14 DAY TRIAL // After successfully funding his Wasteland 2 development project via Kickstarter Brian Fargo, the leader of inXile, has offered some insight into the relationship between publishers and developers and the problems it can create.
The developer says that publishers tend to restrict the information about their relationships with studios because it can be detrimental to their objectives and often use fear to make sure that no one talks.
He went on to address the controversy over the bonus that Obsidian could have gotten for Fallout: New Vegas by saying, “There is more tension than you can believe. You would not believe the stories you hear about how developers are treated by publishers these days.
“It is abysmal. Look at the most recent one with those poor guys at Obsidian. They did Fallout: New Vegas, the ship date got moved up and, who does the QA on a project? The publisher is always in charge of QA.”
He said that the developers could never provide the manpower needed for the Quality Assurance process and that Bethesda was mostly at fault for the fact that the game launched with some problems.
Fargo added, “they missed their Metacritic rating by one point. Did they get a bonus? No. Do you think that's fair?
“I tried to get some of my publisher friends, who I used to make a lot of money for, to donate. Do you think they donated? No. Their employees did.”
The industry veteran also claimed that at least 25 percent of the costs associated with video game development were linked to the involvement of the publisher and that the figure might rise to 35 in certain situations.
The Wasteland 2 ideas was pitched to all major publishers and none of them was interested in it, so Fargo decided to make the game on his own, getting more than 1.5 million dollars in funding from fans (1.13 million Euro).