You think if he wasn't a sports star, people would somehow be more forgiving for things like not paying their employees, getting in bed with a state, hiring family members for positions they may not be qualified for, taking little responsibility for the failed company they ran?Originally Posted by SlyFrog
That's not why I'm flogging Schilling. I'm personally upset that he fucked over his employees so badly. I don't give a shit about him being a dumb, overconfident sports hero, except insofar as it led him to fly his company into a mountain, causing pregnant women to lose health coverage and sticking some employees with double mortgages.
This is why we must Understand the Carnage: so it won't be repeated next time Joe Fastball thinks he can make an MMO, and developers actually believe it.
Given the stories from employees of how they screwed and lied too I don't see why it is so hard to understand. He didn't just screw up financially.
Since everyone else who's replied to this has told you you're wrong, I'll just say that you're damned wrong, for emphasis.
Goddamn I was rooting for this whole thing to succeed. I'm a huge baseball fan, obviously, and really, really was tickled by the entree of a mainstream entity to the gaming world--and especially one who was so goddamn good at fan service as Curt Schilling was (and presumably still is). I've felt terrible discovering the mismanagement and lack of accountability that permeated this endeavor, because it all flies in the face of what I wanted to believe about the entire enterprise.
I don't think anyone is finding a whole lot of glee in hitting Schilling over this. In the long run, he's likely to be more financially ruined than any of his employees and so even on that level it hurts to read these stories. But the reality is what it is, and ignoring or glossing over it doesn't make it any less true.
Last edited by triggercut; 07-26-2012 at 01:38 AM.
Schilling was doomed to fail from the moment he started putting cronies on high positions and ignore people who actually knew what the hell they were talking about.
I once spoke to an investor/idea man who wanted to have a piece of software made. He had tons of stories about his past successes and great plans on how he would hire a small team of Romanians to write the code. If only I was willing to move to Romania for half a year to lead them, it would be great. However, as he was being vague on exactly what the program should do so wisely I asked for a more detailed overview of required functionality.
Two days later I received a lengthy list of bullet points and I was quite surprised when I realized what he wanted.
Basically he wanted me to build SAP. With a dozen people. In half a year.
It would be difficult to even realize one of his bullet points with that amount of man hours so I wrote a nice email back telling him what he wanted was impossible and that it was better to start out small and go from there.
He naturally responded to my mail with a huffed response claiming that I didn't get it and (here's the real kicker) that by using tools like SQL Server development time could be drastically reduced.
Now either he was just tossing terms around at me not realizing for some reason I'm a software engineer with a decade of experience or he genuinely believed that just by using a database everything would be resolved in moments.
My point is, people like Schilling and the above dope don't get it. They will never get it. They think rocket science is hard and creating software is easy. They don't realize that 85% of the programmers out there are shit and unsuited for anything bigger then a website. They don't realize that especially for large applications proper software engineering is in fact far FAR more difficult than rocket science.
Anyone who believes that they can do something like this on faith and optimism alone is delusional beyond redemption.
I wonder how failures like this increase the potential earnings of someone like a Scott Hartsman. I mean can't he essentially name his salary now, either for Trion to keep him or for a company looking to release an MMO?
Given Schilling's comments in that Boston Magazine article about Copernicus not being fun, I'm thinking that a hastened release would have been similarly disastrous. In fact, considering how harsh the post-WoW MMO audience has been towards mediocre games, I wonder if Copernicus wasn't a doomed project regardless of the financial issues.
Schilling always struck me as a good guy before all this. I never followed his baseball career, so I had no idea about his performance or grandstanding or whatever people hold against him while he was a player. I thought he was cool because he was one of the first big personalities that was unashamedly a nerdy MMO player. He was a huge fan of Everquest and made no bones about it. He could easily derail an inteview into espousing what a wonderful thing this online fanstasy world could be and how much he loved it when he was away from baseball.
When he first announced his intent to build a game studio, I thought he was just going to dump money into the project and hire a bunch of gaming industry vets to do their thing. I assumed he was going to be hands-off and be the money guy and the public face of his gaming "toy" letting the pros handle the actual company. Unfortunately, that was the wrong assumption.
The whole thing is fascinating because his big gaming dream was crossed by his business incompetence and hubris. That's why most of us are gawking at the wreck.
For me that's the key: he was a gaming nerd who (apparently) had the financial wherewithal to get his dream game made. Since all other MMOs on the horizon were being constructed out cloned parts assembled by bloodless corporate suits, the idea that someone who actually loved the genre was steering the ship was appealing.
Pity.
Yes. Because I don't think you would see people saying shit like just because he's a dumb fucking arrogant jock doesn't mean that he can run a software company.
There is a decided edge to some of the posting here along those lines.
I tend to come out on Telefrog and Tim Wisdom's side. I think it is sad that this guy, who was clearly an optimist and passionate about this (though seemingly without the discipline to run it like a business) took his shot and failed so badly. The guy made terrible mistakes, but he also lost, what, $50MM or so of his own money on this. Yes, employees didn't get final wages, and yes, that's terrible. It's hard for me to make him out in to some type of malicious asshole when he lost 25 times that himself.
Of course we can argue that the money had less impact on him. My point is, this guy isn't exactly your typical capitalist, lining his own nest and walking away for the better while his subordinates took the hit.
Last edited by SlyFrog; 07-26-2012 at 08:12 AM.
That has a ring of truth about it. If, say, Donald Trump had been behind this venture he would have loudly broadcast it, gotten way overfunded, then given himself and a few board members huge packages (goody bags, they have come to be known) that recouped his investment with tidy profit. Then he would have declared bankruptcy on the venture, leaving most of the shareholders holding the bag and all the employees out on the street. So, Trump would have been much better off, but the overall damage done would have been a lot bigger, and there probably wouldn't even have been the one game released.
Don't trust me, look at Trump's history. He's performed this exact scenario at least 5 times on large real estate deals. It's how venture capitalists typically operate.
Fair enough. My basis for my position:
RI had a security interest in 38's IP (a terrible idea, but one we have hashed over thoroughly) as a condition of the loan. I am not an expert in valuing IPs, but I would expect that an IP being developed by a going concern with employees that could be brought on board to complete work on the project is more valuable than a "dead" IP that is nothing but a trademark, some art assets, a story bible, and whatever good will the Amalur RPG generated. By losing its staff, 38 was rendered a husk with a dead IP. There are lost possibilities, such as selling the sub-studio made up of the former BHG, bundled with a license to use the Amalur IP for a sequel RPGs. Could such a deal have been cut? We will never know.
Which leads to the question, what should the state of RI done to preserve the value of its security interest? If it were a private lender, one of the first steps would be to re-negotiate the repayment terms that were rendering 38 insolvent. A likely next step would be Chapter 11 bankruptcy to reorganize, versus Chapter 7 liquidation. Any coproate accountant would place a valuation on both the Amalur trademark and good will associated with the brand (In a primarily service-oriented company with little actual inventory, such as a funeral home for example, the value of the brand and accumulated community goodwill would be the primary asset being sold). Liquidations are not a finacially advantageous transaction as a rule (especially since the seller is dealing from the ultimate position of weakness, and time-crunched to boot), and usually results in poor compensation for security interest holders. I would be surprised if RI realizes more than 15 cents on the dollar from 38's liquidation, and I think I'm being a bit optimistic in picking 15%.
From what I saw, RI was unwilling to negotiate and perfectly willing to characterize 38 as a doomed company. If you are no longer liquid and your primary security holder won't deal, you are done, and 38 was done. But as a result of the publicity created by Chafee, I believe the value of the Amalur IP was diminished, and ultimately sacrificed, by moving to liquidation. This seems crazy from a business perspective, since a lender would ordinarily have a fiduciary duty to make every effort preserve the value of its security interest. But there is no fiduciary duty on the part of a politician to the taxpayers, and no (non-ballot box) consequenses for making decisions that negatively affect assets held by the state. Since I believe people generally do things for a reason, I suspect that Chafee saw a personal/political benefit to his actions, since losing several million dollars of asset valuation does not appear to be in RI's financial interests.
On that basis, I think Chafee had no business shooting off his big mouth.
But let me reiterate, I am NOT saying that 38 was well-run, smartly managed, made good business decisions, or was anything other than doomed. But it appears to me that the party in the driver's seat was RI, headed by Chafee, and they chose to crash. Go directly to liquidation, do not pass go, see what the fire sale brings in. Maybe they were trying to destroy the political viability of future state development-fund boondoggles (I would actually support that), but they ain't telling.
Oh no! I've wasted my time!
(kidding, I love to kick things around)
Fair points made by RickH (Chafee threw gasoline on the fire sale) and Slyfrog (Schilling was 100% sincere and went down with the ship). Slyfrog's point especially now makes me think "hubris," in the original sense of Greek tragedy, is even more appropriate here. Schilling as Icarus, unwilling to quit flying even while his wings melted?
Icarus was overcome by the sheer joy of flight and by the sense of godlike accomplishment he felt at what was already a major success. Schilling was just an idiot, possibly a sincere one, but no Icarus :)
Chafee may well have thrown some gasoline on the fire, but it was already burnt down to embers and coals anyway.
I honestly believe that most games are built by people who love games but somehow the vision gets compromised by reality or by being too close to the project to see the bigger picture.
e.g. Brad and Elemental.
Miramon, I think the "sheer joy" and "godlike accomplishment" were Schilling's five-year run of unbridled optimistic dream-world company-running. Problem is, his wings melted before he made it all the way across the ocean. Anyway, that's enough metaphor for one day.
Well, it doesn't help that he's seen as a giant douchebag.
I liken Schilling to Narcissus. He was staring in the pool at his reflection, dreaming of being Donald Trump rich and creating/funding the autism foundation to aid his son. Blinded to everything but the vision, he fell in, and drowned.
It's probably pushing it, but hey!
By the way, I got to interview Schilling at GDC before Amalur's release. He's got a forceful personality, to be sure. I was really struck by his thoughtful responses to some of the questions I posed and his ability (no doubt honed through thousands of locker room question-and-answer sessions) to either steamroll or finesse his way past questions he didn't care to answer.
I think you're on the right side of this argument, and I certainly concede that almost all developers and most of their management are people who want their products to be fun and enjoyable, and are probably people who could make more money in the commercial sectors but choose to stay in the game biz because they want to like what they do.
That said, the management of MMOs seem (to laymen like myself and presumably Schilling) to be more aloof and in it for the cash. SOE certainly threw off that vibe when they took over EQ, and did nothing but reinforce it with Galaxies. The Asian companies all just seemed to be trying to turn a quick buck (at the time) and their games derivative. I accept that those feelings might be entirely wrong for almost any MMOS dev team in the mid-2000s, but that's the way it felt to me.
It really isn't about the amount of money lost for me. It's about a guy being in the driver's seat and others who weren't paying the price. I don't really care about sports enough to think he was a hotshot worth taking down. It's one thing to gamble and lose, at a business, but to keep working people with no ability to pay them, messing up their insurance... this is not just an owner sinking his company, what he did was wrong on a different level, and that doesn't change based on who he is.
Last edited by Nesrie; 07-26-2012 at 07:09 PM.
He thought he was a bigshot and didn't run it like a real business. That's the long and short of it.
Well to defend those of us that are actually successful at MMO's you HAVE to think about $$$ more for the sole fact that development never ends. Need money to develop, play people and support the backend. So yes, it does have a spot in our minds with most design decisions.
I keep coming back to one thing...6 years. WTF were they doing for 6 years?
In a bit of a follow-up to last month's Boston Magazine article came the revelation today that Schilling has been saying that Copernicus would have been F2P and that was the big "atom bomb" (his words) that would have made it awesome and amazing.
So yeah, FYI... it's not a big industry secret that F2P is, for some, a viable business model (albeit one that needed much work to get to that point). Over the last year many games have gone this route, and of course Turbine is doing it fairly well with DDO and LOTRO. GW2 will essentially be F2P and this has been set in stone for years.When I talked to Schilling for my story breaking down 38 Studios’ crash, he told me that the company’s plan was to make Copernicus free to play and to seek revenue from within the game, the same way EA is attempting with Old Republic.
“We were going to be the first triple-A, hundred-million-dollar-plus, free-to-play, micro-transaction-based MMO. That was one of our big secrets,” Schilling told me. “I think when we eventually showed off the game for the first time, the atom bomb was going to be free-to-play. When we announced that at the end, that was gonna be the thing that, I think, shocked the world.”
Though Schilling was initially against the idea, he said that he eventually came around. “You won’t find a more ardent opposition to free to play than me, and I went 180 degrees,” he said.
Shortly after our interview, I followed up with him over email on the subject. Schilling said that he believed free-to-play was one reason 38 Studios was closer than ever to a financing deal that could have kept it alive, if only Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee hadn’t been so public in his disapproval of the company. Schilling wrote, “NO ONE was expecting it, and it was another thing that changed the tenor of conversations with investors late in the game.” When I asked how exactly the tenor changed, he replied, “Most investors wanted NOTHING to do with subscription-based products, they were all on the social media, and free-to-play games as a means to revenue.”
By the time Copernicus would have come out, pretty much damn near all MMOGs with the exception of WoW (and who knows, it might switch by then) would be F2P. What kind of narrow-mindedness would make someone assume this would be the huge secret that would make Copernicus successful? F2P does not guarantee success. It does mean you have to even further fine-tune your business model in order to be viable. This is not the crux of a selling point to possible investors.
Hell I'd think it'd make investors even more skeptical about putting money into a business model that is even harder for investors to understand than a straight-up subscription model, then couple that with the notion that frankly when MMOGs convert to F2P they are considered last-ditch efforts and failures. When did a game switch to F2P when it was doing well? How can revenue be properly modeled and predicted when they've never done this before and month-to-month spend is incredibly hard to see? Potentially this would make Copernicus and even shakier proposition to support, and return of investment even further out than before.
http://blogs.bostonmagazine.com/bost...ios-game-free/
--- Alan
Last edited by Alan Dunkin; 08-15-2012 at 04:36 PM.
Because things were going so well for SWTOR.
I do believe that Copernicus would have been the first big-budget Western MMO designed from the ground up as F2P. The others started out as subscription-based games and were later refitted as F2P, with varying degrees of success. Most of them still feature a subscription option even, and treat the F2P option as a sort of extended trial. Look at the F2P options for SoE's games for example; they're terrible. I could see this angle as a selling point to investors at least.
Right.
It's like no one reads Qt3's front page. Shit, we reported this 6 weeks ago:
The key point there is that the decision to go FTP wasn't made until March of 2012. By that time things were pretty much irretrievably lost.Sources familiar with Project Copernicus have painted varying pictures of the state of development at the time of 38 Studios shutting down. Developers and artists at the company headquarters in Providence suggest that the game was on track for a June 2013 release. Sources at the subsidiary studio, Big Huge Games in Baltimore, question its progress. Those sources tell us that it wasn’t until March 2012 that the studio made an internal decision to switch from a subscription MMO to a free-to-play model, which would push the release well past any chance of its initially targeted September 2012 window. They also describe a game limited in content beyond the starting area and with nondescript gameplay.
Guilty as charged, I just read the games forum. I didn't mean to claim that F2P would have saved Copernicus though. Clearly it was a troubled project all around.
So, Free to Play was a top secret bomb-shell that would shock the world, so shocking and unexpected that all the investors would only talk to you if you told them your game would be free to play?
Uh, sure.
I doubt this very much. It was likely designed from the ground up as subscription. F2P was an eleventh hour desperation bullshit move.I do believe that Copernicus would have been the first big-budget Western MMO designed from the ground up as F2P. The others started out as subscription-based games and were later refitted as F2P, with varying degrees of success.
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