Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="jeep"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]It fucking sucks that the guys who did New Vegas didn't get their bonus. I feel for them. It blows and with the money that game made for their publisher, it's fucking sickening that a little more couldn't be broken off for the people who did the fucking work.[/quote] The bonus was for devs, but there was also a payment for obsidian itself, and that's why people lost their jobs. Either they were operating on the hope they'd get the bonus anyway, or Microsoft canceling their project forced them to go to Bethesda and beg for it. Either way that's an operational fuckup. The market for rpgs is strong, the market for games via steam is strong, their product is strongly differentiated, they have a huge fanbase, there's no excuse for the company to be run on a shoestring. Maybe instead of the bonus, Bethesda could have offered them a similar-sized investment in another product partnership. On the other hand Bethesda might have seen how they operate and decided 1) risk was too high to be worth a second investment or 2) wait a bit until they're in even worse financial straits and pick them up as a west coast development office for a song. Not that this exact thing happened to a company I worked at a few years ago. Really I haven't seen any evidence that Obsidian didn't essentially go bankrupt from the failure of their internally-developed ip Alpha Protocol and they've just been limping along on goodwill since. There's no way to look at this that doesn't suck. Obsidian has as hard a time as Troika/Black Isle did getting games shipped without bugs, but when it comes right down to it they're the company with the best chance of making the kind of game I want to play. In the same way some people are gonna give molyneux or will wright free passes forever, I'm pretty much on board with whatever avellone (and sid meier) make. [quote]But God. Metacritic. On one hand, they're mostly all dickslurpers. On the other, New Vegas was a C+ game. So it's telling that it got an "84." Then again, Metacritic converts scores that aren't out of 100. Then again, game publishers are doing it to themselves. According to Schaefer he got ... let me look it up to be sure.... ok.... zero fucking dollars from game publishers. Zero. Activision used to send $100 worth of shit to be awarded to people in the Interactive Fiction Competition. Now, they're all such pieces of shit they can't break off $100 to hand over to a guy who's made them millions. But yes, lesson learned for anyone who is making games on the same sort of deal as these guys: as terrible as games journalism is, it's just terrible enough to ensure you don't get the money you deserve.[/quote] This can't really be a surprise to anyone, no one does business with Activision or EA anymore unless they're ready to sell their company. No one should do business with them at all. The Metacritic thing is entirely, 100% on the CEO of Obsidian. If he had a board and investors, they'd demand he fall on his sword for it. Or think of it in football terms: it's dumber than the time Ricky Williams let Master P negotiate an incentive laden contract for him. Fucked up his whole career, probably cost him $50M over the course of it. [quote]I read that New Vegas made $300 million or something. Un fucking real.[/quote] Well that's what I mean by "how did that bonus not get turned into an investment in the next game?" Bethesda's owned by Zenimax now, they're being careful or they know things about Obsidian's operations that we don't. [/quote]