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Old 11-18-2007, 09:32 AM   #32
Josho
Third Guy from Andromeda
 
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Merricat,

Well, I don't know if you've been in the game publishing business or just publishing in general, but I would be happy to comply with examples that satisfy your demands. It has nothing to do with envy, BTW (although you have no particular reason to believe that). I'm not sure what you think I'd be envious of.

Here's one from my archives.

Prior to 2000, I was Director of Game Design at a particular instantly-recognizable multinational videogame software publisher (which I shall not name) that also sells its own videogame hardware and systems. I was brought on to oversee non-sports first-party and in-house development of titles that would be the first wave of gameware for the company's soon-to-be-released next generation game system.

For months, I read and worked on first-party game proposals with dozens of development houses; most, of course, our division ended up rejecting, and some we passed along to the financial decision-makers in America (who, upon greenlighting them, would then pass them along to the company's overseas management).

Over the course of months, we found ourselves constantly stymied. Not a single project made it past very early production; most were killed during the concept stage. After eight months or so, it became painfully clear that we were not going to be able to greet the new game system with any first-party non-sports titles...time was growing short, and the overseas management had nixed every single project at some point along the way (often without much actual examination of the product in question).

The head of the division that hired me finally went to the overseas management and said, "What's the story?"

Well, the story was basically this: the overseas management had long ago decided not to publishing ANYTHING we presented, under any circumstances. Apparently, during the days of that company's previous videogame system, American development had let them down, and they no longer trusted the American division to provide any action, RPG, adventure, arcade, or any sort of non-sports software. (Never mind that there was not a single individual still at the company who was responsible for the previous system's software, nor was there any notion of considering any of the newly proposed games on their own merits.)

The division head followed up this rather stunning revelation with the question, "Then why are we here? Why do you have a whole division set up if you KNOW you're not going to publish anything we come up with?"

The answer: they simply wanted to make it APPEAR to the press that the company WAS supporting the new hardware with lots of first-party software. To close down our division would signal to everyone that perhaps the company wasn't as serious as it could be about first-party support for the hardware.

With the cat out of the bag (within the company), some people in the division stayed because, hey, big paycheck and virtually no work required. (Now that we knew they weren't going to greenlight ANYTHING, there was no longer any reason to look at proposals, visit developers, etc.) Other people -- my boss, myself, and several other people -- left because we had nothing to do and didn't care to sit around surfing the web all day, even if we did pull a good salary doing it. Think of the millions of dollars this company spent intentionally NOT developing games.

The system, which was a very good system, tanked fairly quickly due to lack of software.

Who could POSSIBLY have predicted THAT?

--Josh
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