Namco Bandai recently explained why Bottlerocket had the development of Splatterhouse yanked from their hands and given to an in-house team, citing “performance issues” and claiming that the studio wasn’t meeting requirements. Bottlerocket had today returned fire, claiming that they were in fact meeting targets, and did all that was asked of them.
“We too have to be careful of what we say, since publishers have to worry about their ‘image’ and will sue small, independent studios who bark back at them too loudly,” stated the developer, quite savagely. “Game development contracts are put in place to protect the publisher and their interests. Within these contracts are a series of defined game development objectives and goals called milestones. If a developer is underperforming, they tend to fail these milestones and have varying degrees of accountability placed upon them.
“Splatterhouse had been in development for over 18 months, and up to having the title taken away from us, we had not missed any contractually defined milestones. So either there were no performance issues during that timeframe or Namco’s management of the title was inept.”
If Bottlerocket is being “careful” with that statement, I’d love to get their off-the-record opinions on the matter. I’m not a huge fan of Namco or its practices, so my instinct wants to take Bottlerocket’s word on this one. However, if Bottlerocket did perform to a satisfactory degree, it keeps this situation incredibly strange. Why did Namco pull the rug out from under the studio?
