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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Some WiiWare devs were not being paid.

peanut1972 said:
Sqrl said:
noname2200 said:
peanut1972 said:
Wow. Nintendo gets paid, and does not pass it along. I see a law suit coming out of this.

I'm not sure if you're being serious here (I suspect not. However...), but since it's almost certainly spelled out in the contract any lawsuit would get dismissed by summary judgment minutes after going before the judge.

 

QFT

This is as stated in the article, a deterrent to developers pushing a ton of crap onto the service.  We are talking about ~5,000 units they have to sell in order to break past this threshold...for a download service fed to some 25 million people (iir the numbers right) being required to get 5,000 sales is not a high hurdle and should not frighten or scare away any legitimate offering.  If you can't make your game appealing enough to 2% of 1% of the available market then you honestly should not be making games.  More importantly you agreed under contract to the stipulation so you legally don't deserve to get paid either.

I can easily see certain judges declaring the contract uncostitutional.

 

 

And within 10 minutes a motion from the Supreme Court would nullify the ruling. Even in the most liberal 11th circuit, they aren't going to step on a contract.



 

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peanut1972 said:
Sqrl said:
noname2200 said:
peanut1972 said:
Wow. Nintendo gets paid, and does not pass it along. I see a law suit coming out of this.

I'm not sure if you're being serious here (I suspect not. However...), but since it's almost certainly spelled out in the contract any lawsuit would get dismissed by summary judgment minutes after going before the judge.

 

QFT

This is as stated in the article, a deterrent to developers pushing a ton of crap onto the service.  We are talking about ~5,000 units they have to sell in order to break past this threshold...for a download service fed to some 25 million people (iir the numbers right) being required to get 5,000 sales is not a high hurdle and should not frighten or scare away any legitimate offering.  If you can't make your game appealing enough to 2% of 1% of the available market then you honestly should not be making games.  More importantly you agreed under contract to the stipulation so you legally don't deserve to get paid either.

I can easily see certain judges declaring the contract uncostitutional.

 

If you're saying that there are activist judges then I agree, but I don't know of anything in the constitution that you could legitimately use to nullify this contract, do you?

 



To Each Man, Responsibility

So I'm basing this post on some of the number thrown around in this thread.

So say the cut off is 5000 and each game is $10. Developers gets 2/3rds of each sale. So in essence they lost $33,333 because of the threshold. Developer knows that and has to crunch the numbers to make up for it. To me the easiest way would be reduce the team size by 1.



peanut1972 said:
noname2200 said:
peanut1972 said:
Wow. Nintendo gets paid, and does not pass it along. I see a law suit coming out of this.

I'm not sure if you're being serious here (I suspect not. However...), but since it's almost certainly spelled out in the contract any lawsuit would get dismissed by summary judgment minutes after going before the judge.

Your not in California are you?  Progressive Judges come up with some strange rulings as they breath new life into the meaning of words.

 

In point of fact, I am. And I even study California law for a living. And while I'll be the first to tell you that our courts have slipped in quality from their golden age, the basic rules of contract remain in place. Contract terms can only be nullified if they violate public policy, are unconscionable, or meet one of a few other narrow circumstances.

While you can try to take a stab at the latter, you'd lose, simply because courts assume that commercial parties enter into contracts with their eyes open, and there's nothing I can see here that rebuts that presumption. In fact, I'm highly skeptical that a court would find these terms unconscionable even if one of the parties was a common consumer, as the threshold for "unconscionable" remains pretty high. Additionally, there are other venues that developers can take, which is taken into account.

But this whole discussion is irrelevant, as I'm fairly certain that Nintendo's made sure that Washington law applies.