Chris Avellone, creative lead at Obsidian Entertainment, has said that the studio did not receive a bonus for its development work on Fallout: New Vegas bcause the game's score on review agregator Metacritic was one point too low.
In a post on his Twitter account, Avellone explained, "Fallout: New Vegas was a straight payment, no royalties, only a bonus if we got an 85+ on Metacritic, which we didn't." The tweet has since been deleted, and Avellone has not responded to media requests for comment.
At the moment, the PC and Xbox 360 versions of Fallout: New Vegas hold an 84 out of 100 on Metacritic, meaning the team missed out on the bonus from the game's publisher, Bethesda, by exactly one point.
While publishers offering bonuses for high review scores is hardly a novel concept, this announcement provides a glaring example of just how ridiculous the policy can be in practice. Metacritic casts a fairly wide net with the sites it includes, but it's still a limited selection of all the reviews ever written about a game. It's entirely possible that a unnecessarily harsh review from a site with almost no readership could cost developers hard earned money, as could the omission of positive reviews from sites that don't make the cut or choose not to assign numeric scores.
On top of that, this sort of publisher behavior throws an added wrench into maintaining journalistic independence. It's bad enough that reviewers have to assign a number value to something that hundreds of people have spent years of their lives working on, and knowing that a low score could cost developers financially just serves to complicate things further.
Obsidian, for their part, have fallen onto hard times as of late. Yesterday, it was announced that the studio had laid off dozens of employees following the cancellation of their next gen project.