“The worst part of this business is that publishers think developers are out to screw them and developers think publishers are out to screw them.” Paranoia. Power. Money. These are all common themes in game development. Unfortunately, they take away from everyone’s primary goal: making a good game. Game Informer talked to people on both sides of the equation – some who could only do so anonymously – to shed light on the behind-the-scenes battles that go on in game development between publishers and developers, and to discuss how this traditionally at-odds relationship can be fixed for the betterment of the games that we play.
On the face of it, the relationship between developers and publishers is simple: Publishers give developers an advance payment and the promise of back-end royalties to create a game, with payments doled out at agreed-upon milestones as the project progresses. These milestones, which vary in length, could involve anything from demonstrating how an in-game feature might work (even if it lacks any AI, art, etc.) to providing a playable preview build for a press demonstration.
In practice, while milestones are important in guiding development, mapping out years’ worth of work is a fool’s errand. “I’ve never worked on a project where from the beginning to the end, we knew what the product was we wanted, and at the end sat back and said, ‘That’s exactly the product we started to create,’” says producer on the publisher’s side Pete Wanat. Not only are features being added and dropped, but technology is changing and a host of problems can derail the project from day to day. Unfortunately, s--- happens – and that’s also the moment it hits the fan, because if you don’t deliver on a milestone you don’t get paid.
Developers’ need for cash from publishers puts them in desperate situations. It can cause them to sell off the rights of the intellectual property they’ve created to the publisher, accept bad royalty rates, or be bought out by publishers (where autonomy is exchanged for survival). Often, financial demands create a situation ripe for bad choices. Multiple developers told us that studios often take projects that they know they can’t finish simply to get money from a publisher. They gamble that the publisher will give them more time – even if the publisher doesn’t like the game – because of the money already invested. This only leads to bad games and mistrust.
Developers’ monetary demands also lead to bad competition between developers, since publishers often look for a studio to make a game that fills a certain need in the publishers’ portfolio. In this case, external developers might have to outbid each other for a project – one which they might know they can’t fulfill to expectation – and as the fee for work gets lower and lower, so does the promise of quality. One anonymous developer we talked to thinks that under certain circumstances made-to-order titles are bad for the industry. “There is a little secret society in every publisher that says, ‘Here is a game we’re going to do. We’re trying to hit a marketing window, and we don’t care how bad it is. We’re just trying to sell to those people.’ I believe that these destroy our industry.”
Money is the root of all evil. Said one developer, “Someone once told me the Golden Rule really is, ‘The guy with the gold makes the rules.’” Scott Miller, 3D Realms co-founder, states it just as plainly. “The dirty secret is: Publishers control developers through payments. Rockstar was paying Human Head so late on the milestones payments [in the early days of Prey] that 3D Realms was jumping in to help Human Head because they had payroll to meet. [Rockstar] even said to us, ‘[You’re] taking over the control [we] have over developers.’ Nasty stuff like that happens all the time.” For its part, 3D Realms is helping its fellow developers by offering creative and financial assistance on projects.
Naturally, the money that publishers pour into a project entitles them to have some say. These suggestions can run the gamut of good, bad, and ugly. “When Prey was being developed early on it was actually a Rockstar-label game,” explains Miller. “At the time, Metroid Prime was going to be released, and they had the whole visor thing, and this producer [from Rockstar] said, ‘Well, the visor is going to be a big thing for Metroid, and we should have a visor for Prey.’ And it didn’t fit anything to do with the game at all. So it ended up where we were rejecting all these crazy ideas, and for that reason along with some others, Rockstar ended up dropping the game because we were too hard to work with.”
The headaches that developers have to put up with involving money, creativity, control, and time, the publishers have in the form of risking millions and millions of dollars. While we’ve illustrated how developers can be hamstrung by the milestone process, this common form of development doesn’t help publishers either. They have to commit a large sum of money up front to a project that everyone knows might not be any good, has too short a schedule to being with, or could change substantially by the time it releases. It’s like paying several million dollars for a single lottery ticket.