It would be a rubbish joke, but bear with me, for now the joke is about to become a reality. Yesterday, an article in The Hollywood Reporter reported that a leading videogame publisher was proposing to start penalising game developers for making unsatisfactory software, by adding a clause to its license contracts that says: make the game decent, or it's going to cost you. And which publisher is this? Answer: it’s the fat, bloated, moneybags Warner Bros. corporation. And PALGN cannot praise their actions enough.
So what are Warner Bros., who have dished out licences for the incompetent likes of Enter The Matrix (PALGN score: 6.0) and Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup, actually proposing? Well, from now on the company will not only be monitoring the commercial performance of a game, but also the critical reception it’s given. To this end, Warner Bros. will be keeping a close eye on cumulative game review scores from sites such as gamestats.com and gamerankings.com. Games that score below an average of 70% will incur an increase in royalty rates for use of the Warner Bros. license in question. The lower the score, the higher the rates.
"The game industry has had its time to exploit movie studios all day long and to get away with producing inferior products," Jason Hall, senior vice president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, is quoted as saying. "But, with Warner Brothers, no more. Those days are over. And we mean it. This isn't just lip service. Honestly, the bad games are over.”
Bruno Bonnell (who has now been removed from PALGN’s Christmas card list), chairman and CEO of Atari who published Enter the Matrix, was one of the first to criticize Hall's scheme. "We sold four million copies," Bonnell told the The Hollywood Reporter. "That's $250 million worldwide. That's what a big major motion picture makes. And Warner Bros. would penalize us because we didn’t achieve 70%? Are they joking?”
Responds Hall: "Sales don't equal quality.”
But what’s inspired this sudden attack of conscience? Why should big, bad, transnational media corporation Warner Bros. even worry about what a few critics say when Enter The Matrix is one of the best-selling games of the last five years? Warner Bros. will undoubtedly argue it’s looking after it’s consumers. This is, of course, most likely tosh - the corporation has it’s own agenda for this radical approach to ensuring game quality. It’s far more plausible that Warner Bros. are simply looking after their properties - after all, as the popular saying goes, throw enough crap at a big-money movie licence, and it sticks. Or something like that. So whilst Atari may not give a flying fig about Enter The Matrix’s poor critical reception, it’s perfectly understandable that Warner Bros. would want a licence such as The Matrix to be associated with quality.
Whatever it’s motives for this move, Warner Bros. should be roundly applauded. For far too long, poor games have sold on the strength of licences alone, with consumers suffering from substandard software as a result of developers being forced to rush games that are tie-ins to movies or cartoons. The big-movie licence has been a curse on the vast majority of games - Goldeneye, we’re letting you off - so for Warner Bros. to adopt such a radical stance in what is becoming an increasingly publisher-led industry is admirable.
In the end, only consumers will benefit, and we can only hope other publishers begin to follow this new model for quality control. As for Warner Bros., we may even forgive Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu.
It's good that something is being done... 
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