38 Studios Epic Collapse

[KendrickPanther]

Some of you may remember the recent video game flop "Kingdom of Amular". Well it was the first and last game produced by 38 studios. They were owned and financed by Curt Schilling who lost pretty much everything when game sales were solid but not spectacular. I just can't imagine having 50 million dollars in the bank and going into a highly competitive business like video games. He should have gone into low interest long term investments like bonds or CDs. I feel bad for his 300 employees that lost their jobs after not receiving a pay check in weeks. This is just a sad embarrassing story for Curt.

http://espn.go.com/boston/mlb/story/_/id/8084138/former-boston-red-sox-curt-schilling-says-baseball-fortune-all-gone-company-crash

[Doyle]

I always wondered why Dan Morgan decided to go into the restaurant business. Worst investment ever.

[Doc Holiday]

Doubt it, Halo 2 only cost $24mil to make I doubt he actually lost $50Million, usually publishers pick up some of the cost

[Doc Holiday]

I just read up some more on it, but who ever was running the company was a complete moron, to go that far in debt developing a game, and then not finding a proper publisher. the game apparently was half way decent and at least respectable.

I have no idea how they could rack up the debt amount that they did, the game apparently cost more to make then some summer block busters, something doesn't make sense.

[KendrickPanther]

I think it was a bad idea to take a 75 million dollar loan. I think I read an interest payment was $1.1m. Bungie could make Halo a bit cheaper for several reasons but the biggest would be it wasn't their first game. They didn't have massive overhead.

[Doc Holiday]

I think it was a bad idea to take a 75 million dollar loan. I think I read an interest payment was $1.1m. Bungie could make Halo a bit cheaper for several reasons but the biggest would be it wasn't their first game. They didn't have massive overhead.

but still the game should not have cost that much to make, if that were the case every flop of the last 5 years would have put the company that made it under, but many are still producing games

[Guild]

This is a real shame. Amalur is not a bad game by any means (for this generation... long live Ultima 7) and I hope Curt can get a bailout from someone who sees this.

[Zaximus]

This is a real shame. Amalur is not a bad game by any means (for this generation... long live Ultima 7) and I hope Curt can get a bailout from someone who sees this.

Amalur was close to being a great game. Needed to be harder though, and have some glitches fixed, but it was fun other than that. I was hoping a patch would come out to fix some stuff, but yeah.

[Wyank]

but still the game should not have cost that much to make, if that were the case every flop of the last 5 years would have put the company that made it under, but many are still producing games

38 Studios was also working on a MMO set in Amalur. Supposedly it was to point that it was a working game. Some of that money could of been also used to make that game.

[Khyber53]

That video looks great. Shame it didn't pan out. Is it truly dead?

[SmootsDaddy89]

Amalur was basically a cash in to hopefully give them the boost they needed for Project Copernicus. That's why outside of milking customers with DLC, they didn't support the game whatsoever post-launch. This sucks because I really liked BHG, but lol @ EA and Curt.

[Zaximus]

That video looks great. Shame it didn't pan out. Is it truly dead?

It's possible EPIC games owns the IP for it, I know they hired a lot of 38 studios employees, we may still get to see it.

[Doc Holiday]

this still doesn't make sense the video makes the game look pretty decent, the first one was decent by todays standards if they were truly cash strapped why didn't a publisher pick them up?? I guess it will be a question that is never answered either that or someone figured that they could make more money on the IP if they let 38 go under rehire the staff and finish it. kinda cut throat but I guess that's what business is today.

[Zaximus]

Few athletes become successful in business. I think their egos think they can do anything they want. Curt threw 50 mill at a wall hoping it would stick I guess.