royalties: a modest proposal

"While game reviews often have an effect on a publisher's bottom line, that effect has never been quantifiable. However, now, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment has begun directly tying royalty payments from licensees to ratings from game-review sites." Warner Bros. to peg license royalties to game reviews (GameSpot)(gamesindustry.biz)

On the surface, this would seem to be an excellent idea to prevent some really horrible games. On the other hand, there are so many cases where the game development studio can be railroaded into making a game that is less-than stellar, it boggles the mind. It's telling that the primary offender and commentator that articles have pointed at is Atari, and their Enter the Matrix game. The trouble is not so much that Shiny is not capable of making a good game, but that the prospect of launching an all-platforms game simultaneously with a movie's premiere, while containing live-action content from the movie is, under current game development pipeline models, almost certainly insane. I enjoyed one developer's comment on the topic from Penny-Arcade:

WB's plan is a great one. As a person that has made one or two crappy licensed games myself (even for Warner Bros.) I welcome the idea someone saying, “hey quit making shitty fucking games you asshole”. It’s good for the industry and I don’t like shitty games any more than the next guy.
Now, with that said am I going to get more time to do them? Am I going to get more money? Are the Movie studios going to quit catering to the lowest bidder and go with the quality studios? The biggest and last question, are the movies studios still going to wait until the last three months of production and insist on changing the entire fucking game because one of their fat executives played it for five fucking minutes and didn’t think he liked it? When answer to those questions equal no, then and only then with shitty movie licenses quit being produced.

My impression is that it's not the studios specifically, or the developers, or the publishers that are the middlemen in almost all of these deals. It's the dynamic that exists between all of them. The Big Ape-developed game for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace? It was operating under the same schedule as Enter the Matrix. I seem to recall Minority Report having similar issues, which is no surprise. It's not like Treyarch can't make a good game...