I’m from one of those Boston families that hears things around the courthouse, and other places. They told me a little while ago that Curt Schilling was going to lose all his money on this video game thing — it looks like has. They also said he might be serious legal trouble due to some financial improprieties (some funny business with the houses of employees of Studio 38). We’ll see if that comes to pass.
What’s clear is that he is a fuck-up and a clown, even relative to the standards of other Randroid parasites. My favorite of his claims is that some other chump would have pissed eight figures down this drain if soshulist Linc Chafee hadn’t put the kibosh on it:
Schilling also accused Chafee of failing to work with an investor who was willing to put $15 million to $20 million into the company to help it succeed. He said the investor walked away because of Chafee’s inaction.
Tbogg nails it:
Hey, what investor wouldn’t want to sink another $15 to 20 million into a video game company that had already burned through over $100 million in less than two years?
Isn’t it just like a winger to run things into the ground and blame it on someone else?
If only Chafee had clapped louder….
Keith
For reference, Rockstar Games burned through $100 million to produce Grand Theft Auto IV (and made over half a billion in sales). But then, the Housers *really* know what makes a good game.
And, oh, yeah, GTA IV consists of an entire city the size of New York (and based on it), with thousands of people going about their business within it, more than a hundred locations you can visit, including a car dealership and clothing stores, along with about twenty radio and TV stations you can watch/listen to, including DJs and sitcoms.
Martin
Burning $100M is par for the course in top game firms. However, they’re burning that money on proven franchises.
The funny business with the houses is that he told employees that the company would sell their homes for them as part of a relocation deal. Turns out the company didn’t do that, didn’t make the payments, and now the employees are learning that they’re in foreclosure and their credit rating has gone to shit.
Oh, and they have no jobs, too.
MikeBoyScout
Wait! What?
Damn! I was going to
investthrow away my money into the shilling enterprise.Litlebritdifrnt
How do you do that though? How do you actually spend $100 million in less than two years? I mean what the fuck were you spending it on?
satanicpanic
You liberals just don’t take responsibility for yourselves like conservatives do.
Quaker in a Basement
That’s a gambler mentality: Sure, I’ve been on a losing streak, but my luck is changing, I swear. I got a system, see? Just let me slide another week and I’ll pay you back.
robertdsc-PowerBook
@Keith:
And it’s an incredibly involving game. There are so many things to do other than what you mention.
I’ve completed it to 100% and had a great time doing so.
shortstop
@Martin: That was the rumor, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. Employees turned their homes over to Schilling and trusted him to sell them–without contracts, documentation, paper trails, or monitoring of mortgage payments? If this is true, these are the dumbest people on the face of the earth.
The Dangerman
@Litlebritdifrnt:
WHY do you do that though? He had a long career; he must have had a nice little nestegg. Why burn through it on a crap shoot? I understand the concept of must get more, but I also understand the concept of must protect against ending up fucked.
GxB
@Litlebritdifrnt: Hookers ‘n’ Blow
GxB
Check out comment #28 by Crosstimbers – should be disseminated far and wide.
dmsilev
@Litlebritdifrnt: It’s not unusual for a really big video game to cost that much. Basically, big video games involve creating a large and detailed game world, with a whole bunch of things going on. You need a cast of thousands to pull that off. Artists to create every last square inch of world, writers to populate it with interesting events, programmers, am army of testers to try to make sure the whole thing actually works, etc. The cost adds up fast.
Coco Laboy
@GxB: He should have designed the game around that and got Charlie Sheen to endorse it
Keith
@The Dangerman: At a minimum, he should have been working on a baseball-related game (and hoped EA would buy him out), since at least he knows something about it. But instead he decided to produce some kind of fantasy RPG…he might as well have started up a restaurant. At least he would have had a strong chance of losing a few million dollars instead. Hell, he would have lost less money actually spending it all on hookers/blow.
JPL
Free Enterprise = Privatize profits, Socialize losses. It’s a win, win because……………
DougJ
@robertdsc-PowerBook:
Everyone says it’s a good game.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
I’m sure Chafee feel just awful that it’s all his fault Curt Schilling might not be worth tens of millions anymore.
DougJ:
The story and script were by R. A. Salvatore, who’s a known progressive and Kossack.
Strange bedfellows.
.
Michael57
As a Yankee fan, I still respected most of the Sox, but I always thought that Schilling was a total douchebag. When people would rag me about A-Rod, I would rag them about Curt. So glad he’s back in the damn news!
gnomedad
@GxB:
Or they are Tea Party sad sacks who imagine that if the Job Creators were given one more tax cut, they would be deputized to get in on the duping, cheating, and destroying.
Yutsano
@The Dangerman: He was a huge Evercrack/WoW player and he wanted to create his own bigger badder version because of WOW! Plus he’s fucking Curt Schilling, the man farts unicorns and rainbows! Just ask him!
The Dangerman
@Keith:
I haven’t monitored the details; it wasn’t a baseball game?! He might be the biggest asshole ever.
JGabriel
@Martin:
So Schilling made committments and didn’t keep them? He lied?
Sounds like a Mitt Romney Republican.
.
PreservedKillick
The company was apparently more than $100MM in the red.
You have to wonder if Schilling has even one thin red dime left to rub together, especially since he’s probably personally liable for all the unpaid wages. If he doesn’t end up actually, you know, in jail before this is over.
At the end of the day, that is what is most mystifying to me – any sane company would have shut down well before NOT PAYING THE EMPLOYEES.
And Schilling is, quite simply, nuts if he thought that anyone was going to invest in that streaming pile. They’d simply wait for the inevitable to happen, as it quickly did, and pick up whatever assets they wanted for pennies on the dollar (as they soon shall.)
Truly impressive mismanagement.
JPL
@Michael57: How many times has A-Rod had a bloody sock? Now A-Rod can claim that he’s a few threesomes and Schilling probably thinks that means something else.
I really hate folks like Schilling who think the Government owes them a living. What does he drive a cadillac or something.
JPL
@JGabriel: free enterprise.. free enterprise
PreservedKillick
@JGabriel:
IIRC, the company paid the mortgages while it was trying to sell the houses.
The houses didn’t sell, which would not have been a problem, except the company stopped paying (they also stopped paying for health insurance and actual, you know, salaries, too).
Then it was a problem.
dr. bloor
@efgoldman:
Actually, the citizens of MA look like a genius for electing a governor with a pulse and functional cortex. Don Carcieri might have been the only governor north of the Mason-Dixon line dumb enough to bite on Schilling’s money hole.
Raven
My brother went to high school with him, asshole then and asshole now. Xin Loi douche.
BGinCHI
When government invests in roads and education it’s a waste of money, socialism, a burden on taxpayers.
When the government invests on a video game enterprise captained by an uneducated ex-athlete who railed against government spending, it’s an investment.
It’s the gap between those two statements that haunts our national discourse and is the reason we are headed toward the dustbin/shitter of history.
Violet
@shortstop:
Exactly. If they did this, they are idiots. Now, if they’ve got signed documents saying the company was going to do this, and the company failed to do it, that’s something else entirely.
A company selling a house for an employee if the company requires them to move isn’t unheard of. My dad was relocated from one city to another city with the company he worked for and the company sold their house for them. This was decades ago, though, so I don’t don’t if that kind of thing is still done. I know it used to be done.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@JPL:
I think that there’s a point where a certain type of person accumulates enough wealth and power that they expect government (and us proles) to bend to their will. They expect tax breaks to locate their businesses somewhere, public money to back and build their pet projects that they siphon everything out of for themselves, workers who will work at slave wages and so on.
They have POWER and dammit, they want to use it to their advantage. Never mind that they are asking for welfare and free banking services, they have money so they deserve it!
They usually get it too, at least until they do a Schilling.
BGinCHI
@Raven: I assume you are posting from the Five Eight show.
Violet
From an article on Boston.com, dated today:
So they hired a relocation company. You’d think there would be some kind of paperwork and contracts associated with that.
Raven
@BGinCHI: We bailed, it’s hot’n mofo and I don’t go without my doggies. We watched Emma instead! Bitch gettin old.
Roger Moore
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Easy; it’s probably easier to burn through that much money when you’re on a deadline than if you have lots of time. When you’re on a deadline, you throw money at problems to make them go away. It can work, but it’s risky.
JPL
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I agree and I think it’s only fair that they pee in a cup for every 500 dollars they want. In fact I think a daily pee is necessary because they could be having wine and martinis at home. If they can afford wine and martinis then they certainly can afford to do without govmint help. Is there a test for caviar?
Raven
@Roger Moore: If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter!
Litlebritdifrnt
Just been watching the Romney brothers on Conan. Can I ask a question? What do the Romney brothers do for a living? I have never actually seen that reported anywhere? Do they live off Daddy’s money or do they actually work for a living?
Roger Moore
@Keith:
In fairness, Schilling has been in the gaming business for quite a while. He got hooked on Advanced Squad Leader something like 20 years ago and wound up buying out the company that developed it when they decided to stop; AFAIK he was moderately successful doing it. My impression is that his bigger problem is that he bit off more than he could chew, not that he was a completely hopeless novice.
JGabriel
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Whether or not they work, they still live off Daddy’s money. Most jobs don’t pay enough to afford the lifestyle they’re accustomed to.
.
Jamey
I still haven’t seen Schilling’s long-form birth certificate…
JPL
@Litlebritdifrnt: As real patriots they have been campaigning for their Dad because then they know America will be great again. In fact in 2008 they made mention their job was more important than serving overseas… They are Sarah’s patriots.
PurpleGirl
@Litlebritdifrnt: One of them (not sure which one) has his own hedge fund firm, in partnership with Daddy and someone else from Bain (I think). Who knows about the others.
JPL
@Jamey: duh…he is white and we don’t ask that of the white folks.. Please get with the program.
Roger Moore
@Litlebritdifrnt:
They work trying to grow daddy’s big pot of money.
PurpleGirl
@PurpleGirl: From a site called wiki.answers:
Mitt Romney has five sons, Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben, and Craig.
Tagg Romney is a Managing Partner at Solamere Capital. He co-founded the company and has previously worked as Chief Marketing Officer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, VP of onfield marketing at Reebok, and Director of Strategic Planning at Elan Pharmaceuticals. Tagg founded and subsequently sold Season Perks. Tagg worked for each of his father’s three political campaigns. He also worked for several years as a consultant at both Monitor Group and McKinsey and Co. Tagg graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Economics from Brigham Young University and earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Matt Romney works as Vice President of Strategy and Investments at Excel Realty Holdings. He was previously a Project Manager for Microsoft Corporation and held marketing and project management positions for Polaroid Corporation and Lavastorm, Inc. Matt received a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University.
Josh Romney is a Real Estate Developer and owner of Romney Ventures. Previously he worked as an Acquisition Analyst for Intercontinental Real Estate. He has considered going into politics and currently serves as an advisor to Utah Governor Gary Herbert. He also helped his dad with his 2008 Presidential Campaign. Like his older brothers, he got his BA from Brigham Young University and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ben Romney is a Medical Student who also got his Bachelors Degree from Brigham Young University.
Craig is an Advertising Music Producer. He got his Bachelors Degree from Brigham Young University as well.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_kind_of_jobs_does_Mitt_Romney's_son_have#ixzz1yfbhQgd5
Darkrose
@JGabriel:
And a cringe-inducing writer. And I say this as someone who owns the first few Drizzt books.
PurpleGirl
OT: Today is what would have been Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. Go to Google for a neat animated logo in honor of Turing.
Anoniminous
@Litlebritdifrnt:
At $136,986.30 a day.
(The quote isn’t exact so the money pissed-away-per-day isn’t right because it’s hard work going out and finding out facts, true facts, unalterably unquestionable facts and figuring out which of ’em are untrue facts … and math. MATH! Too. Also.)
Mr Stagger Lee
What Sean, Rush, O’Reilly, couldn’t hook a brother up when he was on the hook?? Where was the invisible hand or the ghost of Ayn Rand? Will Curtis Maximus write a mea culpa book and become a born again socialist?
Roger Moore
@JPL:
‘
Say what you will about Sarah Palin, you can’t hold that against her. Track put his ass on the line in Iraq, and there’s no hint that she pulled strings or anything to try to protect him.
Walker
@Litlebritdifrnt:
He was working on a “WoW killer”. Those are 300 million dolars before launch (and before you see a dime of revenue). You do notdo these without heavy guaranteed backing. Such as Bioware had for SWTOR; and look how that is turning out.
PurpleGirl
@Roger Moore: IIRC, the boy was in some amount of local trouble and it was advised that he join the army instead of spending time in jail. A time-honored low-income American tradition for troublesome sons.
Raven
@PurpleGirl: Smile when you say that.
“Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land . . .”
amk
@Roger Moore: Didn’t “track” run off to military to avoid some police problem in alaaassska ?
ETA: PurpleGirl beat me to it.
PurpleGirl
@Raven: Yes, I smile at the thought. My brother spoke to the Air Force recruiter before starting college, thinking that if he didn’t succeed with college, the Air Force was better than the Army. Lots of boys made such plans back during Vietnam.
Walker
@DougJ:
It was a pretty good game. The problem is that is not where the money went. That game was a money raiser for the MMO they were working on.
There is a reason Epic “bought” Big Huge Games (the division of 38 Studios that made Kingdoms of Amalur), , and not the rest of 38 studios (e.g the Rhode island branch working on the MMO). And by bought I mean “immediately hired everyone in that studio after they were laid off and made a new studio).
Raven
@PurpleGirl: Yea, fuckers got TDY pay ALL the damn time!
JPL
@Roger Moore: I definitely agree with you but because of stupid pranks he had a choice of jail or the army. He made the wise choice. It’s not as though he signed up willingly though.
PurpleGirl
@Raven: My brother saw some time in Vietnam and a little time in the Aleutians but spent most his time at Clarke AFB in the Philipines.
Raven
@JPL: I had the same choice and it was willingly. That’s what a choice is.
Raven
@PurpleGirl: Getting TDY pay and hangin in Olangapo City! :)
PurpleGirl
On the topic: At the rate Schilling was spending money, I think another 20 or 30 million wouldn’t have lasted all that long. Maybe 2 or 3 months. And he’d be back in the same situation of needing money and the MMO wouldn’t have been finished or ready for players.
JPL
@Raven: I definitely understand that, the problem was that his mom didn’t protect him. She couldn’t. It does not diminish his service, it diminishes hers.
catclub
“I spent a fortune on liquor, fast cars and fast women. The rest I wasted.”
Is one of my favorite quotes.
Darkrose
@DougJ: The one person I know who played it said it was good. The timing was bad, though, especially for starting a new franchise; a lot of people were either still playing Skyrim, or waiting for Mass Effect 3 and Diablo III.
Raven
@JPL: Yea and all that “thank you for your service” shit is just that, shit.
Pick up “When Trumpets Fade” about the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest. Very interesting look at “bravery”.
Darkrose
@Walker: As soon as the words “WoW Killer” were mentioned, their funding should have been yanked on grounds of stupidity.
alex milstein
An article about Schilling in Business Insider says he is:
“…blaming the government for refusing to give the company tax credits…”
I love the GOP mentality. Government assistance is OK when I need it for my business, but not OK for someone who is let go from my business when I screw things up.
Walker
@Darkrose:
I don’t disagree.
Jay C
OK, a serious question: while it certainly sounds like Curt Schilling is likely to be extraodinarily full of crap about his boondoggle “just needing another $20MM” or whatever to make it: can anyone say that he really IS wrong? I know absolutely zippedy-squat about the VG industry, but on general business principles, it’s rarely likely that a properly-run development project will run through it’s budget up to 100%, and then need just 110 or 115% to hit it big. Or is the gaming biz different?
catclub
@Raven: The post WWII GI Bill was an anomaly. The Bonus Army was a response to the usual treatment.
Which later famous General had his first taste of ‘combat’ against them?
ETA:Eisenhower, Patton and MacArthur were involved in the attack on the Bonus Army.
Mistreating ex-soldiers may not be unique to the US, but it is endemic.
sdhays
According to this Ars Technica article (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/06/schilling-says-hes-tapped-out-after-38-studios-implosion/), the man doesn’t even understand why people would suggest that he’s a hypocrite:
Smaller government = government taxing other people to give to me to put “right back into the local economy”
What. An. Asshole.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@alex milstein:
Hey! They’re rich and should be allowed to gamble with others money and lives! They need to make more money…
to bribe the politicians for more money.
We’re only voters, we aren’t worth much to them except at election time. In fact, the more the politicians and wealthy assholes discourage voters, the more control they can exert over the system via the smaller pool of voters that they need to influence.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@JPL: FTFY since I’m such a nice guy.
I might note that Americans who are not the sons of state governors don’t get offered such good deals.
Mnemosyne
I realize that Lincoln Chafee will never become a Democrat, but he does seem to have become genuinely independent from the Republican Party, which is nice to see. I liked how he told the right-wingers who were upset that Rhode Island had a state “holiday” tree and not a “Christmas tree” to go fuck themselves.
shortstop
@Forum Transmitted Disease: Was it dealing meth? I thought he took out the entire school district’s buses or somesuch.
redshirt
Some advice, RI: Just open a casino in Providence to pay for this loan. Easy money.
GregB
Schilling is making Lenny Dykstra look like Gordon Gekko.
Dexter's new approach
“Free market” defeats Schilling, taxpayers.
He’s gone bust and and took more tax $s than he ever paid – and he’ll never make enough going forward to be a net tax payor. I guess that makes him a worthless parasite.
(“It hurts doesn’t it? Your hopes dashed, your dreams down the toilet…”)
Normally I feel bad when a small business fails. But he learned a valuable lesson: it’s hard to bootstrap to success even with $50m and celebrity leverage if you’re not that smart.
isildur
@Jay C: It’s not really likely that the game only needed another $20M. In game development, money buys time. You’re paying for staff, and that’s it. When you go through $100M in two years, another $20M is going to get you about four and a half months of additional development time.
If you’re shipping a major AAA online title, you need about three months to do a final polish pass and get your launch infrastructure set up. What that means is that you should have a working, playable, feature-complete game, with all its core content in place, before those three months start.
If they had that, all they’d have to do is show the product to any major publisher and it would be snapped up in a heartbeat. Publishers love when someone else sinks $100M into a project and then turns the project over to them on the cheap.
Since that didn’t happen, I have to assume they were nowhere near shipping the game. If I had to guess, I’d say they were a year out, minimum. Things I’ve heard from people in the industry suggest that’s about right.
What was actually happening: if you can get $20M, you buy three or four months of time to round up more investors. It’s not going to get you across the finish line, but it’s going to give you enough gas to keep driving a little further.
When a project goes off the rails like this, it’s always a result of incompetence on the part of the producers. You can make a WoW-killer, and you can even do it for $100M, but you need great designers and really competent, focused producers to keep everyone focused. Most game studios are lucky to have even one great designer or competent producer.
(eta: I’m speaking from the experience of having been both a lead designer and a producer in the game industry.)
Shalimar
How would another $15-20 million have helped the company succeed? If it’s true that they were at least a year away from completing their big MMO, then that amount of money wasn’t going to get them close to pulling in the revenue to match their expenses.
johnny gentle famous crooner
Not that Schilling isn’t a clown, but let’s at least keep in mind that 300 employees all lost their jobs when the company went down.
There’s a big difference between “Schilling is a moron and a shitty businessman” and “Ha ha! Your stupid company got pwned!”
Not that people here are making the latter type of comment, but I’m just mentioning it.
Villago Delenda Est
“WoW killer” is a blurb on a PowerPoint slide you show to potential investors. Sort of the same trick that Qui-Gon Gin used on Watto. You appeal to their greed to get what you want…more money for development.
The problem is, WoW is an anomaly. As Isildur points out above, you need to have great designers and seriously competent producers. Blizzard was fortunate to have that. Having great designers is not enough…that’s what crippled Star Wars Galaxies. They didn’t have the production talent to go with their world class design team.
The thing is, players know all this. But people on the outside of the MMO ghetto don’t get it.
isildur
When I say ‘WoW-killer’, I don’t really mean it literally, and anyone who says they can create that game is lying — to you, or to themselves. I don’t know which category Schilling falls into, but probably the latter; fans who have never worked in the industry have strange ideas about how games get made, and what makes them successful.
To me, ‘WoW-killer’ means you’re making a $50M+ triple-A MMO that you believe will attract enough of an audience to pay for itself in the first year or two. There are a lot of people out there who have burned out on WoW. You can draw them into your game by promising them an experience like WoW, only newer and more exciting. As well, there are a lot of people who aren’t even in the MMO audience yet, and if you can grow the market to just a small percentage of those people, you can make back your investment.
I’ve got friends who’ve worked on, or are currently working on, making these games — Star Wars: TOR, Rift, and WildStar — and they are a viable business model. But you can’t fuck around, because if you go over budget or over schedule, the chances of you making that massive initial investment back are slim.
And if you’ve spent $100M and can’t show a real product to potential investors, you’re fucked. Because that’s more than enough money to get a playable, fun prototype running and out the door into the hands of testers.
auntie beak
@Shalimar: the current winger line in r.i. is that it’s chaffee’s fault the company went under because he bad-mouthed it to potential investors, of whom i’m sure there were many thousands.
Lurker
@DougJ – if you’re interested, the wife of one of the screwed-over families wrote a letter about what went down from the artists’ perspective:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/172303/38_Studios_Spouse_speaks_out.php
shortstop
@isildur: @isildur: Very informative. Thanks.
Dylan
That’s hell of a lot of cash… How can someone spend so much money! Curt Schilling should of hired someone to help him out with the project. You can’t just decide to make a video game with a budget! Spend it wisely.
Dylan,
Gaming Author
Spin Palace