Curt Schilling, 38 Studios, and Rhode Island

i don't know if anyone else has been following this story but, wow. curt schilling is the worst person.

we'd had hints of that

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2012/05/25/curt_schillings_38_studios_lays_off_entire_staff/

Curt Schilling’s troubled 38 Studios laid off its entire staff in Rhode Island and Maryland on Thursday in a stunning turn of events for the former Red Sox pitcher’s ambitious gambit to build a video game franchise off the back of a winning baseball career.

The decision comes less than two weeks after 38 Studios’ financial woes surfaced and deep cracks began appearing in the six-year-old company. It was lured from Maynard to Rhode Island on the promise of a $75 million loan guarantee from a state hoping Schilling’s vision could bring high-paying jobs.

I was watching the local news last night precisely because of this story

a victory for "small government" "job creators" everywhere, good job everybody

can I just

http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2012/05/25/1337919654_0011/539w.jpg

http://www.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/large_lightbox/hash/monty-python-gay-drilling-260.jpg

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/24/kingdoms-of-amalur-reckoning-had-to-sell-3m-just-to-break-even/

Despite Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning selling "1.22 million copies in its first 90 days" according to 38 Studios head Curt Schilling, it apparently never crested the 3 million mark it needed to break even. "The game failed, the game failed," Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee told attendees of a press conference this afternoon.

i am having trouble coping that our already strapped state economy is being fucked over even further by the failure of an MMORPG. having to hear our governor talk about the financial crisis spawned by a video game is just too absurd.

ha, yea, of course i know one of those guys, it's RI

this whole thing is unbelievably absurd

I don't know that many ppl in the gaming industry but I know some dudes who worked on Asheron's Call, I wonder if any of them floated over to this

just so everyone understands, the loan guarantees were approved by former republican governor don carcieri during his last term, after declaring he would not seek reelection

And unfortunately, through a comedy of errors Lincoln Chafee looks like a genius as he denounced the 38 Studios deal struck by Schilling, Carcieri, and the General Assembly in 2010. Then-candidate Chafee said:

A serious misrepresentation has been made to the taxpayers of this state about the value of this deal. The time to put a stop to it is now. The original information used to make this decision was flawed. First, the initial job numbers were inaccurate. Second, new information about the slowing growth of the video game software industry requires a serious second look. Third, some of the loan’s proceeds will be used to pay off a Massachusetts bank loan of unknown size, not create new jobs. The conclusion is inescapable: this is an insider deal that does not serve the best interests of citizens.

http://wrnipoliticsblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/gov-chafee-asked-afl-cios-nee-to-resign-from-edc-board-nee-refused/

schilling is such a garbage human being, this entire thing is awful

whole ordeal enabled by slavish parochial sports fandom / red sock of courage bullshit imho

how much money could I make off of CHAFEE WAS RIGHT t-shirts

schill was a hell of a pitcher though.

sure, but how does that translate to him being a good CEO? only the RI general assembly knows!

Despite Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning selling "1.22 million copies in its first 90 days"

hmmm the number i heard was far less than that, 500K in the first month, which would have meant it sold more in the 2nd month...though he could be citing worldwide figures, not just U.S.

if their break-even projection numbers were over 3 milllion, man, that's a tough row to hoe.

to be honest, big huge games is a solid studio, and they hired ken rolston, who played a big role in making both elder scrolls morrowind and oblivion.

i wonder how much they wasted paying RA Salvatore and Todd McFarlane to deliver boilerplate fantasy crap?

it's a shame that Big Huge just got shut down, because the game itself was pretty good, and if it really sold 1.5M that's not bad for a new franchise....if they think making an even more expensive project (the mmo) in an even riskier genre that's littered with the bodies of companies that thought they were the "next World of Warcraft", they are insane.

i heard through the grapevine that schilling had gotten money out of a bunch of pro athletes as "investors" lol

pro athletes should be banned by law from investing their money

lol, at first, because of the RI connection, i was thinking of seth mcfarlane and thinking, "duh, of course it was doomed to failure!"

oh man I had forgotten that this was the Spawn meets Drizzt Do'Urden MMORPG

what do the farrelly brothers do with their money?

Big Huge did Rise of Nations, right? the Civ/Age of Empires mash-up series?

What pisses me off is that the motherfuck makes fucking loud-ass Tea Party noises for years, then runs for public coffers for dosh to pay back himself first, iirc.

Setting up a system for subsidized loans to entice high-tech industry and gamedevs is a good idea(Bethesda is in MD, if you remember); dumping insane amounts of funds into a new studio run headed by a first-timer trying to make a blockbuster MMO on their first try is not.

likewise, sinking all of the state's economic development funding into a single business!

exactly! awesome example of appeal to authority as a cognitive fallacy, too!

i heard through the grapevine that schilling had gotten money out of a bunch of pro athletes as "investors" lol

― wack nerd zinging in the dead of night (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, May 25, 2012 2:25 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

iirc schilling actually asked for MORE loans to cover costs after 38 couldn't make payroll, over and above the loans already received. the request was turned down, which led to the mass firings this week. afaik, the only remaining thing 38 can do to raise money is to sell off their tax credits to other businesses.

Big Huge did Rise of Nations, right? the Civ/Age of Empires mash-up series?

What pisses me off is that the motherfuck makes fucking loud-ass Tea Party noises for years, then runs for public coffers for dosh to pay back himself first, iirc.

― Choad of Choad Hall (kingfish), Friday, May 25, 2012 1:48 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yep they did Rise...studio was founded by Brian Reynolds, one of the ex lead producer types at Firaxis, like a said a good, solid PC oriented studio, Schilling certainly didn't pick a bad company to work with...

I believe the Reckoning project was actually started with another publisher, dropped and picked up by 38 Studios

to your second point, Big Huge was in Maryland and Schilling actually sort of played Maryland and Rhode Island against each other to see who would give me the most "job creation" kickbacks...Rhode Island got sucked into his celebrity and also the very misguided idea that making money on these dang games those kids love so much is really easy - why my kids play video games all the time!

Schilling is basically just a well-heeled fanboy with the hubris to think he knows one fucking thing about running a successful game company, no different than any million dudes except he's famous.

if i've learned nothing else, it's that the business is incredibly complex and just crushingly difficult -- even if you are amazing at what you do. and that enjoying playing games has very very little to do with whether or not you'd be good at making them.

RI public radio roundtable on the subject, including Gov Chafee

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wrni/news.newsmain/article/0/13/1932647/Top.Stories/Political.Roundtable.the.future.for.RI.and.38.Studios

right, Dunning-Kruger Effect in action.

Will take this moment to state that I really want Firaxis or Reynolds to do an updated Alpha Centauri, my fave of all Civ games.

I enjoyed it so much I even read _The Jesus Incident_, its source material.

Schilling actually sort of played Maryland and Rhode Island against each other

this is exactly what happened, it essentially became a bidding war

you win this round, maryland. *shakes fist*

massachusetts comes out of this looking great too because our politicians our dumb but thankfully weren't dumb enough to call when rhode island raised

I really can't see Deval Patrick going for this at all

I mean, there's no casino component

hah yeah pretty much

curt schilling is the worst person.

― judas, a homo (elmo argonaut), Friday, May 25, 2012 11:37 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

$75 million loan is just a staggering amount, like how many fn people did they think this place was gonna employ

400-450 iirc

public documents from the RI EDC are online, who knows what's buried in the fine print

http://www.riedc.com/38studios-public-documents

i realize that fantasy genre shit with foofy names makes tons of money all the time, but it still cracks me up that this much coin was riding on something called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

as far as fantasy names go, that's super tame and boring tbh

One former employee told the video game blog Kotaku that 38 Studios workers learned of the payroll miss only when checks failed to hit their accounts. According to the employee, workers learned by word of mouth that their health insurance was to expire abruptly, Thursday night at midnight. "We found this out when an employee's pregnant wife was told by her doctor, this was on Tuesday 22nd May this week," the employee wrote.

ra salvatore made $5 million off this, lol

that to me is the worst shit, like it's one thing to hear "oh you're not getting paid in 2 weeks" and another to hear "oh that bill you thought you were gonna pay today? yeah that's not happening"

ironic that my video-game-loving son's public school may end up getting shuttered and consolidated because of a failed video game

schilling's the dope who drove this into a wall but carcieri's the moron who handed him the keys to his car, unfortunately I live in that car and, well, I don't really know where I was going with that metaphor

into a wall

Catherine Welch ‏@CWELCHRI
@RINPR Ex-38 Studio employee tells RIPR that Gov Chafee stonewalled the company
2:48 PM - 25 May 12 via web

i completely understand 38 employees being outraged at the sudden loss of their jobs but i honestly don't think chaffee is the appropriate focus for yr anger, dudes

he would not give us $78m more dollars

trying to make an MMO from the start seems like the worst business plan ever for a game company

Huge article in today's NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/business/curt-schilling-rhode-island-and-the-fall-of-38-studios.html?hp&_r=0

In the end, with warnings like these apparently ignored by the staff, only one of the 13 board members voted against the investment in 38 Studios. That lone dissenter was Kurt Wadensten, who owns Vibco, one of the country’s main manufacturers of industrial vibrators.

waht

That man is living the dream

http://www.vibco.com/

"This can't be right, a million orders for an A. Jourgensen?"

pretty disappointed "industrial vibrators" aren't what i was envisioning.

When the recreational and medical vibrators just won't do, you really do have to move up to the industrial models.

love that their page has no sense of self-consciousness or anything about this.

just like my gf.

"We can shake ALL the air bubbles outta your cement, awwwwwwyeahhhhh"

we're the vibrator guys
          ^expert

I went to their web page and started getting flashbacks to Morel Orel, had to click off

Help me out... what was like Moral Orel on their site?

guess he did put his fortune into that video game http://www.forbes.com/sites/zillow/2013/10/07/retired-baseball-player-curt-schilling-selling-house-home-contents-in-estate-sale

who wants to make a video game that bad damn

there are so many video games already

I feel bad for the people who lost their jobs and the people of the great state of Delaware, but on the other hand: lol

Delaware and Rhode Island are the same place to me

tough but fair

Curt Schilling ‏@gehrig38 3h

If someone were to buy Amalur, put team back on it, it's a billion dollar franchise, 2 years later and still no ones done what we were doing

it's true, I can't think of another software developer who bankrupted a state

Only one video game company put up a blood-soaked sock as collateral.

' 2 years later and still no ones done what we were doing'

Weird kinda delusion makes you make public statements like that, or sink your fortune into taking on WoW right out of the gate with a team of no MMO experience, or be a ball player who adds 'Gehrig' to his twitter handle

@williemayshayes

Gehrig is his son's name fwiw

Seriously?

Also, did KoA ever go on super sale on Steam or amazon or anywhere? I'd to actually try the game out now that all the shouting's done

he's just a really big gehrig fan, and i believe has used that handle forever on wow and message boards and stuff. it's probably the least offensive thing he's done.

A ha

diagnosed with cancer, and the fact that he doesn't want to talk specifics leads me to fear the worst :/

Game is on Steam, finally. Was on sale this weekend.

I mean, I don't even care about Schilling beyond schadenlols and I thought responding to "dude has cancer" with "plus his game came out" was cold

i took it as a pvmic but idk

It's a horrible diagnosis, but one of the things I've been curious all along is what the actual thing that effectively started all this downfall was like as a game.

I'll grant my juxtaposition could have been handled better.

Sort of. That one that actually came out was developed by another studio that got swallowed up by Shilling's studio during all this, and it was already mostly done. I believe they rebranded it to fit into their fictional universe, the main game of which never came out.

Really? IP acquisition is weird. I always thought that his studio led with the design and brought in all the nerdcult names to work on it. Like, this thing was a piece with the MMO.

http://deadspin.com/various-lowlights-from-curt-schillings-failed-38-studio-1732879364

Chas Pierce paying attention to this loony

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a47895/curt-schilling-senate-elizabeth-warren/

and Taibbi!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/curt-schilling-is-the-next-donald-trump-w435754

Curt Schilling...Mike Pence...is there a right-wing American fucknut called Pound, by any chance?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Ezra_Pound_1963b.jpg

in many ways the ur-fucknut

TY. Eric Morecambe behind EP, too.

hahaha is that actually Eric??

http://deadspin.com/detective-curt-schilling-is-on-the-case-of-the-hoboken-1787242420

next trump http://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2016/09/28/curt-schilling-run-president-haha-sure

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--JYqz9Ent--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/r7t7jjyzhcggacqjivbc.jpg

lmfao

he still hasn't deleted it

Gotta go on Twitter and thank him for the display name