Slashdot Mirror
Reason On How and Why 38 Studios Went Bust
cathyreisenwitz writes "The 2012 bankruptcy of Rhode Island-based video-game developer 38 Studios isn't just a sad tale of a start-up tech company falling victim to the vagaries of a rough economy. It is a completely predictable story of crony capitalism, featuring star-struck legislators and the hubris of a larger-than-life athlete completely unprepared to compete in business." Reason makes no bones about its view of this kind of public-private "partnership."
Reason, a libertarian magazine, is probably the most pro-capitalism publication currently available. The article is about how taxpayer-funded loans are almost always a bad idea. Schilling was unable to find private sector investors - which usually means that the business model is not very good. Crony capitalism is not capitalism, it's a corruption that wastes a whole boatload of our tax money.
Short story: Leave investing to investors and stop risking taxpayer money on ventures that will most likely not succeed.
Come on, son.
Crony capitalism is not capitalism
Crony capitalism is what actually happens when you implement captialism in the real world. Capitalism is the theory, cronyism is the practice.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Crony Capitalism is when you use the state to get unfair private advantage. It's not like a builder who gets the state to "smooth things out" when building something for public purposes (ex. police station, highway, etc.). There are times when the government needs to help facilitate the work of private parties. This was not one of them. It was the government doing something with a marginal public purpose (the nebulous "it'll create more jobs" excuse).
Put another way, this is precisely the same sort of crap we saw Bush and Obama do with the banking sector (using public funds to secure private losses that were not incurred due to a public purpose). In either case, the government stepped in to do what the market should have done in an otherwise private transaction with minimal to no public purpose.
What we made:
1) A console game -- Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Published by EA, you should still be able to buy it even with 38 gone (and it's been a year, it is probably discounted at this point; available for xbox360, ps3, pc, though if you play on a pc you should go buy an xbox controller because the keyboard/mouse control isn't that great). Got mostly good reviews, sold pretty well. It's an action-heavy-RPG, think the combat of God of War with a crunchy MMO inspired "gather piles of loot, explore a big world, do quests for lots and lots of people..." backing.
2) The Big Project the company was working on was an MMO, just titled Kingdoms of Amalur, set in the same world long afterward; you could think of Reckoning as a kind of teaser to get people excited about the world and story to lead them into the MMO. Think WoW, but with a very different art style (I can't really describe it in text, you can search for the screenshots if you care), and lots and lots of refinements. It was approximately a year from release when the company went foomp.
3) Assorted tie-ins. Yeah, just like you can get the WoW novels and comic books and action figures, there were plans for that stuff too. Obviously, those things don't get launched til after the MMO does, so they were in early-planning stage.
Technical and software issues: MMO software is big, and we were chasing a moving target. With an MMO... it's not hard to write an MMO that's better than what WoW was at launch, lots of people have done that. But to make any headway at all in the market, you've got to make something that's better than WoW is Right Now, because to attract a gamer of an inherently social game, you have to pull them not just away from the gameplay of their current game, you have to also lure them away from the circle of friends in their current game. You don't yet have a raiding guild in our game, so our gameplay/art/story/etc has to be enough better than WoW (or LotRO, or DDO or FFXIV or EVE, or whatever you are currently playing that we're trying to convince you to turn off long enough to try our game), that we can convince you to try us for long enough to get a guild going and establish those friendships in our game. That's a high bar, and in a multi-year development cycle, you have to go back several times, look at the new games and expansion packs coming out, and say "hey, WoW just came out with kung-fu panda expansion... is there anything in there that is really compelling? Is there some new piece of gameplay or UI that is good enough that we ought to match it, or is something that we can see how to do better?" If you compare the WoW UI of today to the UI of three or five years ago, there is a world of difference in usability. You don't notice it at the time, since it's growing in bits and pieces, but if you've played an MMO of today, you'd never go back to one of three years ago. Which means... Those design docs from when 38 studios first formed had to go through a lot of revision. Systems written early, we'd go back and say "oops, this needs to be seriously expanded, otherwise we'll look bad by comparison".
The last week, for example, as we watched the financial axe fall, we were running our one functional raid between sessions of watching the idiot governor holding press conferences about us. And then we'd post-mortem the run, say what was fun, with a lot of comparisons to other MMOs -- "here's why X was more or less fun than it would have been in game Y". That generated a lot of new feature/bug requests; it's often hard to tell what is going to be fun until you actually are running around in the world flinging fireballs... which is great, and very "agile", but unfortunately wrecks havoc with scheduling. In hindsight... Build in more slack in the budget/schedule to pay for revision passes, because with a game (or with art in general I guess), you're likely to do something, look at it, and see a way to improve it. Unless your goal really is to pu
Not to mention that this entire deal had nothing to do with capitalism. Government guarantees a giant loan to a business driven by nepotism, greed and lies in an erratic industry headed by a former sports star with no management experience whatsoever? How is that capitalism?
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.
When the VCs took a look at Schilling's plan said it sucked balls, that was capitalism in action.
When the RI governor went to lick Schilling's schlong and suck his balls, that was definitely NOT capitalism.