A Variety report says unrest is growing at Vivendi Games' Sierra label because all of its titles will soon have to be pitched to new corporate masters at Activision.
"Development teams on all of Vivendi's games now have to essentially pitch their projects to Activision executives," writes Ben Fritz, who cites numerous sources in a report on Variety's The Cut Scene blog.
"Until the merger is technically complete, work proceeds as usual, but once it's over, Activision will start making some decisions. And it seems very unlikely that everything at Sierra will keep going as it has been.
"Just like when a new executive team takes over at a film studio, some projects in development get killed and others get changed as the new folks in charge start establishing their own tastes and corporate priorities."
Fritz writes that World of Warcraft developer Blizzard, and games due out this year such as The Bourne Conspiracy, Prototype and Ghostbusters will not be subject to interference, but those in development for 2009 may be dispensable.
"Activision obviously made the deal to get its hands on the biggest MMO, and really the biggest game, in the industry. Everything else is basically an afterthought. Which leaves all of those making the afterthoughts in an uncertain position.
"It's all in Activision's hands now. Which leaves some nervous developers at Sierra."
Seemingly so mate. I always thought Activision were a good company, I thought wrong by the looks of it.
As far as PLCs go, there's no such thing as a good company in the games industry. Unless the company is independent, the power lies with a bunch of faceless money-grabbing shareholders and their executive puppets that don't know the first thing about what makes games good.
Activision used to be a good company till the turned EA when the movies came out by lionhead they basically said they dont want to support the modding community and all modding talk was banned on the lionhead forums.
Unlike Bethesda who support modding for their elderscrolls games and have dedicated forums for it.
To be fair to Activision, we're all just speculating here. They might not interfere at all, at least not yet. When this batch of games do crappily, then they might start the layoffs and cancellations...
I'm sick and tired of this now, EA and now Activision....is it any surprise that most of the big titles these days are sequels? As with Hollywood all these companies care about are profits margins.....X game made so much....so X2 will will make at leat this much. If these huge mergers cary on then I fear for the originality of the games industry.
Games industry started dying late 90s, its taking its time but its still slowly dying untill such a time it cant stand up anymore.
To some degree i see your point. Games are losing their originality now, and as the games industry gets bigger it is getitng treated completely as a business, meaning we see tonnes of FPS games etc. but very frew platformers and things similar to them. It is losing it's heart.
Or maybe i'm just whining because there's no Monkey Island games now, and because Brutal Legend is an upcoming Sierra game...
By nature, mergers and acquisitions are about consolidation, not about innovation. There is no doubt in my mind games will be cut (Hope it's not Brutal Legend).
What I'm even more worried about is Blizzard. Will they succeed in keeping their standards up? What amount of pressure are they going to get in the next few years?
We've all feared this. Looks likely our fears will come true...
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