exceeded an 85 rating on Metacritic.Who would do that? What kind of numbskull bases huge business decisions on the score they get at a review aggregate site? That's like a movie studio determining salaries based on the score they get at RottenTomatoes.com.
I don't think even the guys at EA or Activision are that reckless.
END OF LINE
~A.H.
And it gets worse. Turns out Zenimax were the ones who had control over QA on FNV.
ReplyDeleteWhat was the biggest gripe for FNV? Oh, right, bugs.
How do you find bugs? Quality Assurance.
Who had control over QA? Zenimax, the people who stood to benefit if the game didn't review well.
What did they do? Bumped up the release date, cutting both development time and QA to almost nothing, and shoved it out the door before it was ready, guaranteeing a low Metacritic score.
Best of all, the Metacritic thing wasn't part of the original agreement, that came in later in a Darth Vader style "pray I don't alter the deal any further" moment.