38 studios Auction Nov 14th and 15th.

Tenks_sl said:

Health insurance, 401k matching and other benefits make up a significant amount of the cost per employee. I'd say each employee costs at least 130% of their salary. Not to mention I don't think they were hiring "average" developers. Generally for game development you seek the best and generally they get paid a bit higher. Although the stress/skill/hours involved in game development don't justify the smaller increase in salary.

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Plus it wasn't a labor cost estimation, it was a total cost estimation. It's just a ballpark estimate, one that is very commonly used in the industry by publishers, to get a general sense of what a project will cost. You use per person because bigger projects cost more and for software development a "bigger" project mostly just means more people working on it. You use those numbers for professional developers developing in a professional environment, so it (obviously) doesn't apply to 2 guys in their garage. I know you know this, just qualifying so Quaid doesn't come out with something like "But Super Meat Boy cost blah... blah... blah..."

It also isn't just a game thing, in most industries there is a an average cost per person for a project or activity that doesn't change by a whole lot from company to company, and everyone uses that number to estimate things. I am pretty sure that most car companies converge on some average cost per person per month to develop and prototype a car and they probably use that number for early estimates of project feasibility.

Denaut_sl said:

I am pretty sure that most car companies converge on some average cost per person per month to develop and prototype a car and they probably use that number for early estimates of project feasibility.

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Cost modeling in automotive is a completely different thing, because you generally don't produce anything and pay a relatively small team for the R&D and protoyping (which is very often partially outsourced, except key components). When you go into production, you have an enormous reduction in cost. It's quite complicated, but that's the gist of it.

the sad thing is again, if 38S had any sort of self awareness they could have mitigated most of these problems. A year before shutdown SOMEONE should have said "hey wait... we only have enough money for 18 months at this burn rate. Ok, lets fire 75% of our employees, negotiate a deal with RI where we don't have to pay penalties for having a smaller staff but still stay in business, and work out some new investors at a much smaller burn rate with hard deadlines that show exactly how we will make tons of money".

instead the retards kept hiring, including some really big names (some EA guy?) literally 3 months before shutting down, and having massive overhead with a ton of vice presidents, senior managers, and other bullshit jobs that are mostly assholes who pontificate and do no actual work.

the original CEO left like 2 years before the shutdown, kinda makes you wonder if he was the only one who kept pointing out the problem and everyone else ignored him.

From what I've heard, Brett Close tried fruitlessly to talk some actual business and financial sense into Curt but was constantly dismissed. He saw the writing on the wall and left. So Curt hired a yes-man, err woman to replace him, Jen MacLean. In fact Curt hired lots of yes men, gave them important titles and installed them into his increasingly bloated management teams. All the while consistently dismissing constructive criticism. That's the watercooler and post analysis anyway.

Why did he have this attitude? In one of the post-mortems in his own words since he won the world series, he believed the same kind of sports-metaphor miracle would happen to his company.

Lots of other weird shit went down too, like Bob Salvatore basically being thrown to the curb as well. In one of RA's interviews, he lamented that he was basically pushed out of the company and his original role reduced to almost nothing. He didn't go into why, but one could easily surmise his input no longer fell in line with Curt's and so he had to go. They kept his name front and center for marketing purposes of course though.

Well shit, if the dark elf guy couldn't save the company, who was going to?

honestly, the biggest fallout from this is the fact that it's getting more and more expensive to make games and investors are going to be less and less likely to put money into anything that isn't Madden.

The music is actually pretty good.

Jukebox Heroes: Project Copernicus' soundtrack | Massively

Yeah, that dude was killing it with the OST. He's working on The Witcher 3 so that should have a nice score.

spronk_sl said:

the original CEO left like 2 years before the shutdown, kinda makes you wonder if he was the only one who kept pointing out the problem and everyone else ignored him.

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That's pretty much exactly what happened. I remember reading an article about the whole debacle a year ago, and the first CEO was pushed out the door and replaced with that chick who had little or no experience as a chief executive, and who was on maternity leave when the company went tits up (or was it stress/medical leave?). Color me sexist, but you don't take that kind of a position in such a critical time for a start-up if you are trying to have children, even if you intend on taking a very, very short leave. Weeks and months for a company like 38 Studios is like years and decades for established companies.

j00t_sl said:

honestly, the biggest fallout from this is the fact that it's getting more and more expensive to make games and investors are going to be less and less likely to put money into anything that isn't Madden.

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The AAA gaming industry is turning in to the movie industry, yes. But that's fine. There's still art house or independent films, tv shows, and the like. The gaming industry is going the same route, especially on PC.

spronk_sl said:

the sad thing is again, if 38S had any sort of self awareness they could have mitigated most of these problems. A year before shutdown SOMEONE should have said "hey wait... we only have enough money for 18 months at this burn rate. Ok, lets fire 75% of our employees, negotiate a deal with RI where we don't have to pay penalties for having a smaller staff but still stay in business, and work out some new investors at a much smaller burn rate with hard deadlines that show exactly how we will make tons of money".

instead the retards kept hiring, including some really big names (some EA guy?) literally 3 months before shutting down, and having massive overhead with a ton of vice presidents, senior managers, and other bullshit jobs that are mostly assholes who pontificate and do no actual work.

the original CEO left like 2 years before the shutdown, kinda makes you wonder if he was the only one who kept pointing out the problem and everyone else ignored him.

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They were required to hire a specific number of people to work in RI by the loans terms. Then RI yanked last 25 million of promised 75 million loan in a completely out of the blue move. They were boxed in by loans terms on number of employee and then blindsided by RI refual to hand over last third of loan.

Siddar_sl said:

They were required to hire a specific number of people to work in RI by the loans terms. Then RI yanked last 25 million of promised 75 million loan in a completely out of the blue move. They were boxed in by loans terms on number of employee and then blindsided by RI refual to hand over last third of loan.

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Clearly all RI's fault, then.

No, but 2 two retards doing business together... there's enough blame to go around.

Siddar_sl said:

They were required to hire a specific number of people to work in RI by the loans terms. Then RI yanked last 25 million of promised 75 million loan in a completely out of the blue move. They were boxed in by loans terms on number of employee and then blindsided by RI refual to hand over last third of loan.

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thats not what happened at all. First RI didn't control the loan at all, they were just the guarantor - if 38S defaulted RI would pay. I don't remember the details anymore but the last 25m was not due to be paid out for a while and had some other conditions applied, but the banks held the money not RI. The specific # of people thing is true but the contract allowed a penalty if this number wasn't hit, and I don't remember reading anywhere that 38S tried to renegotiate this term - they didn't want to appear weak to anyone outside, probably.

What 38S tried to do 2 weeks before they shutdown was sell off some tax credits from RI, which is just silly, and RI balked and said "uh, wait, no these credits are for you not just anyone". And some other really dumb things. Basically no one outside knew 38S was in huge financial problems until a few weeks before everything exploded, and most people inside 38S didnt seem to know either.

i'm sticking with my prediction from the other thread, the IP sells for 250k or so and is just used as publicity for some shitty phone KOA2 game that is just a rework of a shitty phone RPG with KOA slapped on it. If the publicity sells an extra 2-3m copies it's worth up to a 1m investment, but nothing will ever be done with the actual things the guys at 38S ever did.

spronk_sl said:

i'm sticking with my prediction from the other thread, the IP sells for 250k or so and is just used as publicity for some shitty phone KOA2 game that is just a rework of a shitty phone RPG with KOA slapped on it. If the publicity sells an extra 2-3m copies it's worth up to a 1m investment, but nothing will ever be done with the actual things the guys at 38S ever did.

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I don't know. I think if the auction remains that low, EA would scoop it up even if it was just to sit on the rights so no one else could profit from the KoA name.

But don't forget, the auction also includes the rights to Rise of Nations, which might oddly be the more lucrative thing to try to get a hold of. It's a series that is remembered fondly that hasn't really been bogged down by all of this nonsense.

Cantatus_sl said:

I don't know. I think if the auction remains that low, EA would scoop it up even if it was just to sit on the rights so no one else could profit from the KoA name.

But don't forget, the auction also includes the rights to Rise of Nations, which might oddly be the more lucrative thing to try to get a hold of. It's a series that is remembered fondly that hasn't really been bogged down by all of this nonsense.

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The Rise of Nations and other former BHG IPs are a separate lot from the Amalur IP, so its quite likely it will be bought up by a different entity.

And although a shitty Amalur phone game is certainly not out of the question, I also believe you are correct in that EA would not let the IP go for that low. Reckoning was a very profitable game for them and they had expressed a lot of interest in a KoA:2. Not saying they'll shell out the 15-20 like R.I. hopes, but $250 is kinda low IMO, but we'll see.

Luxer_sl said:

The music is actually pretty good.

Jukebox Heroes: Project Copernicus' soundtrack | Massively

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Some of it is good, but a few are kinda irritating imo. Really needed the live orchestral pass to make them shine.

But don't forget that Rosenberg wasn't even the main audio guy; that was Aubrey Hodges and as far as I know the only thing we've heard of his work on Copernicus is the Main theme which I think is pretty good although it too, needed the final live orchestral recording:

Kingdoms of Amalur Theme by aubreyhodges on SoundCloud - Hear the world's sounds

And while we're on the subject of audio, here's some Copernicus other audio by Bill Mueller:



and



and

ThunderCougarFalconBird_sl said:

The Rise of Nations and other former BHG IPs are a separate lot from the Amalur IP, so its quite likely it will be bought up by a different entity.

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Ah, I thought it was all lumped together. Now I'll be curious to see whether Rise of Nations or Amalur gets purchased for more.

RoN fetches more, hands down.