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Old 10-26-2012, 09:11 PM   #1
Blastoise
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Kotaku: What Went Wrong with X-Men: Destiny?

Saw this on NeoGAF, thought it was an interesting look into the industry and also extremely notable for being a Kotaku article that doesn't blow horse dicks:

http://kotaku.com/5955223/what-went-...-x+men-destiny

Probably my favorite part: trying to dick around Activision, a company which is run by a man who would sell his children into slavery if he thought for even a moment that he could get away with it.

Quote:
Former employees say Dyack was confident that history would repeat itself, and that yet another publisher would cave to his demands for extensions and further funding injections. He was wrong. "SK kept getting stonewalled by Activision regarding extensions for the game and pushing back the launch," says a source. "However, SK management was convinced they would have to delay; as a result, they started shifting a few more resources very quietly to ED2." The idea was to slow down production more than ever before, to try to apply pressure for an extension.

It didn't work. Instead of offering an extension, Activision turned up the pressure by publicly announcing the game, and attaching Silicon Knights' name to it prominently.

The October 7, 2010 release of the game's first trailer , released about a year before the eventual launch date, essentially put Silicon Knights on the hook to turn out a sellable product in a realistic time frame.

"I believe that's the video that Denis did not want released," said one source. "By putting the SK logo on the project for the first time publicly, Activision forced SK to start taking it seriously. But by then, it was pretty much too late."

"This was the first time that a publisher basically said, ‘No, finish the project and get it out the door'," the source said. "Keep in mind that during this time, SK continued to have some pretty senior people staffing [Eternal Darkness 2], and had no intention of moving them back over to XMD to help out the title."

Impossibly tight deadlines and publisher-pushed rush releases are two of the most commonly-cited factors when poor-quality games appear on shelves. Yet none of my eight sources believe that Activision was putting undue pressure on Silicon Knights. "They gave SK enough time; SK just didn't use it wisely at all," says another source. "SK over-promises to get a contract, and then always under-deliver. Activision was just the first publisher to hold their feet to the fire, so to speak."
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Old 10-27-2012, 04:56 AM   #2
deoxys
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You know, I'm noticing a trend with Activision over the past few years... what was it agai-

>Impossibly tight deadlines and publisher-pushed rush releases are two of the most commonly-cited factors when poor-quality games appear on shelves.

Oh. Right. Wait, what's this?

>Yet none of my eight sources believe that Activision was putting undue pressure on Silicon Knights.

A developer not knowing how to develop? Silicon Knights? You don't say!

I mean, anyone else remember Too Human?
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Old 10-27-2012, 02:35 PM   #3
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Yeah, I was reading that yesterday myself. While I found it interesting, I'm not entirely surprised. The whole Dyack bullshitting publishers with "We made Eternal Darkness!" and then milking Activision as their cash cow for other projects- it's a practice which happens more often than it should.
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