Setting aside the problem of Activision essentially destroying its best studio for whatever reason...

Game developers are a tight community, and there's some sense of camaraderie involved in the whole thing. However, publishers are considered external to that community. They're more of a necessary pain in the neck than people whose input is actually valued. (Even in the cases that the studio is completely internal to the publisher.) Gamers generally have similar feelings about the publishers. So whenever something goes wrong in the developer-publisher relationship, everybody who really constitute "the public" will immediately turn on the publisher.

It has nothing to do with the relative merits of the situation. Us vs them. That's where the anger -- which you see in this thread amongst many others -- comes from. That's what makes any kind of serious legal discussion difficult here, and why I asked you to post the summary. West and Zempella may have screwed up badly, but they're with us, and The Publisher has wronged two of us.

From what I've seen, The Publisher mentality is that once you've established a successful IP, you can just pass it off to anybody and the IP will hold its own. I'm sure that's what Activision is thinking about the CoD franchise, otherwise they wouldn't be tearing apart IW. If things get bad, just pass it off to someone else.

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz

Quote: Original post by Calabi
As you guys said above whom would be stupid enough to sign a contract where if they get fired they dont get their bonuses.

Me and everyone at my company...

I'm not a developer but I've never worked at a company where your right to additional compensation wasn't revokable at any time for any reason including termination.

Well I guess I cant argue if people are willing to accept it, and its kosher with the law of the land. But it doesnt stop it from, in my mind being totally wrong.

Publishers are in general demonised but I think in this case it could be justified as what the ceo said, he wanted to remove the element of fun in creating games, and create an atmposphere of fear.

Quote: Original post by Calabi

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz

Quote: Original post by Calabi
As you guys said above whom would be stupid enough to sign a contract where if they get fired they dont get their bonuses.

Me and everyone at my company...

I'm not a developer but I've never worked at a company where your right to additional compensation wasn't revokable at any time for any reason including termination.

Well I guess I cant argue if people are willing to accept it, and its kosher with the law of the land. But it doesnt stop it from, in my mind being totally wrong.

Publishers are in general demonised but I think in this case it could be justified as what the ceo said, he wanted to remove the element of fun in creating games, and create an atmposphere of fear.

I don't think anyone in this community will argue that what they did was morally wrong.

Quote: Original post by ChurchSkiz
I'm not a developer but I've never worked at a company where your right to additional compensation wasn't revokable at any time for any reason including termination.

Same here.

Bonuses are almost always "discretionary". It is rare to have any kind of bonus formula built in to employment contracts.

I think that's reserved for the executives of multi-national banks, getting X million dollars in contractual bonuses even if the company went bankrupt.

Well thats the thing, I think, the bonus's paid to developers are usually contractual. Its not a discretionary payment at the whims of their boss's its an agreed on amount after a certain amount of sales or something like that.

Surely this be a game development forum, someone should know about this?

Quote: Original post by Calabi
Well thats the thing, I think, the bonus's paid to developers are usually contractual. Its not a discretionary payment at the whims of their boss's its an agreed on amount after a certain amount of sales or something like that.

Surely this be a game development forum, someone should know about this?

I have never worked at a company where bonuses were contractually specified, or where rank-and-file employees were able to demand it. I am in the industry and have seen quite a few contracts.

There was a time, decades ago, where royalties were sometimes specified with employment, but those days are long gone for rank-and-file workers.

Now days it is generally not contractually guaranteed, but often offered. It may be based on some formulas about how well the company is doing along with an individual modifier assigned by the company. This allows star performers to get a bigger bonus and poor performers to get a small bonus or even no bonus, at the boss's discretion.

Well Activision did say that Modern Combat games would NEVER sell, but all gamers wanted it. It is then the biggest selling game. Who cares if Activision is right, video game publishers are basically like the government right now. Nobody cares, nobody listens :(

I would be really suprised to Activision lose.

Quote:
The Publisher mentality is that once you've established a successful IP, you can just pass it off to anybody and the IP will hold its own. I'm sure that's what Activision is thinking about the CoD franchise, otherwise they wouldn't be tearing apart IW. If things get bad, just pass it off to someone else.

I'd admit having done this. Making something from someone else's IP tends to piss off the customer (why isn't so and so making it! Being a separate company means not having access to everything, and also falling victim to our own whims about what is good (this isn't like the other _____ games!).
Being a separate company also means having to start from scratch and re-implement stuff, yielding features that aren't quite the same or outright missing.

Customers just don't like it when someone else makes a game they loved. It kills the experience for them. Even look at movies. Most people think movies made from books suck compared to the book because it left too much out. Books based on movies are too shallow. Same for games based on movies based on games based on books based on a true story. Stuff just gets lost in translation that kills the nostalgia experiences we've all had with the original content.

Even games that are dev'd by the same team will get a lot of backlash if they change the wrong mechanics in their sequels.

Oh well. Hopefully Activision learns their lesson when they try to expand the Modern Warfare series of games. The next one in line will need just as much polish as 2, and all the right features. Switching teams will likely kill that. And butchering their current team might kill it too.

Quote: Original post by frob

Quote: Original post by Calabi
Well thats the thing, I think, the bonus's paid to developers are usually contractual. Its not a discretionary payment at the whims of their boss's its an agreed on amount after a certain amount of sales or something like that.

Surely this be a game development forum, someone should know about this?

I have never worked at a company where bonuses were contractually specified, or where rank-and-file employees were able to demand it. I am in the industry and have seen quite a few contracts.

There was a time, decades ago, where royalties were sometimes specified with employment, but those days are long gone for rank-and-file workers.

Now days it is generally not contractually guaranteed, but often offered. It may be based on some formulas about how well the company is doing along with an individual modifier assigned by the company. This allows star performers to get a bigger bonus and poor performers to get a small bonus or even no bonus, at the boss's discretion.

Fair enough, I guess that means West and Zampella, are screwed then.