Brian Fargo: Buggy games is not developer’s fault, Publishers are in charge of QA

Brian Fargo, Interplay founder, has revealed a lot of depressing things about publisher-developer relationships in an interview with Ripten, and its really an eye-opener.

Obsidian shipped out Fallout New: Vegas and it did 84 on Metacritic, and they were supposed to hit 85 on Metacritic for bonuses which they obviously didn’t get.

“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,” he revealed.

“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 also said that its always the publisher’s fault that games are so buggy, because a developer will always fix the bugs if asked.

“When a project goes out buggy, it’s not the developer. The developer never says, ‘I refuse to fix the bug,’ or, ‘I don’t know how.’ They never do that. It’s the publisher that does the QA, so if a product goes out buggy, it’s not the developer’s fault,” he said.

“So, [New Vegas] goes out buggy and they didn’t do the QA, their ship date got moved up and 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.”

This is indeed a shocking revelation and my heart goes out to the folks at Obsidian.

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