I see a lot of people harping on the *how* and not the *what* -- maybe you all agree that it's a worthy goal. Hall proposed something. It needs work. It's a step in the right direction, though.

I think these gold masters should be sent to Crappers.  We'd sort them out.

Charles, I don't buy your argument in post #83 that this isn't possible to do. The people at WB don't have to make the game; they have to ensure that a quality product is made with their license. They hired a game developer to make sure this happens. This can't be an impossibility, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the agreements that entertainment companies like WB make with publishers, but I don't think I am.

Being an outsider, I don't understand how any development house could get away with saying, "yeah, 1 year" and not mean it.

*snip*

What kind of contracts are you crazy bastards signing?

The people at WB don't have to make the game; they have to ensure that a quality product is made with their license.

I don't think it will work to anyone's advantage long term unless they add clauses into the system...for instance, if your game sells over 500,000 copies, the reviewers can blow it out their ass.

Last I checked, it's pretty damn hard to determine whether a game is going to sell well or not.

But see, the focus isn't whether or not it sells well. The focus is whether or not it's a good game.  Two different things.  A game that sells well that sucks (which is possible, hooray for marketing blitzes), will do more damage to a brand than a great game that sells almost no copies.  If the game doesn't sell that well, it's not doing any harm to an IP if it is actually a good game.

If you don't lie about how long it will take, you aren't going to get the contract to begin with.

You've just indirectly endorsed the Tomb Raider series, you realize.

I wonder about this. I bet you could predict game sales pretty well from just a few basic things like development budget, marketing budget, whether or not it uses a well-known IP, and what platforms it's for. There would be a few exceptions, but I bet you could predict pretty well across games. If I had access to all this data for a bunch of games I could analyze it pretty easily.

If the focus is whether a game is quality or not, I would NEVER leave that up to reviewers to decide...but that's just me.

The first 1 or 2 Tomb Raiders weren't the most evil thing created, imho.  And the first one, if I remember correctly, was pretty spiffy (in terms of tech) for it's time.

Funny that when he tries to implement a system that emphasizes quality over sales quantity, so many people are attacking him.  I don't think the system he proposes is ideal, but its a lot better than any counter-examples anyone else has suggested, and I do think it is absolutely worth trying.

To be fair, Scott Miller swims in money.

The first Tomb Raider game was amazing at time of release and essentially defined the entire 3rd person action adventure genre (not to be confused with the 3rd person 3D platformer, that was being defined at about the same time by Mario 64).  

However, that doesn't change the fact that the sequels are harming the IP but still managing to sell millions of copies each based solely on brand/IP.

The people at WB don't have to make the game; they have to ensure that a quality product is made with their license. They hired a game developer to make sure this happens. This can't be an impossibility, unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the agreements that entertainment companies like WB make with publishers, but I don't think I am.

But, to reuse an example, the wachowski brothers were involved with, and endorsed, the matrix game.  So those are the kind of people who'd be making the decisions.  Which is why I'm saying that the straight forward solution that you propose isn't necessarily a solution.

I'm curious as to what lead you to believe WB, or any major studio for that matter, has any ability to recognize quality. These are the same people who greenlighted Pluto Nash and Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever. Ghost Ship, Fear Dot Com, Kangaroo Fucking Jack, and Catwoman! For god's sake, it's not even released yet, and I can tell you that whoever is working on that deserves no royalties!

Funny that when he tries to implement a system that emphasizes quality over sales quantity, so many people are attacking him.

Being game reviewers isn't WB's core competency.  You should always focus on your core competency.  This is what Jason Hall is attempting to do.  He is right to do it.

I think we're just on different wavelengths here. I like the idea of higher quality games being put out, but I cannot possibly imagine WB being objective about reducing royalties as an incentive. Furthermore, I don't see Jason Hall's presence as any sign of quality assurance, in light of his track record and based on my own personal opinions of the products he's worked on.

If he wasn't hired for his expertise to ensure that the brands remain undamaged -- which logically implies that he would be overseeing those games prior to release, and therefore should be taking part of the blame if those games come out poorly instead of punishing only the publishers -- then what was he hired for?

To play the blame game? To clarify, he's letting things proceed as they always have, he's just bringing the hammer down in the financial sense on poorly reviewed games, correct?

The bottom line is this.  Warner Bros. would like to become more relevant in the game industry across many levels.  They want to deal with the game industry – the various publishers and developers – in a competent way.  In a way that doesn’t make everyone feel like, “Man they’re slow.  Boy, They don’t understand anything - we’ve got to explain everything.” You know the drill.  So, they reach out deep into the game industry and they pull me out of it and they say, “here come sit on top of this and help us bring Warner Bros. up to speed on this crazy game environment that you crazy people are from.”  So, you know what my history is, so does everybody else.  So when I sit across the table from these game developers and publishers it is clear to them that there’s someone at the top that clearly understands everything down to why they need a very specific video card so they can overclock it, right? That helps Warner Bros. tremendously.

I know how game deals get done.  I know the struggles of the developer.  I know the challenges that the publishers face.  I know how the products should be marketed.  I know which demographics are going to pay attention to what.  That is important to a film studio that is trying to get more involved in the video game industry, outside of licensing.  Because we’re going to do much more than just license stuff to publishers and developers.  It’s important that they bring a guy like me in to be able to do it right.  You know film studios historically have not been successful.  You have the MGM Interactives of the world and all that other stuff.  That’s not going to happen now - not with me here.  Monolith made it through some of the toughest times of all time and I learned a lot from that experience.

The game industry should consider Warner Bros. as a fellow game company now.  Not the film studio that’s just trying to get into it.  Because you have as hardcore of a game company executive running the whole thing.

Well there’s two things.  One of my big focuses is on the quality of the games that are coming out.  As you know Monolith tended to produce very high quality game experiences.  That’s partly due to the fact that I’m very focused on the quality bar, and I know what a crap game is.  So one of the things that will differentiate games coming from under the Warner Bros. influence are that the eyeballs that are going to be looking at them to make sure that they are not merely trying to trade on the license but the game underneath itself is fun and worth playing. That would be me, and the people that I’m going to be bringing into the organization to make sure that’s the case.  Most film studios don’t have the capacity internally yet to make those kinds of calls.  I’m going to make sure that Warner Bros. does.  That will have a dramatic effect on the overall quality for a Warner Bros. licensed title.  Of course it’ll take time – none of this stuff is going to happen over night, but I would let me track record speak for itself with regards to the what the performance will be for the quality of these games.

But in terms of quality and sales, did Max Payne 2 help or the hurt the IP?