38 Studios and Big Huge Games lay off entire staffs
joystiq.com
joystiq.com
Um. No. You mismanaged your finances and chose not to give your employees any warning that they will be without pay or health care.
A word to all you startup founders out there - don't toy with your employees' lives. If you are running out of money, let them know so they can plan.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/05/24/38-studios-l...
I'm not exactly sure why, but it may have something to do with both their popularity and the ease of imagining a cool, novel MMO concept.
It never goes well. College kids never finish their part-time project, Curt Schilling blows through millions of taxpayer dollars. Many big-budget MMOs are in the cancelled game graveyard, and many dragged down their studios with them: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/show/dead/sCol/estimatedR...
I feel bad for the talented folks at Big Huge Games who boarded a sinking ship. Here's hoping that all the staff at 38 Studios and BHG find news jobs ASAP.
Let me give you some insight into why we decided and why we thought we could do an MMO. First of all, a subscription model is very attractive, because it's clear how the venture is supposed to make money. We thought, or at least I thought, that we could make an MMO more simply by making a game that's just the "multiplayer online part" plus a smaller "rest of the game". I got started immediately working on the network sync code.
I got as far as moving boxes that did in fact sync their positions on multiple computers. But going from that to a real game is about as big a gulf as going from nailing boards to building a house. It turns out, code to network sync a game is not going to go anywhere without a game to sync.
So now I'm working on a simpler single player game, built with the scripting language bindings that was one of the best pieces left over from the earlier endeavor. I think even experienced programmers from other fields cannot understand the soul-crushing amount of work it is to get even simple things working in a 3D game when you're doing it all by your self. Yesterday I got a green line to move on a black screen, and I was happy.
(The game engine, which can do more than that, had been not working for 6 months following a rewrite, so I was happy to see anything. And yes I know about the Joel Spolsky article about the folly of complete rewrites. I'll see your Joel Spolsky and raise you one Richard Brooks: "plan to throw one away. You will anyway.")
That was Fred Brooks, not Richard Brooks.
In one of the best books of all time on the subject of software: The Mythical Man-Month.
Possibly not necessary.
The underlying theme with Joel's point, if you look past the hyperbole, is that you don't want to take successful software and start over, re-implementing everything from the ground up to do the same thing more efficiently or with better architecture or aesthetics.
"Plan to throw one away" on the other hand, is about going through the building process to better recognize the problems you actually need to solve rather than the ones you thought you needed to solve.
Assuming you rewrote your engine because it wasn't solving the problems you really needed it to solve, the conflict between the two maxims isn't significant.
This is the kind of thing that would make a dubious investment, let alone a state-backed loan.
Since game development companies started being run by sports heroes who are virtually revered in the region (as Curt Shilling is in New England).
I thought it was interesting that they were given such a large loan by the government. But they had big ideas, and behind it was Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, R. A. Salvatore and lots of incredibly talented folks.
I applied when they had a job in my area of expertise, and I had another (better) gig by the time they got back to me with my application. Not surprisingly, two months later they contacted me about the same gig, independent from my application.
There's got to be some lesson in there somewhere, specifically about how to judge a startup that takes a month to get back about a job inquiry.
But who am I kidding?
A few key tidbits:
Curt Schilling's inspiration to start 38 and work on Project Copernicus (the original title it was founded to develop) grew out of his passion for playing games like World of Warcraft alongside his active participation on game-focused forums like Fires of Heaven. Many people from that and other similar communities are observed moving into the industry when they demonstrate particular insight or skill through game design/balance discussions (aka 'theorycrafting') so it's not as unexpected as you might think for a random gamer to go from talking about a genre on forums to working on a game of his own. Curt is only unique there in that he had the cash on hand to get it rolling himself.
38 Studios started out working on Copernicus (under another name) for multiple years without much fuss in the press and (presumably) at a much smaller studio size than it has now. It wasn't until 2009 that it started making visible moves to expand and act more quickly.
In '09 they acquired Big Huge Games (actual developers of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) and had them rebrand their game in order to have an Amalur title to ship soon and presumably bring their resources to bear on Copernicus. In '10 they made their now-infamous deal with the state of Rhode Island to relocate the studio and expand to 450 staff in exchange for a loan.
Curt publicly claimed to have invested a large chunk of his personal fortune (according to some sources as much as $30m - http://thebiglead.com/index.php/2012/05/18/curt-schillings-v... ) into the company alongside the loan from the state of Rhode Island and potentially other investors; more recent reports suggest that the amount he actually invested was closer to $4 million and was repaid out of the state of RI's loan (http://blogs.wpri.com/2012/05/14/38-studios-finances-under-s...).