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Comment by Belphemur | Hacker News Reader

To quote a reddit comment :

I should point out that this is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it clear what the loan is for. What this tells us is that money has been loaned and secured against assets owned by CIG - this is fairly common practice in the case of commercial loans.

To bank with Coutts you must have at least £1,000,000 in tangible assets and in any event they are selective about their clientele; which implies CIG is doing well.

To be honest as much as the terms are huge, they didn't go to a loan shark neither a shitty bank. It's the bank that manage the assets of the Queen. I don't think they give loan that easily hence the huge collaterals.

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"they didn't go to a loan shark neither a shitty bank. It's the bank that manage the assets of the Queen. I don't think they give loan that easily hence the huge collaterals."

Irrelevant. Why would they care which bank the money comes from?

It would be careless to take any deal on less favourable terms than you could get elsewhere, which implies this Coutts deal was the best they could get.

It could easily be a deal on a REALLY good rate to extend their runway well into the release cycle of a finished game, but the lack of disclosure implies otherwise.

Anyone here old enough to remember the original boo.com?

That was also an emperor-has-no-clothes fiasco of epic proportions. Which is ironic, because their problem was that they couldn't sell any of the mountains of clothes they had in storage.

> Irrelevant. Why would they care which bank the money comes from?

I'm sure they're looking for good terms, but being able to secure financing from a more reputable entity is still a signal. If they were some sort or real estate developer and could only get loans from someone like the Russian Mafia then we'd have a little more insight into what kind of business they must be running. In this case, going to a reputable bank is probably the best strategy for minimizing the cost associated with the loan.

The more reputable the bank, the more selective they are about their loans, and the closer to the LIBOR rate they'll charge. You can get a much better loan from a large bank than you can from a loan shark.

I guess to make conclusion we would need a disclosure from the studio.

The reputation of the bank and the way they approve client is relevant. It doesn't reduce the fact they took money, but again without a break down of the term we can only speculate the reason.

Saying "they'll fail" because of this loan is making a hasty conclusion.

Yeah probably just some cashflow issue due to mistiming how the remainder of the $141m is invested

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