The wheels of justice continue to turn (sort of) this week, with the conclusion of two big wrangles that games industry watchers have been, ah, watching.
The biggest news is the settlement between goliath publisher Activision/Blizzard and former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella, both of whom were abruptly fired in March of 2010. West and Zampella sued, claiming A/B owed them monstrous royalties for Modern Warfare 2. Activision/Blizzard countersued, claiming that West and Zampella were stupid-heads, and the whole sordid affair dragged on for a while.
Today, on the eve of the jury trial, the combatants acknowledged that they’d reached a settlement. Details are undisclosed, but I’m guessing it involves a number preceded by dollar signs; A/B likely will retain the Modern Warfare IP, though if West and Zampella were clever they may have wrangled permission to call themselves “the creators of Modern Warfare” in advertisements for future games.
Activision/Blizzard is a pretty nasty company run by pretty nasty people; as the day of the trial grew near we learned more and more about just how nasty: documents indicate that the highest levels of A/B leadership engaged in a clandestine attempt to spy on Infinity Ward emails, and during the 2010 shakedown that led to West and Zampella’s ouster, stories of locked-room interrogations, bullying, thug-hiring, terrorizing of employees, threats and worse were pretty common. Plus of course there’s the fact that West, Zampella, and a number of other Infinity Ward employees really were never paid the royalties they were owed (and we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars here).
Meanwhile West and Zampella are probably not blameless in this, though I think it could be argued that their behavior was a direct result of Activision’s efforts to cheat them and drive them out of the company they founded. 40 other Infinity Ward employees who left in the wake of the firing and also sued the megapublisher were named as recipients of the settlement as well.
There’s little doubt that Activision didn’t want to be in the middle of a high-profile jury trial just moments before E3; for them the settlement may be a win of sorts, since juries don’t generally react well to the kind of corporate bullying that Bobby Kotick, Thomas Tippl, and others at A/B engaged in. Meanwhile it’s also a win for West, Zampella, and the Infinity Ward 40 because they’ll get at least some of the money they’re owed and can now move on with their lives. So for all appearances, this story is over.
The other big case is a bit weirder. On Wednesday, a jury found in favor of defendant Epic Games in a case brought by Canadian developer Silicon Knights. Basically Silicon Knights claimed that Epic’s Unreal Engine was poo and that because it was poo all the money they spent to license it for their bomb Too Human was wasted. Silicon Knights’ case had been coming apart for some time, not least because claims that Unreal technology is poo are kind of rendered insubstantial when you stop to consider that it’s one of the most popular, powerful licensed engines in the world, and that Epic is famous for supporting its licensees. Silicon Knights founder Denis Dyack has stated that he will appeal the verdict, but it might be better to just put his tail between his legs and go home.
I can’t say whether Silicon Knights’ case or argument had any merit, but one thing’s certain: Too Human failed because it was a bad game, not because of its underlying technology. This case has already cost Dyack’s company a lot and if they want to stay in business they might be wiser to just suck it up and get that Eternal Darkness sequel out rather than bogging themselves down in this stuff.
And now you know all the news! Thank god for blind justice!
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I feel bad for the employees of Silicon Knights. Have they even made anything since Too Human? I thought it was supposed to be a trilogy but assumed they’d cancel it based on the first one being a flop. I didn’t play it aside from the demo, which was pretty bad. I see a lot of copies of it in various bargain bins.
Oh, corporate bullying! *wipes away a tear* The video game industry is all grown up now…
Were I a more expert analyst of long-term consumer trends and stuff, I might speculate that this kind of thing, coupled with the continual successful rise of the indie game, coupled perhaps with the fall of ridiculous Hollywood money-dumps like Battleship or the second G.I. Joe movie, signals a gradual move away from the same level of corporate control of our entertainment. Or I’d want to. I suspect the reality is more cynical.
I’m still somewhat baffled about Too Human, in the sense that it looked good on paper, with that interesting sci-fi twist on the classic mythology. That plus the fact that Eternal Darkness was of such high quality. But yeah, TH stunk, although honestly I only played the demo. Mr. Dyack could have done himself a huge favor and held his tongue. His behavior during that whole mess was…dysfunctional.
I wonder about Blizzard in all of this. Given their stellar record, they’ve won many fans, but I get the sense (with nothing to back it up really) that they and Activision deserve one another.
I’ve heard horror stories about what it’s like (or what it was like, I suppose, pre-merger) to work for Blizzard. Much the same kind of thing that gets leveled at Rockstar every few months. Ultimately I suppose suspect practices does not eliminate the possibility of high quality, especially when you’ve got the skilled people to make all those extra man-hours worthwhile.
On the other hand, Activision sounds pretty okay from an employee perspective (from what I know, anecdotal though it is), but the behavior of their corporate level clearly leaves stuff to be desired. I constantly am just befuddled by why this kind of activity consistently occurs when you get major business concerns in place. Seems like corruption – or at least amorality – could only possibly reach the top levels of so many major businesses, right?
Anyway, yes, they probably deserve each other. I think, given their current course, with the fiasco surrounding Diablo III’s DRM and so forth, they might deserve each other right out of a fanbase, given time.
Dix said: “Ultimately I suppose suspect practices does not eliminate the possibility of high quality…”
That right there is a great opening to a very interesting (well, to me anyway) philosophical discussion. I would assert that there are examples of success (if you measure success by profitability) on both sides. The one side being companies that drive productivity through fear and intimidation, and the other side being those that, well, don’t. You can probably find examples of both within a given company even.
Given that, I still believe that the coercive method is unsustainable, especially when people know they have alternatives.
But more to your point, do you see Blizzard squandering all that good will they’ve built up?
I think Blizzard has been squandering it for years. Certainly the company has switched its business model entirely; it is an MMO developer, period. Eleven years of development for Starcraft 2 underscore that, and Diablo 3 is an MMO is all but name.
But Blizzard’s behavior toward its customers is what really bothers me. It’s quick to bring out lawyer-sanitized statements without ever actually apologizing for misdeeds; there’s also a disturbing implication of intolerance at high levels of Blizzard decisionmaking. This is the company that solved the “problem” of openly gay players by banning them, let’s remember; this is the company that decided everyone without exception should publish their full name when communicating on Blizzard channels – theoretically a good idea until one considers the myriad potential dangers associated with it. When shouted down, Blizzard reversed that position and, in a rare didn’t-use-a-lawyer-team-to-write-the-message, announced the reversal with a snarky “sorry we tried to make everyone’s experience better.” This is the company that secretly stole volumes of information from users’ Windows registries with the very first iteration of Battle.Net, and gave an innocent-faced “what?” when called on it. Blizzard has had success but it’s never had any interest in customer service or customer satisfaction.
Activision, meanwhile, is loaded with the sleaziest of the sleazy at high levels – Kotick and Tippl are just the most public examples; the entire leadership of Activision walks the fine line between corporate assholism and corporate crime. But that translates as it being a bad company to work for, not necessarily a bad publisher to buy from. Activision seems reasonably willing to do what consumers want, provided that doesn’t mean they also have to do anything to make their employees or wholly-owned studios happy.
Yes, I think they deserve each other. I have no interest in Blizzard’s games any more so its behavior doesn’t bother me. As for Activision, well, the sooner Bobby Kotick and his team are ousted, the sooner that branch of the megapublisher might see a way toward improving.
Silicon Knights, meanwhile, is a company of good people who did stumble on one game. As Botch pointed out, it’s really Denis Dyack’s bloviating social ineptitude that hurts the company’s perception. I hope the studio survives this setback (though they should never have sued in the first place), and that a new Eternal Darkness puts them back on the track where they belong.
I would hesitate to say Blizzard’s got much “good will” built up, period, so much as something more akin to “street cred”. And I think that’s unfortunately pretty hard to squander with anything besides crappy games, which so far they haven’t been producing (at least not so far as their fans are concerned: they haven’t exactly offered much to those of us who aren’t huge MMO or RTS players). By all accounts Diablo 3 is huge fun, if you’re looking for Diablo, even if most people seem compelled to preface such comments with phrases like “DRM aside” or “when the servers are up.” My personal decision NOT to buy Diablo 3 is usually met with incredulity, especially from people who know that I’ve played lots of Diablo 2 in my time.
Without delving into the realm of the political if I can avoid it, the unfortunate fact is that out of sight, out of mind really does hold true, and not just in games. I guess, personally, I’ll spend time worrying about gamers’ consumer habits when Americans stop consistently re-electing public officials who are provably corrupt, if not outright criminal.
I try to vote with my dollars, so to speak, which is why I haven’t bought Diablo 3 (or Starcraft 2 or any WoW thing basically since release, but in all cases but Diablo that’s just because I actually don’t really want to play those games). Unfortunately with corporate behemoths like Activision (or EA, or Sony, or Microsoft…) we are faced with the problem that 1) they publish lots of great games, and more importantly 2) that lots of completely well-meaning game developers of all stripes are the ones actually MAKING these games, that their livelihood relies somewhat upon those games’ success, that choosing not to buy, say, the latest Call of Duty on the basis of Activision’s corporate practices will not, in the end, send the message that I disapprove of those practices, but rather that the people who actually made the game are not worth the salaries they are being paid.
It may be tremendous compartmentalizing on my part to think “I’m supporting Treyarch!” and not “I’m supporting Activision!”, but at present this is generally how I find I must think about it, when I think about it at all.
Interesting comments about Blizzard! I guess I’m out of the loop. I played the heck out of their games years ago (Warcrafts, Starcraft, Diablo I & II) but they haven’t made a game that interests me in quite a while. RTS’s don’t appeal to me anymore and MMO’s never did. Diablo III looks kind of interesting, but it’s not really my jam anymore either. Plus I’m not motivated enough to upgrade my rig when there are perfectly good games I can play on my couch.
So my perception of Blizzard is about a decade old. Since then I haven’t paid close enough attention other than to note that they seem to have moved toward a philosophy which states that a game has merit to the extent that it resembles crack.
From a business perspective, many games have exactly as much merit as the extent to which they resemble crack. Though I don’t necessarily point out Blizzard as a prime offender (that would be social games companies like Zynga), one of the things Blizzard has always done very, very right about WoW is the design of the level curve and how it compels you to keep trying to just get to that next level, dammit. I mean, obviously that kind of thing is pretty important for an MMO, since they make more money the longer you play.
I agree with your points Dix. It’s just that some companies seem sleazier about it than others. It’s a combination of many factors, I’m sure, that affect this; some of them on an unconscious level even.
Take Atlus for instance. They want people to buy their games obviously, but the way they go about it tends to endear them to the consumers, rather than repulse them.