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This story reminds me of ION Storm [1], John Romero's cash rich baby that failed miserably with Daikatana. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Storm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana
Although the moral there is Warren Spector is a far better game creator than John Romero.
Seems like incredibly poor budgeting given that they had $150M and couldn't deliver even a limited version of the game. Maybe I'm underestimating the costs somehow, but you could easily pay pretty high salaries for 100+ people's time over a few years of development with that kind of money. I wonder what they did with it?
I'm guessing this will involve unaffordable office space.
Also 4 nice offices in non-cheap locals.
Who could've guessed? The game designer suddenly gets $150m and rather than iterating, he goes for the dream. I looked him up and he apparently has produced AAA games before so what's the deal here? Shooting for the moon on the first go in any software development processes is a recipe for disaster.
I'm guessing you haven't played a little series called Wing Commander?
The fact that any bank considered lending to a tiny company like this with no revenue stream is actually a positive sign. As for pledging all their "assets", that is completely standard. They have no assets to speak of - their "IP" is 100% worthless without future sales, which will never happen if the game doesn't get released. And further, because the money was raised from crowdfunding, the only equity holders that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing this will involve unaffordable office space.
Yeah so I did some research, there's 250+ employees at the subsidiary foundry 42, which would indicate far more than 100 employees to pay for cloud imperium. If it's 400 people or something working at that company, burning through 150 million starts to sound more possible. Also 4 nice offices in non-cheap locals.
This time, the Internet is invited to opine, and they're shocked (shocked!) that the business of game development requires dodgy financial deals a lot of the time.
It's not nearly as bad as they make it seem. Loans/debt are a completely healthy source of financing.
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Excepted it wasn't planned like that.
Source? Not all loans are bad, it wouldn't make sense to plan on never taking a loan.
The projects was always hailed as one of the big crowdfunding break and nothing indicates they considered borrowing to finance the project given the massive amount of money they got and the time estimates they posted.
By all means, check for yourself.
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…
I know SC initial funding is unprecedented, but is taking out what amounts to a line of credit really that uncommon? It doesn't necessarily mean the initial 150M has dried up -> thus the sky just may not be falling?
The terms of the loan we're really, really unfavorable. They essentially pledged every piece of IP they have to get the loan. It's not the kind of loan you take if your company is healthy and has easy access to financing.
A bank that gives out loans to a failing company with collateral that is worthless if the company fails doesn't seem that smart.