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Curt Schilling Fires Entire Staff At 38 Studios
redletterdave writes "On Thursday, former Boston Red Sox pitcher and tech entrepreneur Curt Schilling fired his entire staff at 38 Studios, his Rhode Island-based video game company, leaving more than 300 employees without jobs because the company couldn't repay its debt to the state. 38 Studios failed to pay Rhode Island's economic development agency $1.1 million, which was due last week, and also failed to meet payroll for its staff in both its Providence office and its Maryland subsidiary, Big Huge Games."
The company's recent action RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, sold 1.2 million copies — which would have been great if they hadn't needed to sell 3 million to break even. An article at Massively goes through some of the lessons the video game industry needs to learn from this situation.
I was hoping this would turn around, I'm tired of hearing stories of companies that take gov't money and fold right quick afterwards. That ugly monument to screwing the taxpayers, SolyndraBuilding, irks me every time I drive by it.
Having played both Skyrim and Kingdoms, I loved the way Kingdoms worked and preferred it over Skyrim and Oblivion. The gameplay was great and the action seamless and fast, being able to switch from ranged to melee to magic and back and forth with the speed that Kingdoms had was amazing. I enjoyed the world, the story, the design, everything.
Hopefully a decent studio will take up the title for future installments, cuz it was a great game.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
I fail to see how he confuses a single player game with an MMO. WTF. His eventual goal may have been an MMO but THIS GAME was a single player action CRPG.
>IOW a copy to one out of ever 100 living Americans?
Hello? There is this place called the rest of the world. It's a place where americans don't live. There are lots of us.
We know you are there. We just don't care.
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Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
Uh... you realize that the market for video games is a hell of a lot bigger than just the US right?
Diablo 3 had 4.7 million sales *on day 1*. And that's without korean cafes.
Skyrim (which was cross platform) is up around 9 and a half million copies in about a week.
The problem with Kingdoms of Amalur:reckoning is that no one has any fucking clue what an Amalur is, and it's not obvious that is the world they were creating, which immediately turns attention away. And as an RPG it's nothing spectacular, run around do quests. It's decent enough, and well executed, but there's nothing in it that you call your friend and say 'you have to play this game to see this' the way skyrim or fallout has.
No one knows what the fuck skyrim is either, but when you're an established series you can build press and momentum for whatever name you want, and people will go for it. Kingdoms of Amalur may have failed in part because they didn't invest enough in press and marketing, released at the wrong time, etc. But it's certainly not a huge barrier for a game at the production quality they had to sell 3 million copies, especially across all 3 platforms. Granted, it has been out for 3 months and is *still* 60 bucks on steam, so that's not helping either. They'd have been well served to do a sale at say 20 bucks and use it as an experiment to see if they can get more sales. At this point, there's nothing else to lose, so it can't hurt to try.
We know you are there. We just don't care.
And they should be thankful for that. When it comes to foreign countries, we've only got two modes: Apathy and Ass-kicking.
You don't like being ignored? Ok, how about we teach you to know your place? It's ass kicking time.
War of 1812, Vietnam war, Bay of Pigs... shall I continue?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
We know you are there. We just don't care.
And they should be thankful for that. When it comes to foreign countries, we've only got two modes: Apathy and Ass-kicking.
You don't like being ignored? Ok, how about we teach you to know your place? It's ass kicking time.
War of 1812, Vietnam war, Bay of Pigs... shall I continue?
Those all fall under apathy.
but on the positive side, it looks like they're hiring! ;)
:/
In light of recent events, I'd advise the site developer to update that page but I'm guessing he or she was just fired
It also didn't help to have single player quests behind a online pass. Fighting with the user-base when you're just beginning is never good.
And that was a damned good RPG. Needing 3 million sales to break even is insane ......
they failed as a company because they had way, way too much staff.
would it really have been that much different with "just" 150 people? don't think so.
oh and an ordered world that wasn't too imaginative. skipped the whole title because of that. they could have lifted their pr right off from wow, didn't seem imaginative.
judging from gameplay videos, you people who compare amalur to skyrim: are you fucking insane? if you have to compare it to something recent compare it to the abortion that was dragon age II or wow - because skyrim, oblivion & morrowind are sandbox virtual 3d world action rpg games with gameplay that goes with it - wow, amalur & dragon age II are mostly 2d hack'n'slash games portrayed with 3d models - apparently not too many people want a nwn-gauntlet hybrid for their xbox, can't blame 'em, not after the abortion that was dragon age II.
but plenty of people wanted skyrim - it's at least different and the world took something else to make than what 38 studios could have made with a staff 10x bigger than what they now had, it took imagination on how to use the tools.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That gladly preaches on behalf of Republican Senator Scott Brown for supposedly smaller government, all the while sticking his greedy hands out for as much government subsidized $$$ as he could muster as a "world series hero"
all government spending is evil in his hypocritical world, unless you're a clown that pissed away $75 million in taxpayer money so he could play video game developer
You don't get it. This isn't an online pass so you can play online or play the game. It's an online pass so you can play some single player content. It matters to each and every player in the XBox and PS3 market that ether wanted to trade it in or buy it used because it devalued the game. That one little trick caused the price of it used to drop faster which also means less trade in value (47.99 instead of 54.99). Developers and Publishers want to think that these hurt their sales. In truth they are what are driving their sales. Without the economic flow from the used game sales the new game sales would be a smaller pie. And personally I don't buy or play Ubisoft titles like ANNO 2070 because of their always on DRM for single player.
More like willful ignorance - the most common American trait there is.
AccountKiller
What the heck are you talking about? The USA lost the Vietnam War, there's no question about it. The goal was to stop the spread of (chinese/soviet-backed) communism, by getting involved in a civil war and backing the non-communist side. The USA failed; they finally pulled out, and the communist side took over the country. That conflict bears zero resemblance to the War of 1812.
Finally, the Vietnam conflict didn't just kill Americans "willing to die in defense of their country". In case you don't remember, they had a draft back then. Lots of people had no interest in going to war, but when they got called, they either tried to escape to Canada or they went ahead and went, hoping they'd be OK (and a lot weren't).
Finally, the Vietnam war didn't even have similar motives. The War of 1812 happened because of British actions as the AC above stated. It's pretty bad when a foreign power seizes your merchant ships, kidnaps the sailors, and forces them to fight in their armed services. Vietnam, on the other hand, was no threat at all to the USA, and was really in a civil war (sound familiar?). We got involved there partly because of communism, and partly because our French buddies had their asses kicked there and wanted to preserve their colonial interests there. Vietnam has far more parallels to Cuba and the Bay of Pigs (except in that conflict, we changed our mind at the last minute and didn't show up, much like what happened at the end of Desert Storm in the early 90s, leading to a slaughter).
I understand completely. And it's not an issue. If anything they made more money doing it this way and needed to sell less copies. I know you don't want to hear that because you believe used game sales add value, but frankly, they don't. The huge array of very successful titles through steam should give you a clue as to why this works.
On the other side of this, which is where I am, used game sales have been an unmitigated disaster for the industry as a whole. It has created a perverse adversarial relationship between us, the developers, and gamestop the prime seller of our games (well, 25% of the overall market) as well as the prime purveyor of used games.
Notice how there are no used game sales for diablo? MMO's? Anything on any of the online marketplaces etc? Right. Physical boxes exist to build interest in a brand, and even then it's usually a money pit these days, because who the hell wants to print 40k copies of a game for walmart and gamestop when it probably won't even sell 40k copies. You are far more likely to be successful with a banner ad on steam than boxed copies in stores (where the big brands of maddens, skyrim, etc all pay for the good shelf space).
Preventing used game sales, for example, by only releasing our titles through online distributors (PSN, XBL, Steam, etc.) you make a shit load more money, even if the total number of copies sold is less. Now when you're really big, skyrim big, you can afford used game sales because people will play your game long enough, and enough people will be there day one, that the used market will be lost profit on top of a mountain of profit. For everyone else it has been a giant plague on the industry. Where we could sell 100k units, and make a living before used games were prevalent, now we'll sell 50k units, that are resold 3 times. It shifts the entire industry to an advertising exercise making sure your game is bought on day one, because after that you're basically fucked (and btw, having a game that spends 4x as much on advertising as making the actual game will piss you off too, which is what the big guys do these days). Sure, more people are playing the game, but you're getting half as much money (and actually the numbers are generally dramatically worse than that but I don't have them in front of me at the moment*).
And I don't care that you didn't play ANNO 2070. Really, I don't. They've sold a shitload of copies for what is a crushingly niche game. As in hundreds of thousands of copies. As as ARMA II on the PC. Where there are no used sales via steam. That's the future. Because it has to be. We cannot keep running an industry on 40% government subsidies.
Remember, I'm advocating (perhaps later in this thread) that they cut their price to boost sales. That is a good idea absent used game sales. But you can *never* compete with the identical product for less money used. Ever. People have tried. It fails.
This also ties into another thread from today, about games wrecking kids. The article itself is overblown, but it's decidedly not healthy to have people rush out, buy a game, play it for 8-20-40 hours straight, sell it used. Which is what happens a lot. We can track these things you know.
*I'm sure I've posted it before on here somewhere. But I think for the last big project I worked on it was something like a factor of 6 or 7 x as many players as copies sold, which were down around 50% from the previous title in the series. But don't quote me. It was brutal though.
That little trick they did could also be what cost them sales, but you can't actually measure sales lost because the user-base decided that they weren't going to take it. It breads negative sentiment for the brand.
Lets see if you understand even a little bit of economics. Game Stop puts about 1 billion a year into the hands of Gamers. This is based off of their Reported Profits from Used Game Sales. That 1 Billion then goes to ether New games or other Used games. You might think that the Used game sale costs the Developer something, but in Reality it freed up some cash so that the Gamer who traded in the New Game first can buy another New Game. If he didn't that would reduce the Speed of how many games in total that they would be able to buy in a Year. The same logic applies to the Used Car Market. Stopping Used game sales could end up causing the New game sales to contract by 1 to 2 billion dollars since it doesn't just stop the 1 billion from getting into the gamers hands but also puts a stop to the over all flow of games. The overall market would have a contraction of over 5 billion since it would kill the 3 Billion in GameStop Used games and contract the New game market as well. If you're goal is to kill the industry this is exactly how you should do it. I've heard these excuses before. I'm old enough to remember Nintendo complain about Block Buster Rentals. Up until recently they've had a Recession Proof Industry, and the lost Sales the last few years is clearly due to the Recession, and has nothing to do with Used Games. The Profits from used games can also be tied to their price hike. Nintendo Warned them that it was a bad idea to increase the cost of development too much, and look at what it got them. A price hike that has caused Used Games to become preferable and made it so they no longer have a Recession Proof Industry. And this year we're in a flip where People arn't buying much because New Consoles are around the corner and new AAA games are being put onto systems that aren't out yet so supply is contracting. It happens every Console Cycle.
Cry Me A River
I saw Amalur advertised. It looked interesting. I checked Steam, it was 60$. I mentally filed it under "maybe someday if there's a sale". Sale didn't happen before developer tanked.
Maybe now it'll go on sale?
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
No, they succeeded. It may have been a Pyrrhic victory (estimates put their losses at 1,000,000 Viet Cong), but they did win; they drove out the western imperialists and took over the country with their communist government. The US didn't win squat; 50k American lives were lost along with who knows how much money, and the peoples' faith in their government was shattered.