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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.
>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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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.
Only slightly different from Curt Shillings first industry, professional sports, where they take taxpayer money, stay in business, then demand more. Had the state just given him the money, he could have stuck around for a while, then went back for more a few years later by threatening to take jobs elsewhere.
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