JoWooD cancels SG-1 dev deal

"In recent months we have invested a lot of time and resources in helping Perception finish the development," he continued, "but we now simply have lost confidence in their ability to finish this project in time and sufficient quality."

The rights to the title and its source code will now revert to JoWooD - and the publisher today claimed that it is seeking "repayment of their investment in development and further expenses."



A glowing endorsment for Perception, I forsee small brown envelopes landing the programmer's desks soon.

What was jowoods problem with it? it was too good for them perhaps?

Uhm, ok. i dunno too much about the game, but from what video footage I saw; it seemed to be pretty good.

What other games has this JoWoods published, that SG1 is apparantly to low in quality for them?

Yes this is a slap in the face for Perception. Like everyone has been saying, no-one really thought that this game looked bad. I was quite excited actually by the teaser trailer and the screenshots. Jack and Daniel really looked like their RL counterparts.

Something positive like this happens -- i.e. a publisher halts production of a game they don't think is up to scratch rather than releasing any old rot and cashing in on the Stargate name (like EA would do) -- and we still have people moaning about them on the comments thread.

Jesus...

I guess licenses do actually mean something to JoWooD.

this has been doing the rounds on sg1 forums, and also here.

Hello. I'm afraid I'm not a fan of the franchise, I just googled for the biggest Stargate fansite on the web. I'm a cost-analyst that works for JoWood; my job consists of working out how much a project will cost, then grovelling to management to try to get a large enough budget. First, let me bring you up to speed on JoWood. Anyone who's bought one of our games knows we make woefully inferior, poorly funded crap; with little to no support after the game comes out. The management are totally clueless, as in completely out to lunch. JoWood has fallen on hard times and are always on the lookout on ways to reduce costs (of course the idea of actually improving our games never occurred to them). Why am I slagging them off? Well I've just got a job offer from a much better company so to hell with them.

Do you know why SG:Alliance was really cancelled? It's because some poor simpleton signed a contract stating that should the project not meet our standards, we reserve the right to renege on the whole deal. What's more, they'd have to reimburse us for all the money we invested and release all the assets associated with the project (i.e. the game). We planned to renege on the contract from the beginning. Don't you see, we have the developer make us the game for nothing. Once the game reached a certain point in development we'd say it wasn't up to spec and now not only do they have to hand over the game, but the developer has to pay us for all the money we spent on it.

How do you justify what they did to Perception? They're a low-budget developer, now saddled with a million dollar debt. That's lives ruined, not to mention all the people who will probably lose their jobs.

even with a contract, those business practices cannot be legal. You cannot enter into a contract knowing that you will not honour it, the get out clause is meaningless here if they made a judgement before looking analysing the product (which didn't seem especially bad for a licence game). I can see them getting sued for this. I would say boycott the finished product but in all honesty, there hasn't been a truely successful organised boycott of a big company in a long long time.

JoWood, big, thass a good'un

Everyone should presume this is BS, since JoWood has published all of 3 or 4 quality titles, and even those were buggy.

JoWood have never shown interest in their releases being of a certain quality before, so why now?

Frickin hell, I liked SG-1, but the series was hardly what I'd call high quality...

So JoWood want their money back as well as the source code that Perception developed, where is the logic in that?

Yes, let's all take that post by a random person on an internet forum to be fact.

...

You gullible idiots.

Kotaku had some interesting coverage as well, including a pretty level-headed post. I for one thought the previews were horrid, especially for a game with a AAA budget (I have heard $7-$9 MILLION). Sad for Perception, sad for JoWood and the licenses fans, but, seriously, I'm a fan and after seeing the E3 presentation I lost all hope and began expecting this (and this was months ago). Wasn't Far Cry's budget around $7million? What Perception/JoWood was showing at E3 didn't reflect that investment in the least!!

If this was sincere, way to go JoWood for taking that stand for the sake of the quality of the license and title. If it takes a small, virtually unknown publisher to take this stand and stand up for the quality of a tv/movie licensed franchise, that so be it and JoWood should be commended for that.

how exactly is a game studio being canned a positive thing?

quite how you can say this is beyond me. It's not like they were responsible for the army men series.


Good luck to those involved. I'm not sure about other prospects in australia btu hey at least you got hot weather & barbies on the beach


Oh, and if you're reading, good luck Karl...

I don't claim to know inside information but JoWooD has a lot of problems at the moment and I guess they wanted to stop all unneccessary expenses.

Jowood is a publisher, when they start to see future games that they are publishing as "unnecesairy expenses" they're in more trouble then they think, lol.

there is nothing to talk about games based on movies they always sucked big ass
they dont take time for those games

I don't think it's right that JoWood get their money back AND the source code... that will ruin the developer. It's fair enough for them to want their money back if there was a clause in the contract which allowed this and they are hitting on hard times, but at least let the devs keep their "low quality" game.

Admir, so chronicals of ridduck sucked big ass did it?

SG1 isn't even a movie anyway

so any other publishers canning licensed games in the last week or so?

Well, its hardily Perceptions fault. It must be very difficult to make a good game out of a crap series.

Like carving a gold bar out of shite.

You'd have to feed something gold before that could happen.

EVERY single game that JoWooD has published has been compete crap, so it'd be surprising if Stargate truly couldn't meet their 'expectations'. Seems really dodgy.

Didn't Microsoft do something simulator with a Train Simulator game by Kuju? Waited till it was nearly done and then can it and keep the code.

Interesting investor news release from JW (them being public they have to be pretty open to their investors about their decisions). Namco appeared to be as involved in the decisions as well. JoWood also states to, through Namco, offered Perception development aid resources. I trust Namco's decision on the matter a little more than I trust JoWood's, so, it's interesting to hear that Namco POSSIBLY had reservations as well.

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http://www.jo wood.com/investor/?lang=en

JoWooD Productions Software AG (JoWooD) announces that the development agreement of January 21, 2004 between JoWooD and the Australian developer Perception Ltd., Sydney (Perception) has been terminated.


Outset:

By January 2004 a development contract between JoWood and Perception for the title Stargate SG-1™: The Alliance, based on the lTV show license owned by Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) has been signed. Perception is the licensee and sublicensed in turn to JoWooD. JoWooD already invested more than EUR 5 Mio. in this project by now.


Project development:

As part of the complete restructuring of the company during the last months, all departments were reorganised. Apart from the adjusted sales and distribution, several considerable measures were initiated concerning product development, including studio due diligences and detailed project assessments for every single development project undertaken by and for JoWooD. This was done in order to ensure the right timing concerning product release and quality of the titles under development. In most of these projects excellent results were achieved.

A detailed evaluation of the Stargate SG-1™ title was also undertaken during the reviews. Here JoWooD became aware of several serious shortcomings concerning the conception of the development contract as well as the development staus of the game by Perception with regards time to completion and quality of the game.

The development contract signed in 2004 was fulfilled from JoWooD's side by paying a total of more than EUR 5 Mio. (the major part was already spent in 2004) as well as the use of internal and external resources for press- and marketing campaigns and the cooperation with MGM/Sony. Against that JoWooD faced a severly delayed development with serious quality issues that were not sufficiently adressed by the developer.


Status:

Together with its US publishing partner for Stargate SG-1™ Namco Hometek Inc. (Namco), intensive reviews of the technical status and game play quality of the project were undertaken during the past 3 months. In addition to JoWooD’s Executive Producing additional producing resources were allocated to Perception in Australia.

JoWooD has furthermore tried to provide Perception with additional development support and advice via Namco.

After all these efforts by JoWooD to release the game title Stargate SG-1™ to the market within the proper time and in adequate quality, JoWooD had to face the fact that the present technical status of the development makes a completion of the project by Perception within the contractually agreed time limit (end of August 2005) definitely impossible. This assessment is supported by an external expertise which confirms the severe defects in the areas of visualisation, animations, audio and light effects of the development project already brought up by JoWooD months ago. Three weeks ahead of the contractually planned target date the versions for the major platforms Playstation 2 as well as Xbox are extremely unstable and face severe performance issues.


Consequences:

Based on the serious technical defects and other shortcomings the completion of the game by Perception in suffcient quality seems unrealistic before 3rd quarter 2006. In order to ensure completion by this date, according to the assessment of JoWooD as well as of qualified experts in this area who have reviewed the project status, it would be necessary to invest further EUR 1.5 Mio. to 2 Mio. in addition to the already invested EUR 5 Mio.

A release of the game in Q3 2006 to the market would mean that the essential platforms (Playstation 2 and Xbox), for which the game was supposed to be released, will already be replaced by their respective next-generation consoles. This would implay that the product could be marketed only at severly reduced prices compared to the initially set plan.

Due to the severe technical defects, existing developer risks and significant additional costs for further development added to the already paid budget of more than EUR 5 Mio. as well as the reduced potential yield due to the delay a profitability of the project is unachievable.

In 2005 JoWooD has set its target within the product strategy as well as product selection to only complete profitable development projects and not to invest further money into projects with doubtful profitability.

Therefore JoWooD has terminated the development contract with Perception effective immediately and will put forward all legal and financial claims based on the serious defects. In consequence there will be no further cooperation with Namco within this project constellation.

Alternatively JoWooD evaluates the continuation of the project Stargate SG-1™ on a new organisational, technical as well as economical basis.

wankers

The story that draven repeats in these comments threads is not entirely implausible. A Publisher pulling the plug and taking all assets and recouping investment is not unknown. Jowood don't make utter crap all the time, they published Spellforce (not bad), Silent Storm (pretty good actually - Nival interactive), Gothic (also good) and also Soldner (bugged to hell). I think they also published Neighbours from Hell (No comment). Maybe it's just a story about a third rate devco with a third rate publisher working on a third rate license? Not such a big deal, but when anyone loses their job it's a sad day.

The Draven 'post' to me seems extremely fake. I've seen the same comment on several forums already and it looks like someone trying to cast an involved party in a bad light. I have seen several posts from confirmed JoWood employees and they have all been polite, courteous and asking everyone to remain calm and had praise for Perception.