Topic: WB to charge royalty rates depending on quality of games

[BlackNMild2k1]

According to NinGC.com Warner Bros. studios is tired of game companies capitalizing off of Movie liscensed names while providing sub-par games.

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"The game industry has had its time to exploit movie studios all day long and to get away with producing inferior products," says Hall. "But, with Warner Brothers, no more. Those days are over. And we mean it. This isn't just lip service. Honestly, the bad games are over."

apparently Atari wasn't too happy about this, as they admit that not all their games are up to par but they still managed to sell over 4 million copies of 'The Matrix' for over $250 million worldwide.

click link for whole article.

[meldavid]

Sif it'll make the games any better. Movie license or no movie license... there's nufiink that'll help a shite developer.

[Ian Sane]

This is great.  Finally a major company has realized the association between sh!tty games and low sales.  I was hoping it would a game company like Acclaim but this is still really good.  Not only does this have the potential to improve all WB licensed games but it also will be a good example for consumers.  The idiots who buy licensed games without reading reviews will notice that WB games are better and thus may come to the conclusion themselves that not all of these titles are worth buying.  WB games sell better than other licensed games, other companies notice this, and game quality in general improves.  It's win-win.

In theory all of the console makers should use this kind of approach to licensing fees.  The only problem is that if review scores start affecting money it's likely that companies like Atari will start bribing reviewers and we'll be right back where we started.

[Pale]

There was a quote on slashdot from someone involved in Enter the Matrix....  it was something along the lines of....

We sold 4 million games world wide but because our game didn't get a 70% we woudl be charged more?  What's the deal with that.

That does make a little bit of sense to me.  ETM wasn't a good game.  It did however have high production costs and interesting things for hard core fans.  I really feel that ETM wasn't so much a problem with the developers production of the game...it just kind of didn't play well... you see that sometimes in games.

I dunno...this gives way to much power to reviewers...how often are reviews completely unbiased?  Try never.

[KDR_11k]

Haha, Acclaim is doomed now.

Whether reviews are unbiased or not, they're taking the average score and that should be somewhat unbiased. Either way, 70% is mediocre, something even the bad devs reach.

But hey, I hope this'll end the policy of "only sequels or licenses" some publishers have (yes, some actually reject games because they don't fit that rule...).

[meldavid]

I wonder if this means that we will get LESS games like Enter Teh Matrix, LOTR: Return Of Teh King & James Bond 007: Everything Or Nothing, and MORE Barbie: Horse Adventures. COOOL!!!

[Infernal Monkey]

Good, Atari make smelly movie-licensed games. HEY DUDES LET'S ALL PAY TOP DOLLAR FOR T3 ON XBOX! IT WAS SUCH A QUALITY GAME!

[Hybrid Hunter]

Thats great news, but then this will probably make game development times longer which would piss us, and probably WB off for not releasing the game around the same time as the movie.

[nitsu niflheim]

Image how many more copies ETM could have sold if the game were better! That 4 million doesn't sound so good anymore does it, it could have been like 8 ~ 10 million.

[couchmonkey]

I hope that WB will have it's own rating system or something...I hope this because lately I've lost a lot of faith in game reviews.  I've played too many games that I thought were way better or way worse than the average opinion from game reviews.  I guess it's proof that games come down to personal tastes.  To me, Halo was generally overrated by about 10 percentage points, and more recently, I feel like Future Tactics has been underrated by a good 25 percentage points.   Granted, I tend to like almost all games more than everyone else.

Anyway, I do think this is a good idea, I'm glad somone at Warner Bros. recognized the problem!  I just hope they don't leave it entirely up to the media to determine the royalties.  I'd like to see WB have internal testers rate the game before the media reviews come out and then average the two - or something like that.

Edit: I'm a perfectionist, so sue me!

[Ian Sane]

"I hope that WB will have it's own rating system or something"

Yeah that's probably a better idea.  They should hire three guys with gaming journalist backgrounds to review the products.  Otherwise they're relying on an unrelated third party so payoffs from the publishers may occur.  If they have their own review crew then they can at least determine if it's acceptable by WB's standards.  Plus the focus should be mostly on how well the game runs.  Framerate, controls, bugs, etc should be the important factors.

"Thats great news, but then this will probably make game development times longer which would piss us"

Any Nintendo fan should know that waiting for longer development time is often worthwhile.

"We sold 4 million games world wide but because our game didn't get a 70% we woudl be charged more? What's the deal with that."

This statement tells me not to buy Atari games.  The guy just admitted that all they care about is money.

[vudu]

tyco @ penny arcade brings up a very good point:

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The thing is, top tier review sites are almost allergic to scores below seven - except in cases where they rate from one to five, of course

[KDR_11k]

Since they use averages, a publisher would need to bribe a lot of outlets to get good scores for crappy games. Some outlets might not take the bribe for the fear that they might lose readers for a deliberately misleading review and people might leak the deal. If Warner caught wind of such an activity, I'd expect them to come down on the publisher with a lawsuit because this bribery can cause a lot more damage to the brand than a bad game.

[nitsu niflheim]

The sad thing about this whole thing is, that is has taken this long for someone to finally stand up and say enough.  Imagine what the game industry would be like if way back in the NES days if a better quality control was the norm and we didn't get so much shovel ware from Acclaim, just one culprit of bad licensed games.

[AMac2002]

This was taken off of Penny-Arcade as well, it's an e-mail from a developer guy or something:



WB's plan is a great one. As a person that has made one or two crappy licensed games myself (even for Warner Bros.) I welcome the idea someone saying, “hey quit making sh*tty f*cking games you assh*le”. It’s good for the industry and I don’t like sh*tty games any more than the next guy.

Now, with that said am I going to get more time to do them? Am I going to get more money? Are the Movie studios going to quit catering to the lowest bidder and go with the quality studios? The biggest and last question, are the movies studios still going to wait until the last three months of production and insist on changing the entire f*cking game because one of their fat executives played it for five f*cking minutes and didn’t think he liked it? When answer to those questions equal no, then and only then with sh*tty movie licenses quit being produced.

[Uglydot]

Yes, I will wait and see what they plan on doing about this before I draw any real conclusion.