developing a game after it goes gold

[drone]

Regarding EA and their studios, I think the situation can get even worse than fret says, since they have to deal with console games as well as PC. Burn those console discs, and pray there are no show-stopper bugs. Vodka, with a milk of magnesium chaser, keep them coming until closing time, be here same time tomorrow...

[fret]

since they have to deal with console games as well as PC. Burn those console discs

This is a very real problem, however, because console development is done on proprietry hardware, the occurance of such show-stopping bugs is a much rarer occurance than in the PC market, which has to cope with an infinate number of combinations of hardware manufacturers and a myriad of varying client specifications.

A 'rushed' console game is more likely to result in a less polished title, rather than a title needing emergency patches.


With regard to gauranteed franchise success and the mega succesful studio's, such a id, Bioware, Valve, Firaxis etc, the draconian measure's forced on them by the publishers still remain, the differance is that the Studio will be able to negotiate a better SPA in the first place - but if they fail to meet the the terms they still get punished the same as the little guys. ie when Firaxis negotiated the Civ3 SPA, they would have bargained for a longer development period mainly, if Joe Bloggs Studio wanted to develop a title, Activision would give them less capital and less time to create the product, wheras id or Firaxis would get more capital funding and a longer deveopment period.

Still, there are very, very, very few people who can arrogantly have the attitude of John Carmack and tell the Activision big-wigs "It will be ready when its ready".

Another consideration with these mega-succesful companies is that much of the work will be contracted out anyway (for example, id never made Return to Castle Wolfenstien, they merely oversaw the development of it in a consultative capacity) in this case, the publisher still has to enforce a draconian regime which is passed down the chain.. Activision pressure id -> id pressure contractor -> and so on.

Ad naseum hell on earth