Bethesda just kept them to their original contract and didn’t pay anything they weren’t required to. I mean, it would have been a nice “thank you” for almost meeting their goals. But they didn’t.
The promised bonus was dependent on what rating the game got from Metacritic. If it got an 85 or better, they got the bonus. It got an 84 and specifically lost points due to the rampant bugs. BioWare was responsible for bug testing and QA according to the contract.
it’s still an asshole move though, only a soulless corporation would ever clutch to the “well actually” of a single point of an average of reviews to deny a whole bonus
even if they were cheeky like “oh you were one point short so the bonus will be 5% less than we promised haha” it’d have been better than a binary yes/no
Bethesda just kept them to their original contract and didn’t pay anything they weren’t required to. I mean, it would have been a nice “thank you” for almost meeting their goals. But they didn’t.
i believe it was sawyer who said he blames himself for that because he did not pivot the team to work on bug fixing until it was way too late
The promised bonus was dependent on what rating the game got from Metacritic. If it got an 85 or better, they got the bonus. It got an 84 and specifically lost points due to the rampant bugs. BioWare was responsible for bug testing and QA according to the contract.
it’s still an asshole move though, only a soulless corporation would ever clutch to the “well actually” of a single point of an average of reviews to deny a whole bonus
even if they were cheeky like “oh you were one point short so the bonus will be 5% less than we promised haha” it’d have been better than a binary yes/no
Or they really wanted it to be 90%+. Maybe the 85% was already giving them 5% leeway.