John-ShepardThe nuts and bolts of development and publishing in the video game industry can be all sorts of intriguing.
But sometimes it's just plain stupid and depressing.
High Moon Studio's Deadpool didn't turn out all that well, and one of the team's former artists spoke about the problems they faced. It appears that publisher Activision could be blamed; check out what was written in the Polycount forums :
"We had a couple of weeks were we crunched pretty aggressively on Deadpool. Having activision cut aand cut and CUT just took its tole on so many of us. For a studio to demand that we do mandatory overtime for a project and then keep cutting so much time and money from it was ridiculous. At about halfway into development we were told that we weren't even aiming very high in terms of score.
Can you imagine working on a game where your higher ups say "yeah we're shooting for a 64 or lower" and then have them give you mandatory overtime?"
Ironically, in our review , we gave the game a 6.3, which is almost exactly what it deserved. But it's interesting to see that Activision didn't want it any higher; in some ways, I'm not even all that surprised. But when it comes to lower-budget games, publishers aren't expecting as much, and they're also not expecting to dump a ton of resources into the project, either.