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Call of Duty - The Annotated Contract
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 12, 2007 01:30 PM
from the that's-a-lot-of-info dept.
from the that's-a-lot-of-info dept.
Gamasutra offers up yet another unique feature: an annotated contract for a big-budget game. The document, part of a legal dispute between studio Spark and Activision, was released to the public. Game developers Tom Buscaglia, Chris Bennett, and Dave Spratley have chimed in with some insightful commentary on the particulars of game development in the major leagues. Particularly interesting is page twelve of the document, which lays out milestone payments for the project. "Payments totaling $8.5M USD are spread over the initial game milestones. Since these schedules are incorporated into the Agreement, the Notes to this milestone schedule are as important as the other provisions of the agreement. Here the requirement of approval before payment is reiterated. Also Spark is required to do monthly code dumps to Activision throughout the progress of the Game pre-Alpha, and then weekly builds thereafter. It also includes Activision's detailed requirements for the Final Milestone Schedule (FMS), Technical Design Document (TDD) and Game Design Document (GDD) that are very informative."
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Call of Duty - The Lawsuit 21 comments
Gamasutra is running a follow-up to their annotated contract piece from last month. As you may recall, the contract became public knowledge because of a court case between Spark unlimited and Activision regarding the title Call of Duty : Finest Hour. The article also covers a legal dispute between Spark/Activision and EA during the formation of the troubled development house. Now, the site is running an in-depth look at their legal dispute. The article explores some of the problems that can face any developer/publisher relationship, and how the legal case has affected that already strained situation. "A constant source of friction was Activision's desire to see a fully functioning game early in the development process. 'At Electronic Arts', he wrote, 'the level vision was able to be constructed without the constraints of frame rate, or memory to get the body of the game in and working,' a process which left polish until the end of the development cycle. 'However, under the more risk-averse Activision system, polish happens through the entirety of the process and there is a consistent desire to have the game playable on disc and running at 30 fps.'"
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Call of Duty 4 Announced 77 comments
The fourth title in the extremely well received Call of Duty series has been announced. Infinity Ward is now working on Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat . The title will end the series' reliance on the theatre of World War II, and will place gamers into a current-day setting fighting terrorists in the Middle East. While the chance to get away from WWII will be appreciated by game-players, not everyone is happy about that hackneyed title. "What followed [Medal of Honor] were such games as Day of Defeat (Activision, 2003) and Men of Valor (Vivendi, 2004.) Ubisoft briefly bucked the trend, boldly replacing the near-mandatory 'of' with 'in' for its 2005 release 'Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30,' but soon fell right in line with the rest of its industry brethren with the 2006 real-time strategy game Faces of War. Ditto for THQ's 2006 RTS game Company of Heroes. Later this year, retail shelves will be graced with THQ's Frontlines: Fuel of War and Midway's Hour of Victory. (That's why for the last couple of years, we and a number of our peers have jokingly created our own World War II game titles, Mad Libs-style, like Call of Honor, Men of Duty, Company of Brothers, etc.)"
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blackballed? (Score:2)
That's a good way to make sure nobody will work with you in the future..
Re: (Score:1)
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All Call of Duty games are done internally now.
Re:blackballed? (Score:5, Informative)
CoD 1 and 2 were made by Infinity Ward, CoD: Big Red One by Treyarch/Gray Matter and CoD 3 by Treyarch.
There was also an expansion pack CoD: United Offensive, from Gray Matter.
Infinity Ward are also supposedly working on CoD 4.
So, Spark hasn't worked on CoD since this.
Parent
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Of course nothing beats the original Day of Defeat mod for online WWII combat.
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Re: (Score:2)
"COD2" is actually a fantastic game
Re:blackballed? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Uppon further reading of the artticle (yes, I actualy read all of TFA) one of the counter claims is that Spark broke the contract simply by bringing up this suit (by submitting the contract as evidence they therefore broke the NDA type stuff).
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Re:blackballed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Standard stuff (Score:3, Informative)
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Funny Name (Score:2, Funny)
I'm sure contract negotiations are very thrilling and all, but a game based on it probably won't sell very well.
SOW (Score:2)
I wrote one last semester. The devil is in the details (or lack thereof).
False (Score:3, Informative)
No - Gamasutra offers up a series of low quality scans of the pages of a contract for a big-budget game with some commentary offered after some of the pages. The result is product that is virtually unreadable. On top of that, what is offered is a translation (and a partial one at that), rather than an annotation.