
Advertisement
Advertisement

The Edge piece went on to suggest that “anything under a perfectly respectable [metascore of] 85 might as well be a failure," before highlighting a series of Radical-like situations where publisher expectations were not met by development teams’ best efforts. Kaos Studios created Homefront in 2011, but its lukewarm reception saw THQ, itself now defunct, shut the New York–based studio down. Polygon published a fantastic piece on the Homefront saga, and its bitter conclusion for the game’s makers, in 2012, and it’s well worth a read.Liverpool’s Bizarre Creations, behind the awesome real-world racer-with-weapons Blur and kill-streak competitive shooter The Club, was acquired by Activision in 2007 but closed just four years later, when (the green-rated!) Blur failed to turn critical praise into commercial points. Creative director Martyn Chudley was damning of the giant publisher’s role in his studio’s demise: “We weren’t making ‘our’ games anymore—we were making games to fill slots. We did believe in them, but they were more the products of committees and analysts. The culture we’d worked on for so long gradually eroded just enough so that it wasn’t ‘ours’ anymore.”RIP Radical Entertainment 1991-2012
— Rob Bridgett (@rbridgett) June 28, 2012
Advertisement
Nobody’s about to lose his job at Bungie as Destiny continues to roll out: With expansion packs coming and a number of timed events scheduled for the next few months, the game is a kind of work in progress, making a definitive rating tough so soon after its release—hence the slow reveal of official scores. And yet its Metacritic reception could cost its makers a substantial bonus payout, as Kotaku revealed on September 16. According to archive documents dating from 2010, if the game was to reach 90 on Metacritic and/or the game-specific GameRankings site—76.21% at the time of writing—Activision would honor an agreement to pay $2.5 million to its developers. Which isn’t looking likely, is it?Bonuses based on how a game (meta)scores is nothing new. Obsidian Entertainment missed out on substantial money from their publisher, Bethesda, when their 2010 role-playing game Fallout: New Vegas came in at 84, a single point south of activating the extra payment. Missing out on the cash resulted in necessary layoffs at the Californian studio—which was behind the surprisingly excellent South Park: The Stick Of Truth earlier in 2014—and had Ars Technica calling for an end to such a bonus system, writing: “Publishers… are using [Metacritic] improperly as some sort of final, objective arbiter for the quality of games its developers are putting out.” Which, of course, is crappy in the extreme, as we’ve all played through enjoyable games that have fallen into Metacritic’s wide yellow waters.
Advertisement
Remember Me—this game is goddamn gorgeousBinary Domain, released in 2012, is a third-person shooter from veteran Sega designer Toshihiro Nagoshi, a man with credits on some true classics: Daytona USA, Super Monkey Ball, and the celebrated Yakuza series. Like Remember Me, its (near-future-Tokyo) setting is excellent and its action incessant, but a few minor shortcomings saw it saddled with a 74 on GameRankings. Sales were low, with only 20,000 copies sold in two months of US retail. Despite a great team behind the scenes, a decent publisher in Sega, and some positive reviews from key publications—8/10 from Eurogamer, 8.5 from Machinima—it’s one of those Edge “failures," falling into what the magazine’s 2012 piece termed the “dreaded mid-tier."It’s incredibly difficult to bring a truly shitty game to gold status—the moment at which its code goes into mass manufacture and reaches store shelves (and digital shop fronts) the world over. Most likely fuck-ups are aborted long before the public gets wind of them. But some developers have, admirably, achieved amazingly abysmal results with relatively recent offerings: 2013’s Ride To Hell: Retribution, by Newcastle-upon-Tyne studio Eutechnyx, rated at 19/100 on Metacritic (for Xbox 360—other platforms scored lower), and the same year’s DARK, from German developer Realmforge, averaged 38 for the same system. And we definitely don’t need to say any more about Aliens: Colonial Marines, DO WE?
Advertisement

