MarFish said:
No, we can not agree on that.
Look back at Atari's marketing campaign for NWN. No way IPLY could have done anything close to that when they were not even capable of paying for contractual milestones.
Most of the marketting was done by BioWare and Interplay. Atari only had it for a year or so prior to it's release. By that time, the hype engine was already in full swing - by BioWare.
Look at Feargus excuses for IWD2 - in the end they were all based on "we had no cash".
The game development was funded by BioWare. IWD2's development was funded by Interplay, and went way over the five month development time it was expected to take when the project was started.
Dumping a publisher is a damn risky gamble, you don't do it if it's absolutely necessary.
And a huge reason would be if said publisher doesn't pay you, right?
IWD2 and NWN are two totally different beasts here. IWD2 lacks the important copy protection that NWN has, which is that whole key driven thing to play the multiplayer. A delay in the European release like IWD2 had wouldn't have cost it nearly as much. There might have been a few lost sales, but not many given the differences in the type of game.
A lot of Feargus's excuses on IWD2 were a little off the mark too. IWD2 was only HOTLY ANTICIPATED by a handful of people on the Interplay forums. Outside of that, most people were looking forward to NWN and didn't give a rip about IWD2. It was destined to bomb just because the world had already moved on to something newer - NWN. You could go to any general gaming site and look up the threads on the news postings about IWD2 and most of them had zero comments. NWN, despite having a whirlwind of media regurgitations, always had comments on whatever BioWare did with the game. Not too many people cared about IWD2.
Sure, Interplay tried to scam them and Paralax out of royalties, but that's not a good reason to dump them for cash.
Are you an idiot? If you do three jobs for someone, and they're not paying you for the first two, and you know that third job is going to bring in massive cash, are you going to want to do that one with those people when you can do it for someone that's actually likely to pay you?
Bah, in you hate for BioWare you are even starting to paint IPLY nice if it only serves the purpose of being able to say "See, Bioware is all about cash! How dare they!". You're so blinded by hatred now that you're starting to see things that are not there.
Now you're just mouth stuffing. I think I even said there's nothing wrong with getting the money you're supposed to get for a job, but you should be honest about that. Hell, Interplay probably would have made enough on the pre-orders of NWN to fund the publishing of the game in Europe.
Furthermore, I've never painted Interplay as nice. Note the fact I've mentioned in every single post that they didn't pay BioWare for the Baldur's Gate games BioWare made for them. How
exactly is that painting them as nice? Hmm?