Double Fine Double Dipping?
Posted by Gwyddia on June 4, 2009Probably not, but according to Activision, Tim Schafer’s Double Fine has been working on Brutal Legend all this time while it is Activision who still holds the rights to publish it.
Timeline, please. Here you go:
Late 2007 – Activision and Vivendi merge into Activision Blizzard. Sierra, who was owned by Vivendi is eaten up in the merge.
July 2008 – Activision drops much of the Sierra lineup, including Brutal Legend, Chronicles of Riddick, and Ghostbusters.
Late 2008 – EA Partners breaks the legal logjam and buys the rights to publish Brutal Legend.
Despite dropping the game, Activision now claims that, because they invested nearly $15 million into Brutal Legend, they retain publishing rights. Thus, they are suing to block the release of the game until someone pays them off. Attorneys for all parties involved will scrutinize these contracts and probably did so long ago, but it seems odd that EA would have settled for the right to spend all the money developing the game and not make sure they had the right to publish it.
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The question isn’t really whether they decided to move forward at this time with the project– it’s whether contractually Double Fine had the authority to license exclusive publishing rights to EA when Activision still had the project “on the shelf,” i.e. neither party claimed (or could claim) material breach. If the publishing contract was still in effect as to that title then Activision is entirely within its right to sue. Simply “dropping” a project doesn’t automatically mean those rights revert back to the developer– if anything, there’s a good possibility that a transfer of publishing rights to Activision could survive breach indefinitely (if there’s nothing akin to a sunset provision). That’s what a survival provision is for, after all.
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