The Collapse of 38 Studios

Found this article from two years back. It kind of supports the idea that Schilling put a lot of his own money into the company that he never got back, but it also supports the idea that his head was in the clouds and he certainly was at least partially responsible for watching management.

I dunno, 1.2 million sales, for a brand-new IP from a brand-new company, at super-premium pricing, is damn good. If they were really structured that they had to sell 3 million, whoah.

I've been thinking this for years, not sure I've actually said it, but it sure looks like the MMO is the hill where studios go to die. I think Blizzard lucked into a new market, and then was able to use the insane revenues to grow like crazy, which raised a high bar to entry for other companies. And almost all of them are just doing what Blizzard did, "only better"... except it's not actually better. And, god knows, I've tried just about all of them, and none of them have stuck for me.

I didn't like DCUO because it was too arcadey, RIFT was hard to play solo, and the customer service staff at The Old Republic was incredibly horrible. I had a simple problem with having made a mistaken purchase due to their weird, messed-up interface choices, asked for a simple refund, and the hoops they tried to make me jump through were insane. After three weeks of trying to get a reasonable reply out of them, I cancelled my subscription, and I'm sure the customer service drones didn't give a damn.

That's one thing you really have to give Blizzard; their customer service teams are overworked, but they are very good. They almost always get it right in one exchange... once they understand the problem, they fix it. The team at EA spent a truly ridiculous amount of effort actively trying to not help me. Sure enough, they succeeded.... and now don't have my $15/mo.

At the very least, even with a great idea, it would appear to take a very well-managed company to get into this space and prosper, and these seem to be in short supply. Given how poorly 38 Studios seems to have been handled, I think any MMO they'd have done would have been a massive failure.

1.2 million in todays market of AAA budgets isn't very good. That was across 3 platforms, mind you and without the backing of a first party to keep things afloat. There are stories this generation of all sorts of games that sold around a million+/- copies for new IPs and it killed the companies. The aping of hollywood goes far beyond creating "interactive cinematic experiences" into their business model and that is a broken model. I think no matter how well 38 was managed or mismanaged I think the chances of the MMO being a success (and are we sure it wasn't going to be F2P?) was low. I just think the MMO market is tapped out for AAA games unless you're Blizzard.

I think anyone saying that the management or Curt Shilling were completely mismanaging and Curt should have know this or known that are kind of trying to transpose their own experiences and biases into this situation. We know almost *nothing* and what we do know doesn't show Curt to be a villain at all. The employees from both companies continue to praise him and I think we should show deference to the people that this situation is affecting the most. I think a lot of people are trying to use this as an example to hit Curt because they disagree with him politically. There will be a forensic audit done. There will be a lot of information coming out and you are damn right that there will be a whole lot of waste found. But, guess what? You have me audit any company on the planet, even very successful companies and I can show you a whole lot of waste.

I think anyone from the outside being angry that this happened is misguided. we should be sad because from all accounts it's the whole dream "if i was rich and could fund a game" situation and these games are so expensive and time consuming to build. they don't get easier even though there are so many of them out there.

Malor wrote:

stuff

Doesn't that boil down to "service, not product"?

It does seem like the best successes are always where a company has 'all their ducks in a line', not just a a fluke on one part, or if they do have a lucky hit on that one thing, someone else will soon come along and offer the whole package. How often does someone say "It's got the best X, but..." and then it's quickly ignored.

I'd say that adequately describes KoA:Reckoning, and I can only assume would be an indicator of what would have happened to Copernicus unless there had been a major change in direction at the company. They needed all the stars to align.

Scratched wrote:
Malor wrote:

stuff

Doesn't that boil down to "service, not product"?

It does seem like the best successes are always where a company has 'all their ducks in a line', not just a a fluke on one part, or if they do have a lucky hit on that one thing, someone else will soon come along and offer the whole package. How often does someone say "It's got the best X, but..." and then it's quickly ignored.

I'd say that adequately describes KoA:Reckoning, and I can only assume would be an indicator of what would have happened to Copernicus unless there had been a major change in direction at the company. They needed all the stars to align.

I think using KoA and trying to infer what Copernicus would be is kind of difficult. KoA was a retrofitted RPG that BHG was developing before THQ was going to close them down.

Stele wrote:
pkollar wrote:

And yes, I think between this and The Old Republic, MMOs -- especially triple-A, subscription-based MMOs -- are in serious trouble.

I still don't understand how WoW and EVE are charging $15 a month and surviving.

There's so much to play for free... good stuff, like DCUO, STO, CoH, DDO, and LotRO that were all once pay games.

And even always free stuff like Spiral Knights or non-MMOs like Super MNC or League of Legends are just waiting out there for people to spend hundreds of hours on for free.

Why in the hell anyone would pay monthly to play something only slightly better (which is pretty subjective) is beyond me...

I probably had more general FUN playing DCUO than any other MMO (and I've played everything I listed in my post), with it's action-y combat and familiar hero tie-ins and guest appearances. But still I can't find the time to go back and finish leveling to 30. Much less time for all the rest of these free things. Or the pile of non-online games I have to play.

The last thing I ever want to see released is more MMOs. ;)

Well for starters... It has always felt that Copernicus was dead in the water when what was supposed to be an unveiling of the mmo ended up showing Reckoning instead. It felt like they were trying to cash in on the tech they had developed so far. I also think that TERA beat them to the punch if they were planning on going the action route.

There's definitely a need for MMO games. Hell i'd be willing to pay up to 100$ a month for the right one. Whats funny is the ones you listed as F2P all started as subscription based games.

ranalin wrote:

There's definitely a need for MMO games.

The people who claim otherwise usually never had any interest in the genre to start, and that's not an informed place from which to make such claims. I don't think you can look at the genre from the outside and get a feel for its destination.

If a game can get 300,000 dedicated subscribers, it can carry on. You don't need 5 million, or even a million. Companies making them need to learn about scope, quality, and the importance of having something to set you apart. If you have a unique element that works, enough people will fall in love with it to keep paying you $15 a month. Aping WoW isn't the way to do it.

The situation reminds me of video games versus tabletop gaming. Video games get all the press, that doesn't mean tabletop has gone away. Final Fantasy XI still has nearly a million subs, now ten years since release. I began hearing on podcasts about how dead the game was back in 2007.

The new MMOs get the press, laud the high initial sales, and when they have to cut the team size, people act like it is dead, when that is rarely the case. We just like to consume game news in extremes, because that's easy.

tl;dr - What ranalin said.

Malor wrote:

I've been thinking this for years, not sure I've actually said it, but it sure looks like the MMO is the hill where studios go to die. I think Blizzard lucked into a new market, and then was able to use the insane revenues to grow like crazy, which raised a high bar to entry for other companies. And almost all of them are just doing what Blizzard did, "only better"... except it's not actually better. And, god knows, I've tried just about all of them, and none of them have stuck for me.

If all of these studios did not try to shoot for the moon, they would actually do well. 500,000-1,000,000 subscribers is a massive amount of income and an entirely reasonable subscriber base for an MMO. These studios seem to think if you are not hitting WoW's numbers, you are not a success. It is just stupid. Look at Eve Online or Ultima Online. Both are games with small player bases, but they do exceptionally well because they don't need to cater to millions of people.

Blind_Evil wrote:

If a game can get 300,000 dedicated subscribers, it can carry on. You don't need 5 million, or even a million. Companies making them need to learn about scope, quality, and the importance of having something to set you apart. If you have a unique element that works, enough people will fall in love with it to keep paying you $15 a month. Aping WoW isn't the way to do it.

Exactly, man. Stop trying to chase the same piece of pie that everyone else has their hands on. Do something different and do it well without shooting for the stars.

ranalin wrote:

There's definitely a need for MMO games. Hell i'd be willing to pay up to 100$ a month for the right one. Whats funny is the ones you listed as F2P all started as subscription based games.

If I could have a new Ultima Online without the changes made by Age of Shadows, I would be delighted.

ZaneRockfist wrote:

If all of these studios did not try to shoot for the moon, they would actually do well. 500,000-1,000,000 subscribers is a massive amount of income and an entirely reasonable subscriber base for an MMO. These studios seem to think if you are not hitting WoW's numbers, you are not a success. It is just stupid. Look at Eve Online or Ultima Online. Both are games with small player bases, but they do exceptionally well because they don't need to cater to millions of people.

That's an interesting observation really, but it seems opposite to the way many developers/publishers think now where success is measured in absolute scale. In hindsight it's easy to say things along the lines of 'maybe they should have done many smaller projects', but with so many corpses lying at the gates of AAA-game-and-subscription-MMO-town it would be nice to think more companies would steer clear if they're not up to it.

It's probably also worth remembering that companies that have had success with MMOs (I'd say Sony/Blizzard are good examples) weren't exactly small weedy companies before then, they built themselves up to a good strength before their MMO adventures, and will likely still be around when their MMOs are mostly forgotten. In the case of Blizzard, it probably also helped that they underestimated the demand for their game (they were thinking of about 500k subscribers), but not everyone has that luck.

kuddles wrote:

Found this article from two years back. It kind of supports the idea that Schilling put a lot of his own money into the company that he never got back, but it also supports the idea that his head was in the clouds and he certainly was at least partially responsible for watching management.

That was a very interesting read. If that's true (and there's as much speculation there as in any other claims made in both threads about this), it does sound like Schilling got into something with kind of naive expectations and a plan to learn the business as he went, rather than knowing it through and through first. And maintaining full ownership while trying to get venture capital? Isn't the whole point of venture capital that you're selling off parts of the company in order to fund it? On the other hand, if he's actually tied up most of his personal wealth in keeping the place running and what that article says it true that it could have closed years ago if he hadn't mortgaged his life on it, there's very much something to be admired in that. I'm sure the public results of the forthcoming audit or the press coverage of it will end up revealing how much money he actually put in and if he drained his baseball fortune on this, I do indeed feel for him, even if it maybe wasn't the best plan.

Purely from the point of view of the employees though, I still don't think that if even some of the claims about health insurance, double mortgages, being told everything was fine until the RI loan defaulted and that frankly offensive termination letter are true, some very bad things were going on and those people deserved better. And I still believe those at the top either must have known or didn't try hard enough to know and being in the position they are means they're accountable, that's what the position's about. I agree with Ulari in that it's going to be a long time before the truth is revealed and I'm sure this thread will get necroed many times over the next while as I'm sure the RI state government (who definitely has made some dumb decisions and been neglectful of their responsibilities too) is eager to make a huge press show out of this whole thing. In the end, this this has been a massive mess that no one group or entity is solely responsible for. But as usual, the people in the trenches bore the brunt of it.

Ulairi wrote:

The aping of hollywood goes far beyond creating "interactive cinematic experiences" into their business model and that is a broken model. I think no matter how well 38 was managed or mismanaged I think the chances of the MMO being a success (and are we sure it wasn't going to be F2P?) was low. I just think the MMO market is tapped out for AAA games unless you're Blizzard.

I agree with you on the "tapped out" point. There's lot of evidence of this from the past several years whether you're looking at revenue, subscriber base, install base, or critical reception. Do we know anything about when 38 Studios decided to make its big long-term project an MMO? If it wasn't years ago, I'll have a hard time believing this wasn't just a stupid business decision - even ignoring or rejecting the indicators that MMO space is a dying gamespace, it's clearly an over-saturated one.

EDIT: If KoA:R was any indicator, I'm left wondering what novel innovation the eventual MMO would've offered to differentiate itself from the pack in a "me too!" marketplace. It'll probably be a long long time before we know what was planned, sadly, but I'd like a pre-mortem report of sorts. I think that'd give us a good idea as to how the creatives were being directed and whether this was some real pie-in-the-sky ignorance, or something genuinely potentially great that was still-born.

Wow, that sounds morbid.

I think anyone saying that the management or Curt Shilling were completely mismanaging and Curt should have know this or known that are kind of trying to transpose their own experiences and biases into this situation. We know almost *nothing* and what we do know doesn't show Curt to be a villain at all.

I think you're drawing your own biases into unfairly characterizing people saying, "at a 50,000 ft. glance, a lot of this does look like mismanagement" as irrational "business bad!" broad-brushers when what they're actually saying is "this is awful for the employees, my thoughts are with them, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the facts come in." Yes, there aren't a lot of chewy details yet, but the MMO decision was a bad one, the mortgage/housing flap reeks of irresponsibility, and clearly the financial pooch was screwed because the company laid off its entire staff and effectively packed it in at short notice. It's not a stretch to say that there was mismanagement factoring in here.

I will give you credit - some folks are quick to demonize Schilling, and it's probably because of notoriety/celebrity. He's the one identifiable face in the whole fiasco. But then, I do agree with the remarks on Schilling being a hypocrite for taking a tremendously risky loan from the state to fund his project considering his own very public political views. But hell, maybe I'm still mad at him for what an unreliable schlubb he could be when he pitched for the Phillies years back.

Schilling's a former pro athlete who was considered amongst the best at his profession for years, and will always be a legend in New England thanks to the "bloody sock" game. The man's been revered for years and years, and I'm going to make the totally unfounded assertion that he, like many other retired professional athletes, can't adjust to not constantly striving to be best. Former athletes are renowned for bad business deals, trying to hang on too long, and all sorts of other clear signs that they just can't let go of constantly trying to "win" and deal with reality. Yes, again, I have nothing backing this up, but, in simple terms, the idea that a company run by Schilling could have incredibly unrealistic expectations does not strike me as shocking, simply considering the track record of people like him.

Ulairi wrote:

I think anyone saying that the management or Curt Shilling were completely mismanaging and Curt should have know this or known that are kind of trying to transpose their own experiences and biases into this situation. We know almost *nothing* and what we do know doesn't show Curt to be a villain at all.

While I agree a lot of the facts are up in the air, there's still the matter that (a) Schilling was both a major investor and officially the Chairman of the company so he was both responsible for and incentivized to pay close attention to the operations of the company and (b) Whether it was ignorance or malice, either way you don't lay off your entire staff a week after you realize you can't pay anyone without being a grossly incompetent executive team.

Also, the same previous workers praising Schilling also seem to be blaming the politicians for not handing over another gigantic lump sum they have no evidence of getting back so I'm not sure if it's reverence or Stockholm Syndrome talking. Please note that I think it's likely Schilling is a genuinely good-natured guy who had nothing but the best intentions, but that doesn't get him off the hook for being responsible. He clearly had enough clout in the company to be the person behind buying Big Huge Games so I find it difficult to believe he would also be in the dark about what was happening here.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Former athletes are renowned for bad business deals, trying to hang on too long, and all sorts of other clear signs that they just can't let go of constantly trying to "win" and deal with reality.

See Michael Jordan racing team.

ianunderhill wrote:
I think anyone saying that the management or Curt Shilling were completely mismanaging and Curt should have know this or known that are kind of trying to transpose their own experiences and biases into this situation. We know almost *nothing* and what we do know doesn't show Curt to be a villain at all.

I think you're drawing your own biases into unfairly characterizing people saying, "at a 50,000 ft. glance, a lot of this does look like mismanagement" as irrational "business bad!" broad-brushers when what they're actually saying is "this is awful for the employees, my thoughts are with them, and it'll be interesting to see what happens as the facts come in." Yes, there aren't a lot of chewy details yet, but the MMO decision was a bad one, the mortgage/housing flap reeks of irresponsibility, and clearly the financial pooch was screwed because the company laid off its entire staff and effectively packed it in at short notice. It's not a stretch to say that there was mismanagement factoring in here.

I will give you credit - some folks are quick to demonize Schilling, and it's probably because of notoriety/celebrity. He's the one identifiable face in the whole fiasco. But then, I do agree with the remarks on Schilling being a hypocrite for taking a tremendously risky loan from the state to fund his project considering his own very public political views. But hell, maybe I'm still mad at him for what an unreliable schlubb he could be when he pitched for the Phillies years back. ;)

That does speak to something I find concerning, and i guess you see it most often on the internet, is not so much people assuming the worse, as it is going out of their way to do character assassinations on all concerned. Without wanting to prematurely let people off the hook, occasionally people do get unlucky, are overly optimistic, or out of their depth and try to manage the best they can without malicious intent.

Yeah to me two things don't make sense. I mean I never worked for a game company but even I know those two things:

1. aiming for a million plus seller for a new IP for a new developer is already quite the challenge, let alone 3M to just break even

2. Working on an MMO for this new IP before knowing if it will sell, as your second release as a company is suicide

It's sad but it's just bad management. Anybody with a clue could have told them that

interstate78 wrote:

Yeah to me two things don't make sense. I mean I never worked for a game company but even I know those two things:

1. aiming for a million plus seller for a new IP for a new developer is already quite the challenge, let alone 3M to just break even

2. Working on an MMO for this new IP before knowing if it will sell, as your second release as a company is suicide

It's sad but it's just bad management. Anybody with a clue could have told them that

the MMO was in development before KoA. they bought BHG because Curt liked Rise of Nations.

ZaneRockfist wrote:

If I could have a new Ultima Online without the changes made by Age of Shadows, I would be delighted.

Me too. My 1st choice for my MMO fix is still RunUO servers (IPY2 atm). Loves me some UO!

Ulairi wrote:
interstate78 wrote:

Yeah to me two things don't make sense. I mean I never worked for a game company but even I know those two things:

1. aiming for a million plus seller for a new IP for a new developer is already quite the challenge, let alone 3M to just break even

2. Working on an MMO for this new IP before knowing if it will sell, as your second release as a company is suicide

It's sad but it's just bad management. Anybody with a clue could have told them that

the MMO was in development before KoA. they bought BHG because Curt liked Rise of Nations.

And they were working on an RPG that could be repurposed for the IP.

And THQ was actively trying to get rid of them.

Add to the fact that BHG is a pretty known dev studio with several good games behind them, and it was a good fit for helping get some product out.

Malor wrote:

I dunno, 1.2 million sales, for a brand-new IP from a brand-new company, at super-premium pricing, is damn good. If they were really structured that they had to sell 3 million, whoah.

So, there are two different studios - Big Huge Games (Amalur, quazi-independent) and 38 Studios proper.

The problem was apparently not with Amalur (or Big Huge), which for all we know did just fine. The issue is that Amalur profits were supposed to somehow pay the outstanding bills for the entire operation while Copernicus was under production - and somebody was apparently very bad at math.

When even Bioware can't make a AAA MMO work, the very idea of such a thing starts to look crazy, and the "bet it all on Amalur" strategy here was insane even among the already questionable existing MMO strategies. If they would have made Amalur first and stayed small and nimble, maybe they could have built up more successful single player titles and become sustainable, but this seems to have been a massive roll of the dice that failed stupendously.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

I know nothing about how US real estate laws work versus where I'm from but is this even permitted? If 38 Studios takes over your mortgage as an incentive to get you to move and they go out of business, is the city/bank seriously allowed to come after the former owner for that instead of just foreclosing on 38 Studios?

It would all depend on what contracts exist and with whom. I would assume that 38 taking over the mortgage is a contract between the individual and 38. This wouldn’t make null the contract between the financial institution and the individual- it’s just 38 sitting in as a proxy for that individual. If 38 does not uphold their end of the deal, then (assuming the deal is anything like the simplistic outline above) the bank could, and legally should, go after the individual. Now, this doesn’t change the fact that the individual should also pursue 38’s lapse of upholding their contract.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Apparently the company once again violated its agreement with the state by not providing 60 days notice of layoffs and the state is demanding a full audit of how their funds were used because the governor says there will be "so many lawsuits". Damn.

To me one of the crazier things about this financial situation isn’t that they went broke- it seems that they built a house on the beach during low-tide. What I find surprising (one thing at least) is that this fresh from shipping a semi-successful game they couldn’t even afford the first payment of their loan.

Also, this is from the other thread about the game but quoted here because while I understand the individual words the sentences do not make any sense to me:

TheGameguru wrote:
ianunderhill wrote:
ZaneRockfist wrote:

Nevertheless, the employees are now suffering because of gross mismanagement and a blatant betrayal of the company's responsibility to them.

Cry "profit, not jobs!", and let slip the sinking of the damned company.

Do employees share none of the blame? I mean there were 300 some employees supposedly working on this project.. ultimate blames always falls on the management of those employees..but manage enough projects and anyone will tell you there are times when you just have the "wrong people"

If anything management might have just been way over their heads and completely unable to reign in any sort of focus and drive on this large development staff.

So the reason why the studio went under is because the dev team was composed of “the wrong people?”

gore wrote:

When even Bioware can't make a AAA MMO work, the very idea of such a thing starts to look crazy, and the "bet it all on Amalur" strategy here was insane even among the already questionable existing MMO strategies. If they would have made Amalur first and stayed small and nimble, maybe they could have built up more successful single player titles and become sustainable, but this seems to have been a massive roll of the dice that failed stupendously.

That's one thing I find incredibly irksome about this. If they hadn't been filled with such grandiose ideas about getting a slice of the MMO pie, Amalur could have developed into a respectable RPG series. After a few Amalur games, they might have been able to take a swing at an MMO with more reined in expectations of the market. Honestly, it just sounds like 38 Studios had some of the worst management around. From corrupt business practices to massively boneheaded decisions, it just all reeks of crappy management.

My view is that "MMO" has been viewed as a cash cow ever since Everquest, but it's mostly survivor-bias: we forget all of the projects that were canceled, or launched and failed. Some of these things have been textbook examples of how not to design a product what there's already a market leader: first everything had to be an Everquest-killer, and then everything had to be a WoW-killer. To date, only Blizzard has managed to successfully unseat the AAA market leader. Everyone else has either failed terribly or competes on some other axis (the persistent/shared world in EVE, going free-to-play with a licence, etc.)

Observe which games are not on this chart:
IMAGE(http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png)

The also-rans are instead on this chart:
IMAGE(http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png)
Some of them have quite respectable numbers, but from a business perspective they only succeed if they have enough subscriptions to keep the thing running, which comes back to having realistic expectations.

Now, I haven't seen any figures for what kind of subscriber account they were expecting for the MMO, and I'm pretty sure that the 3M figure for the ARPG included keeping the MMO alive, but I do have to wonder what their expectations were for the MMO, given how much cash an AAA MMO takes to develop.

gore wrote:

When even Bioware can't make a AAA MMO work

You mean they cant make one that is able to match WoW right out of the gate?

The MMO works. Has it lost a lot of subscribers? Yes, but it's still going to be making them money and that's making it work.

demonbox wrote:

So the reason why the studio went under is because the dev team was composed of “the wrong people?”

No no, you don't understand - we don't know ANYTHING.

ranalin wrote:

The MMO works. Has it lost a lot of subscribers? Yes, but it's still going to be making them money and that's making it work.

Right, but if they spent 300 million dollars to do it, it's probably not worthwhile. That's on the order of 200 dollars hard cost/current subscriber, so it would take more than a year to break even, much less make a profit -- and that's without spending anything else on content or providing servers, or scratching the giant checks to LucasArts. That math only works if they get to keep all of the subscription fee (which they often don't), and if their expenses are zero. Their expenses are not zero.

I think a more reasonable break-even point is probably three years, and that's only if they keep all their subscribers, which doesn't look especially likely. From what I understand, it sure looks to me like a disaster.

As I said in the other thread, the MMO is the hill on which studios die.

ranalin wrote:
gore wrote:

When even Bioware can't make a AAA MMO work

You mean they cant make one that is able to match WoW right out of the gate?

The MMO works. Has it lost a lot of subscribers? Yes, but it's still going to be making them money and that's making it work.

"Making it work" by laying off almost all of the staff that made and was supposed to keep making content for it?

I guess they could be "making it work" for investors with respect to overall profitability (and that's far from certain), but even if you assume SWTOR is profitable at these staffing levels that's not a business model to actually build a company on. You need to have enough money to ramp up that staff quickly first (Bioware had that, 38 Studios didn't) and you need to be OK with laying them all off as soon as you ship the game.

Even if Copernicus had been released and "succeeded" at SWTOR levels (read - becoming the most successful non-WoW western MMO), it would still have been a massive issue for 38 Studios since their deal with RI had conditions on continued staffing levels.

It's interesting to see reactions to that $300m, as it's an awful lot of money for most video games, but not really a lot when it comes to the AAA MMO side. Random googling tells me the average development budget of a game is in the $25m ballpark, and the marketing budget has to at least match that, and for SWTOR I think the split was 2:1. For that $300m That's 3 GTA4s, that's six times the development budget of COD:MW2 and if you add on the $200m marketing budget then you've still got $50m to spare, the first Gears of War was 'only' $10m.

In an alternate universe it would have been interesting to see what 38 could have done with their $75m (or whatever resources were available) without going down the MMO road. Perhaps two studios alternating to make a game like Reckoning with a tighter focus every year in the Amalur world, gradually building it up.

ianunderhill wrote:
demonbox wrote:

So the reason why the studio went under is because the dev team was composed of “the wrong people?”

No no, you don't understand - we don't know ANYTHING. ;)

Scratching my head here...I read my post and nowhere did I blame the employees for the companies failures...I asked a question if employees share some of the blame? When $50M plus the $42M produces a tech demo. I have to ask what people were doing for all these years..and when I say employees I mean all of them. Including the Directors etc...you know the guys that are hired by the executive team to really drive the project(s) forward.