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The Fall of 38 Studios
An anonymous reader writes "Boston magazine provides the first reasonably satisfying account of the final year of Curt Schilling's video game company 38 Studios, which was heavily subsidized by a huge loan guaranteed by the state of Rhode Island. During his career as a baseball pitcher, Schilling helped lead three different teams to four World Series, resulting in three championships. He has so far been much less successful as a video game CEO; although he has some of the stereotypical qualities of a successful entrepreneur (passion, energy level, optimism, selling ability), his company seemed utterly lacking in controls, while facing a very tough industry and economy. Schilling apparently regrets the decision to bet the company on an MMO game, but otherwise seems to accept little blame for the demise. His company burned more than $133 million over six years, mostly for headcount, according to an analysis of public documents by Providence TV station WPRI."
Is it so we feel sorry for some rich dumb fuck who's greatest achievement in life is throwing a ball around, and who only got the chance to cause hundreds of hard working people to lose their jobs because America seems to reward the former attributes above all else?
38 steps, that's how far !!
Glad it stopped there - one more, and Mr. Memory would've been toast!
#DeleteChrome
After reading the article, I can only say one thing.
Congratulations mr. Shilling, for winning the "most arrogant douchebag of the century" award.
We've still got 82 years to go, but we're pretty sure nobody will even come close.
He wanted to outdo with half the money in half the time and no experience, what few experts dare to do.
My whole life was spent doing things that people didn’t believe were possible, because God blessed me with the ability to throw a baseball. And I carried that same mentality into everything I did here.
You weren't doing anything anybody thought impossible. Any league has a finite number of teams, one of which will win; this is not an impossibility.
Apart from being CEO at Microsoft, the ability to throw objects has no value outside the baseball field.
The mentality to do short bouts of activity for a few hours every week isn't necessarily the right mentality for anything else in live.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The loan wasn't given out under Chafee, it was given out under his predecessor. Chafee was only governor during the time the company was publicly imploding. Try researching things before posting next time, ok?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Does not predict success as a tech CEO, particularly when you are a right wing ultra-religious asshat.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Because that's pretty much the only stuff you got money for in the IT world a few years ago. Seriously. Walk into some investor's office and tell them you're gonna make a computer game, they'll wait until you add "and it's an MMO like WoW" and suddenly their eyes will light up and they shower you with money. For some odd reason they seemed to think every MMO is an instant success like WoW. For some odd reason they thought the market wasn't saturated. It seems they had no idea how the success of WoW came to be and that they could easily recreate it just by fiat. I wanna, so I can.
I guess that's how he got the money. Greedy investors without a clue what they invest in.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Same shit with the "Make an MMO first because it makes you the most money!" thing. What a retarded, arrogant, idea. When you are new in business, best not to try and shoot straight for the most financially risky stuff because good chance you fail. Had he really wanted to make games and been smart about it he would have started small, maybe with something he could self-fund, and then as he learned moved on up.
Just as you don't start pitching for the majors, you don't want to start on an MMO. It is a shit ton of work, a lot of money, and easy to fuck up. Even for the big players it can happen. Look at The Old Republic. Bioware was doing the design and story on it, and they have a history of very solid single player MMOs, EA was publishing and controlling it, and they have a few MMOs to their name (Ultima Online, DAoC, and Warhammer Online) and yet they still screwed it up fairly badly and it is questionable if they'll manage to break even.
He just thought he was such an amazingly smart motherfucker that he'd go straight to the top, fuck all that noise of learning the business or anything. Instead, it was straight to the bottom.
It would also give basically free publicity, of an actually good kind. "Curt Schilling making a baseball MMO" gets you into both the tech press and the sports pages, and probably would build interest and anticipation even without having a product yet. "Curt Schilling is making a WoW clone" also produces some press, but more of the puzzled/curious kind.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whoops ... I got this story mixed up with the one about Gamestop! I'll repost.
Don't be so fucking dumb. It's not like you can walk into office with a bottle of Tippex and erase all the checks that your predecessor wrote; they've already been cashed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This "jock" is probably a bigger gaming nerd than you ever were -- he was leading a major guild in everquest one back when playing professional baseball (as pitcher, he had plenty of off days when he could lead raids!), and he's still got active max level characters in several MMOs.
He's a hard-core player of tabletop boardgames, and rescued the company that publishes the advanced squad leader franchise when it was having financial problems; he sometimes wore t-shirts from boardgame conventions around the office, and occasionally stayed late to play boardgames with employees.
I'm hoping he hasn't learned his lesson, because 38 studios was a great place to work, and I'd be happy to work for him again if he starts another company.
Probably true. I just wonder which will get thrown overboard first.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Not a flippant comment. I suspect that this guy gave a presentation like no 100 geeks could give. Because of his sports fame and no doubt an ability to have access to the corridors of power he was able to convince the government that they could "pick a winner". I have watched and dealt with people like this my whole career. They see money being made and they insist on getting a "taste" Then they use their one schmoozing skill, round up an obscene amount of money put on a great show which usually is designed to impress and round up even more money. Then since their single driving focus wasn't putting out a great product they fail.
In fact I have long suspected that these guys don't usually want a product out as then the product would potentially drive the success well beyond their simple abilities.
The real drag in these situations is that not only do they waste taxpayer's money but they drive legitimate start-ups out of business; this is through their eating much of the available investment money, eating up the local talent, overpaying for rent, and then leaving a sour taste in everyone's mouths in the area for tech start-ups with the whole once bitten twice shy thing. In my area there was a famous flameout of an educational business. Same deal these guys literally had top government education people working for them "on secondment". Then boom it all blew up over a decade ago. The lawsuits and criminal charges are still working through the system.
Any good tech business need some business savvy people near the top; but It all boils down to whether there are tech people making the decisions. The showmen should be the head of marketing, not the head of the company.
The comments venturing over into partisan politics are getting lame and mean spirited. This is a story about a tech failure and an unqualified CEO. Comments about that are interesting. All the "Republican this" or "Democrat that" replies are irrelevant and pointless.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
What's fascinating about this is that Curt Schilling (and apparently many Slashdot readers) think that you can IGNORE poor business practices by PRETENDING it's the fault of those who make those poor business practices available.
To these people it's not Curt's fault he took the loan, it's the fault of the people who offered it to him.
Equally fascinating is the implication that Curt Schilling is DUMB AS A STUMP if he JUST CAN'T STOP HIMSELF FROM TAKING THAT MONEY.
"It's way too easy to contribute to making the world shit and then deflect all responsibility" - Anonymous Coward
Indeed.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Maybe they will open source their code and the IP won't entirely go to waste. As for the money, well, it is in someone's bank account. It is not lost, just redistributed. Every day we make bets that seem stupid later but such is life. Sometimes stupid bets payoff (I'm looking at you instagram).
Actually, no, you're entirely mistaken. From Brian Youse, one of the ACTUAL founders of MMP: (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/9253202#9253202)
"...MMP began in 1994 when we released Backblast, an ASL fanzine, and was comprised of four AH ASL playtesters and a guy who had some layout skills. Avalon Hill had made the decision that ASL was "dead" and we wanted to keep seeing some new scenarios, etc.
Curt didn't become involved until sometime around the end of 1995 when he was also attempting to buy the rights for ASL from Avalon Hill. We had been working with AH by then on the restarted ASL and Avalon Hill didn't want to sell the rights (read: they thought geez, we can fleece this guy, lets ask for the moon!) but wanted him involved (name value, something the Dott's - the owners of AH - did recognize, having put Tom Clancy on the AH Board of Directors somewhere around then as well). So, to make a long story short, AH told Curt about us, we met, he joined the company, and its been that way since then..."
So essentially Curt, having an interest in ASL, bought his way into MMP.
So *no* management/business experience at all. But lots of cash, and interest.
-Styopa