Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Brilliance, Delay, Simputer
It's all fun and games until you end up in Bankruptcy. Born Game writes: "Loki was supposed to be declared dead today by the bankruptcy trustee. Dennis Powell has followed their story closely, and he has written a wrapup that will break your heart and make you mad."
I hope he's making it longer than Cryptonomicon. We reported that Neal Stephenson's new book Quicksilver was due last month. An anonymous reader pointed to this page at Amazon UK, writing "the book is due out March 6th next year, not this year. Meh."
Maybe calling it Brilliant wasn't such a bright idea. asv108 writes: "According to this article from MP3 Newswire, Cnet's Download.com has removed KaZaA media desktop due to concerns over Brilliant Digital Entertainment's hidden software."
It's still available elsewhere though; if you or someone you love wants to use such software regardless, TDScott writes: "In case anyone is having trouble convincing their friends that there's a problem with the b3d spyware installed with KaZaA, I've put together a quick summary page on what the problem is and how to remove it (use AdAware with caution) - pointing people to it might save you hours of explanation."
I hope these are available stateside, too. Pankaj writes "Simputer is All set to hit the market in India. The Open Source Computer (Both Hardware/Software) Has found its first makers in Encore Solutions who will start selling it within the next one month. {sources internal}. This will give the iPaq and Palms a run for their money, as the simputer is loaded with features like internal modem, smartcard reader and usb port. There are plans to add a gsm phone into it too -- watch out, Nokia! And one third the price; it's supposed to be 10,000 Indian Rupees. Thats around $210 try comparing it to the ipaq.
Did you ask what it is based on? It's Linux 2.4, man, with gtk and its developer kit it's as free as the hardware itself. This looks like hot stuff to go for.
Loki was not killed by a market not willing to buy their goods, though that did have some small contribution. It was killed by the absolute criminal incompitence of it's president.
I feel sorry for the people who Loki owes money to. I feel no pity at all for Loki.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Nobody is going to wait for a company to port games over to Linux if they can boot up Windows on the same box. If Loki perhaps pursued licencing good games exclusively for Linux... then they would probably have had a better chance.
Said one, "All we lost was money. Scott lost his friends."
... Scott should lose his right to be with us anymore. He should be in prison, based on that story.
Let's say they were charging $50/copy and they sold 5000 copies (which seemed to be a reasonable expectation given what the report said). At that price and volume, that's $250,000 per title.
Now, figure that each title is going to take 3 or 4 developers. Let's say that each is paid $96K/year (for math simplicity) in salary and benefits, that would come down to approximately $8000/month per employee or roughly $32,000/month for each team. My numbers are totally coming out of thin air, but not unreasonable. At that burn rate you can afford to spend 7 months in development of each game with some room for some sort of profit.
Of course that base price isn't accounting for a lot of the company infrastructure. You have to afford a place to work, computers, a network connection, marketing, packaging, etc. You'll need an office manager, somebody to run the website, and a couple other odds and ends. So probably, in the grand scheme of things, you're talking at least $50K/month burn rate. As you develop more games, the overhead is probably reduced somewhat but this is a reasonable baseline.
So now, suddenly you are down to 5 months of development time. Ohhhh wait, you forgot to license that game, didn't you? Well that's going to shave a few bucks off each copy of the game, and now suddenly you are in the red assuming that you can get the game ported from start to finish in 5 months.
My numbers aren't necessarily realistic, but I think they are close enough to reality to illustrate that this is, at best, a razor thin business to be in.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
You can help the organisation either financially or by developing applications. Follow for more details including a mailing list for developers.
And do remember, it's target audience is farmers, small traders in developing countries. So, they require applications for these groups. For example, they are trying to developing financial applications that can give details about microcredit transactions of a villager in India, or one that gives details about land records, simple things else-where, but for which the bureaucracy has complicated procedures.