For better or worse, Obsidian and Metacritic will always be linked, with the Fallout: New Vegas developer missing out on a bonus from Bethesda because their game failed to reached 85 on the aggregating site, finishing up at 84 on PC and Xbox 360 (82 on PS3).
With South Park: The Stick of Truth out now, the PS3 version of the game is at 86, PC at 84, and Xbox 360 at 82, but that doesn’t matter to Obsidian, as CEO Feargus Urquhart told Eurogamer:
We have a general policy whenever we’re talking to different publishers now: we don’t do anything that has to do with Metacritic. It’s an unfair way of… in a lot of ways it can only be used as a way to take advantage of a developer.
Ultimately if a game is financially successful, if a developer has back-end royalties on that, then they should make those back-end royalties if they made money for the publisher.
Urquhart was also asked about the future of The Stick of Truth, saying that “I know there are people online asking for DLC and ‘put it on PS4’, and that kind of stuff, and we’ll see. Once the smoke clears, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a conversation. But we’ll see.”
As for a potential sequel, that’s less likely, with Urquhart saying, “Well we don’t have the money and we don’t have the license, so [you probably have as much idea as I do]. I don’t want to say we’re the last guys to know, but we would happily do it if it was on the cards.”
Whatever ends up happening with the future of South Park in video games, Urquhart would “absolutely” want to work with Trey Parker and Matt Stone again.
ASSuming Obsidian does DLC for South Park: The Stick of Truth, what crazy things would you like to see? Let us know in the comments below.
