On funding of PC games, with a smidge of progress updates

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38 studios, Carmageddon, Civ5, Kickstarter, Minecraft, World of Tanks

All continues well in the World of Tanks – matches are played and tanks are ground up.   I have an extra 2.5m ready to buy a VK4502A but will hold off until I elite some of my vast holdings of tanks.    And I finally had enough, burned free XP, and I don’t have to drive the flaming WOLVERINE any more

Minecraft continues to entertain, in a shared experience with my boy, who can talk about it for an hour in his stream-of-consciousness way.   He actually exhausted me with it last night, and I had to go sit on my bed and relax for 15 mins after being treated to his analyses & questions for half an hour.    My game is most about collecting resources and hoarding food.   His game is trying not to lose his house (again!) and figuring out if zombies can break through windows set into the side of a hill.

I brushed the dust off of my Civilization games as well.   At release I only played half-a-dozen Civilization 5 games before quitting with the vague complaint of “It’s not fun”.    Will be finishing this game I started last night, and after taking out Ramses I hope I’m successful.      There are a ton of achievements on Steam I haven’t yet earned !

Read more about the 38 studios implosion and got to thinking about the many problems inherent with PC games.    I don’t own a console, not since the ’80s at least, and apparently the bigger companies who make games get their money from them.     That’s fine to a certain degree.   I remember PC games bringing in the big money, and I didn’t like what it did to the industry.    Now it’s a more specialized/boutique industry and that suits me just fine.

In a vague sense I’ve heard about Kickstarter for several months, but I read about a project last week that made me think a bit more about the service.     If you – like me – aren’t exactly aware of it, Kickstarter is a methodology for coming up with a project idea, and getting crowd funding.    Your project has to hit on the entertainment/art end of the spectrum, which game software is a natural fit for.   You state the amount that needs to be pledged (Like, $1,000) for your project to be accomplished.    If you hit that level, the donors are charged and you are expected to do your project.    If not enough is pledged (Like, $800 only) then no money changes hands.

It took me awhile to figure out Kickstarter the company’s angle – it’s not prominently displayed on their website.     If your project is successful they get a 5% cut.     Your project also pays credit card processing fees of between 3-5%.   So they take a 10% max cut of funded projects, and it seems reasonable to me, not ideal but not exorbitant.

Look at this project ! Haven’t thought about Carmageddon in years.

I read the project description and everything placed onto their page by the Stainless studios guy (Nobby).   What a hysterical and twisted guy.   Probably part of the 80’s generation like me.   I love the whole idea of an updated Carmageddon, and the money going to the development team instead of a publisher.       At this point, I feel good about giving Stainless $15 and hoping for a good game.

For a contrary view I googled “how much does kickstarter charge” and this nicely written post was about tenth from the top.  I do think they’re probably a bit of a pricey service, but with any overpriced service a competitor usually comes along.

With PC gaming being a bit more niche, less so aimed at you damn kids out there, and more at the grumpy young adults/ middle aged, how can you expect to get the games developed that YOU want to see ?   Well – I mean – that *I* want to see ?   This strikes me as a pretty good way to go about it.    Why wait for angel investors and play a big money funding game, ala 38 studios ?    Maybe start with the right core team and see what you can get via previous work or by having a famous developer or such.

Carmageddon Reincarnation is slated for a Feb 2013 release.    This is the game I hid from small children and only played in the dead of night, with a maniacal grin on my face and understanding the whole comedic angle of the game.    But the pixelated mess you see when running it on modern computers just didn’t work for me.    Now, an updated version with 3d support ?     Let’s see what they can put together.

Wish I had been wrong

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38 studios

Basically there is no more “38 Studios”.

Entire staff laid off

The Company is experiencing an economic downturn. To avoid further losses and possibility of retrenchment, the Company has decided that a companywide lay off is absolutely necessary. These layoffs are non-voluntary and non-disciplinary. This is your official notice of lay off, effective today, Thursday, May 24th, 2012

You can’t expect perfect wordsmithing with a layoff notice, but come on.   “The Company” ?    “Experiencing an economic downturn” ?   More like “We ran out of capital before we could become profitable”.

But really, would I have been up for playing a subscription-based, fantasy MMO in 2013 ?    I doubt it.

• I had three reasons for wanting this whole thing to work, and they’re all people:
• Curt Schilling.    Baseball player as gamer.    Retires from baseball (well before *I* can retire) and gives me a taste of what may come for me, ie, “WTF do I do after retiring?”.    Hope I’m smart enough to stay with my core competency.
• Moorgard and Blackguard.   It’s nice to see certain names from the gaming industry stay accessible, and not disappear, even if only through the medium of haphazardly updated blogs.   Wish I had something besides best wishes to send them as they start searching for jobs.

So many names I remember, and admire, for one reason or another in the gaming industry.    Half the time they’re regular guys, and half of them are big wheels in small ponds.    Then there are the occasional superstars who break molds, and the guys who decide to get serious with their careers and move away from a public, gaming persona.

When I started on this journey of gaming – when was that exactly ?    This would require serious thought – I hadn’t thought about it in the wiser, long lived sense of the word.   I was a *freaking child*, so of course not.   But now I realize that the gaming world is almost something in parallel with the real world, two spheres moving forward, intersecting little, and the people in contact with both are those who work in the industry.

I’ve enjoyed playing my consumer’s part in all of this.   I’ve moved from pinball, to video games, to war games, to RPG’s, to the fascinating and endless variety of games on the PC.    The guys in the industry have it pretty hard, it seems, from a career perspective.    I sure lucked out in that I got in a niche and I’ll probably ride it out ’til I’m 60.

In the end, we’re all gamers and it’s all good.   I wish good luck to all 38 studios folks and a happy Memorial day.

Sadly predicting death for 38 Studios

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38 studios

Dig into the Joystiq coverage to get a full sense of the troubles 38 studios has been facing.    I don’t read joystiq all the time but browsing through its 38 studios stories for the past week paints the picture out pretty well.

See, here’s something I know about – audit reports.   Pricewaterhouse gave 38 studios a  “going concern” finding at the end of their previous fiscal year, June 30 2011.    This happens if a company’s reserves, and revenues, are likely not going to be sufficient to keep the company operating over a longer-term period (5 years I believe).    In short, the auditors gave a bankruptcy warning.

Sometimes they’re wrong.    Auditors are not perfect, as painted in the popular media.     I hear calls for “have an audit of their finances!” all the time, like it’s as easy as reading, and I just laugh because I know how fallible auditors can be.    But after missing a small interest-only payment at the beginning of the loan term, with future loan payments set to roughly triple, and being unable to make payroll – they were clearly on the mark offering that warning.

In other words – don’t expect to play Copernicus developed by 38 studios, it’ll be bought and developed by someone else.

38 Studios Woes

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38 studios, EQ2

I first became aware of Curt Schilling about 15 years ago.   His biggest claim to fame is being a major-league baseball pitcher, who also managed to win three world series with two teams.    It was revealed the jock was also quite a geek – war games, tabletop miniatures, and such in addition to being an outstanding athlete.    And, a PC gamer.   He was big time player of Everquest and EQ2, and raised the profile of the MMO genre a bit.

Many years back he founded his own games studio.    It was time to retire from baseball and pursue a more geekly hobby.    Made sense to me – baseball has a shelf life for its players, and being as we are the same age, and I also have another friend – former longtime MLB pitcher our same age – it just kind of gelled and I’ve been watching the whole thing from the sidelines.

38 studios released Kingdoms of Amalur in February which many of you have been playing; I’m getting too cheap to buy games anymore so I haven’t.    And today I find out 38 studios is apparently in trouble.

Also Friday, 38 Studios made an overdue $1.125 million payment to the R.I. Economic Development Corporation

Asked whether Rhode Island would offer do a 38 Studios-style deal again, Chafee replied: “Never, never – not on my watch. I said from the beginning it was a risky enterprise.”

Seems the studio got some taxpayer money when moving to their latest studio in Providence RI.    This can be a smart move for a company – use the State’s credit to get bonds issued at a favorable rate, if your project is beneficial or desirable to the State, presumably in this case to bring jobs to Rhode Island.    Then, the company simply makes the payments like you would any loan.    Problem seems to be, they couldn’t make the payments.

Yesterday, they couldn’t even make payroll.    Doubly scary.    Back to the Everquest2 connections – Curt hired two former Sony dev’s who I always thought did quite a job – Moorgard and Blackguard.   Their blogs are (intelligently) silent about any recent events at their company, but I hope they’re well.   Certainly the press looks pretty bad.

38 Studios employees who were standing outside the company’s Providence headquarters on Thursday afternoon looked glum but said they could not comment on whether they’d gotten paid.

This comes as a big surprise – I had actually looked for a failure for quite some time, but after they released Kingdoms of Amalur I figured, they must have gotten it right.   Seems all is not well for the former Green Monster games after all.