DEVELOPER'S LIFE PART 15: THE NAME OF THE GAME IS BLAME
By François Dominic Laramée

About 97% of games released to the retail market end up losing money. We all know it. It’s been that way forever. Which means that there are plenty of opportunities for blame. Developers blame publishers for bungling a marketing campaign, delaying a release unnecessarily, failing to place the game on magazine covers, or messing with the original design until all that remains is a pale copy of the derivative clone that almost became a hit the previous semester. The publisher blames the developer for missing deadlines, inflating costs, being uncooperative, and delivering games that don’t remotely fulfill the promises of the design doc and demo. Everyone blames the magazines for reviewing games based on how much advertising publishers buy in the mags’ pages - and fail to buy in their competitors’.

Everyone blames everybody. All the time.

No big deal. We’re used to it.

Besides, it’s mostly posturing. We all know that the odds of any given project turning into a mega-hit are pretty slim, even if everyone does their job perfectly. So we bitch and moan a lot, but we know that in the end, if a studio delivers a serviceable game in something remotely resembling the original schedule and budget, its immediate future is safe. If the game tanks in the marketplace, the publisher will chalk it up to the nature of the business and keep working with the studio. Especially if it’s one of their own internal operations, over which the publisher holds almost divine levels of power.

Right?

Right?

Maybe not.

The End of a Legend
January witnessed the demise of Legend Entertainment, a studio with a 15-odd year record of interesting games (like The Wheel of Time and the funny Spellcasting 101 series) and not so interesting ones (like the depressing Star Control 3). In the past couple of years, Legend has produced several SKUs in the Unreal series, culminating in Unreal II: The Awakening. The latter, however, apparently failed to live up to the sales expectations of its corporate parent, Atari, and that was the end of the line for Legend and its excellent designer, Bob Bates. (The official statement said that Legend was shut down because it had no further projects in the pipeline, which is patently absurd; any two-bit bozo has hundreds of game ideas that they’re just dying to try out. Atari killed Legend because Unreal II wasn’t a hit, period.)

Now, I am not privy to the details of Unreal II's production, nor am I going to speculate about them. But shutting down a studio because a game doesn't sell is like sending a man to prison because his lawyer fell asleep during the trial, i.e., both asinine and grossly unfair.

(Disclaimer: while I don't know Bob Bates personally, nor anyone else at Legend for that matter, Bob is the editor of Game Developer's Market Guide, for which he commissioned an article from me. He is also the author of an excellent game design book, which I admit somewhat begrudgingly since it consistently outsells mine on Amazon.)

Just The Facts (In 200 Words or Less)
Let's quickly review the facts here:

1. Legend was founded in 1989 and bought by GT Interactive in 1998. Atari (then Infogrames) acquired Legend with the rest of GT Interactive's assets in 1999.
2. Unreal II is a sequel.
3. A sequel to a game that was not originally developed by Legend.
4. It is also a PC first-person shooter.
5. It received poor reviews.
6. It didn't sell as well as Atari expected, but still placed #4 among all PC games in the UK for the first half of 2003, according to gamesindustry.biz

The Prosecution's Case
Okay. Now what do these facts imply about Legend's guilt, and whether it was calamitous enough to warrant capital punishment?

1. Legend was an independent studio for almost a decade. Its track record of accomplishment was sufficient to entice a publisher to buy it.
2. A sequel provides a sandbox from which the developer is rarely allowed to stray.
3. Legend doesn't own the Unreal intellectual property. I am not sure who does; both Atari and Epic (the makers of the original game) are credited in the game's manual. They probably both had some degree of control over the creative process. In any event, given the corporate parentage involved, anything and everything that Legend wanted to do with the sequel – up to and including the decision to make an Unreal sequel at all - must have been cleared with Atari, if not imposed from above.
4. The PC first-person shooter genre is hopelessly overcrowded, and has been for years. Unless you are publishing Half-Life 2 or maybe Doom III, you are not going to sell huge numbers.
5. Poor gameplay may or may not have been Legend's fault. I have lived through too many examples of publishers and licensors messing with design to test a producer's pet theory, to conform to some ill-defined canon, or for no reason other than to make themselves feel useful. Still, making the best game possible is the developer's responsibility, so Legend has to shoulder part of the blame here. Just not all of it.
6. Atari's sales expectations are its own responsibility. They should have been conservative. (Not all other Unreal SKUs have been huge hits, and as I already mentioned the PC shooter market is saturated.) How in blazes is Legend supposed to be held accountable for Atari's flawed projections?

Now, sometimes, life happens. A publisher may be forced to downscale its development efforts because it has had a bad year, or because the target studio is consistently under-performing, or because of a million other factors. But no one should insult our intelligence by pretending that a team like Legend’s is suddenly unable to come up with a viable project and unworthy of being assigned one of Atari’s seventeen trillion licenses to work on.

Looks to me like someone at Atari dropped the ball on this project. They looked at Unreal Tournament's enduring popularity and at the Unreal engine's success in the developer marketplace, conveniently ignored the fact that shooter fans (who are nowhere near as numerous as The Industry thinks) are holding their breath and their cash for Valve’s and id’s forthcoming masterpieces, and assumed that shoving a mediocre sequel to a tired property out the door before its time would yield mounds of riches. Then, when this dubious proposition failed to magically work out (possibly because the game wasn't very good, possibly because there were too damn many shooters on the market, possibly for a million other reasons), they blamed the developer.

Bah!

Please Don't Sell Our Studio, Boss
Maybe I'm completely wrong here. Maybe Legend really got carte blanche to do whatever it wanted with the game and just laid an egg. But from this vantage point, it seems far more likely that Legend’s demise is merely a case of some corporate bigshot(s) covering their hindquarters by slaying the least powerful partner in the deal.

Which wouldn't have been possible had Legend been an independent company. Sure, independent studios carry their own crosses in this industry, but if they deliver what the client wants, they get paid and they live on to fight another day. Most of the time.

So, if there are any studio owners out there who care about their companies: don’t sell. Please. Vertically integrated behemoths are sometimes very good at what they do, but we need the alternative.

Until We Meet Again…
There are enough sources of job insecurity in this business. Studios run out of cash before they can sign a publishing contract. Others get their contracts yanked away because of a market downturn. Others lack the experience to deliver quality on time, or devolve into self-destructive infighting. We don't have time to watch our backs for protruding daggers whenever a publisher makes an honest (or not so honest) mistake.

Come on, Mr. Publisher. If we give you what you ask for and it bombs, take your loss like a man. The next game we do for you just might make it all up.

I'll talk to you again after GDC.

BIO
If you aren't really tired of FDL by now, don't say so in public unless you are looking for a serious beating. He's been the bane of the game industry for over 10 years, during which he cajoled and threatened his way into over 20 credits as designer, producer, programmer and writer. For some reason, magazine and book editors seem to like him; his Game Design Perspectives and Secrets of the Game Business are available now from Charles River Media. With the dozens of articles he has contributed to other industry publications and the roundtables he hosts at GDC every year, it is getting really hard to avoid him these days. But there is hope; FDL has been freelancing for 5 years, so we expect him to starve to death any day now. Visit his mediocre web site, http://pages.infinit.net/idjy, at your own risk.