According to multiple developers inside 38 studios this video is pretty old and a lot of work has been done since. I wonder when we'll see a current trailer.
@Seiki_sands Well like it or not the Government is involved in every business out there I'm aware of. They dictate you still pay taxes on whatever you make so you in turn are inedibly under their control so I don't see your point. Up until this point they didn't have any say so of how he made his game as far as content, just that he brought jobs. To make a jump to that being socialism I'm confused. If I'm mistaken please show me where I'm wrong, I'm not trying to win a pecking contest. I challenge anyone who was offered free money to support their start up business not to take it. Especially if you knew you could make a successful product based on a proven track record and a long history of successful people working for you. Curt just hasn't had a chance to release that product yet.
2) The reason I stated that info because there have been tripple A titles for much less than you suggested and were very successful, look at Minecraft. Video game journalism and the Media like to hype the term, like politicians like to toss around words like racist and terrorist when they are clearly not in context with the people they are speaking about. However I'm not trying to have a political debate.
3) Curt paid a large chunk out of pocket, its estimated between 30-50m of his own funds went into Reckoning on reoccurring credit for the studio. Yes EA also helped front some of that too. I guess everyone determines success differently. Curt stated he expected Reckoning to be a sleeper since he was working primarily on the MMO for so long. The #'s seem to say he managed to do better than he was expecting.
6) Differences in opinions on some things, but I also want to mitigate risk too. Any successful entrepreneur I've met does so buy buying a company or a commodity and lets them be successful at what they do and try to stay out of the way. Some people are more hands on and that's fine, I've just haven't seen them be as successful. In Curts case he was trying to do the whole entertainment company from the beginning. not just a MMO, but movies, toys, books, etc. So if I were in his shoes I probably would have hired the staff he did as well. If it was just to make a game then I would have gone a different path altogether.
@Seiki_sands wow dude, you are so misinformed, I don't know where to begin. True there could be some management issues. I share that opinion also, but without being inside the office I don't know. I speak of the payment issue below from personal experience. They haven't received 75 million YET, they have received 50M.The rest is in a safe holding account being used to fund the game for the next year. No tax money has been touched yet. Nor will it for over a yr worst case scenario, if at all. The money isn't all due at once, it's set up on a schedule over the next 8 yrs and is completely reasonable to make those payment & achieve their target audience. According to Michael Pachter, Video Game Analyst, Reckoning managed to sell at least a million copy's with over 30M in profits in it's 2 months so far. Not including sales from merchandise like the guide or soundtrack. There's no such # for Tripple A titles. Tripple A primarily just refers to a game that sells at least a million copy's. It doesn't matter if it has a $40M budget or $2,000 budget, etc. Anything more is your opinion or Media hype. They have a staff of ~450 people currently between their two offices, and they need another 150 before next year (read the contract). True they will need some assistance to fund the game in the long run, but for the next year+ they are ok. Like I said they should qualify for at least $8-16M for film credit tax whether you like it or not.THQ was funding BHG for a completely different game. When THQ let them go and a week from the doors closing on them for good 38 Studios bought them, used their engine, and completely redid all the art, characters, level design, animation, etc. Basically the only thing they kept was the engine for Reckoning. EA did publish the game, and helped 38 Studios a lot with their QA and marketing team. (which I'd argue was horrid, except the ME3 cross over.) There's a difference in government entitlement programs for the state and job creation funding which 38 Studios does qualify for and is entitled to receive, versus someone who just wants to stay at home watching Soap Operas and collecting welfare check. These people are actually building a product and offering a service. Different from a company whose been making bad products and failing for several years. 38 hasn't put out their main product yet. Reckoning was the 1st, but it wasn't from the ground up and it was rushed. The MMO was in the works since 2006. I think since they meet the other state requirements there is no hypocrisy there.... See my post below. The "Celebrity's" were brought on because they were the best at what they do, and Curt was mitigating his risk. If you look at the actual people making the game, they came from the most successful games out there (Blizzard, EQ1,2, etc) & have many track records of success. The team Curt's built are the best in the industry at what they do...
My big question to you guys who seem to be clueless and mad is have any of you served in the military before? How many times have you had missed pay checks for that, or had to be back paid? It happened to me at least 4-6 times in my carer. Yet that's not in the news, and when it happens to Curt Schillings company suddenly he's the evil bad guy. I had to wait 12-14 months for my GI bill to come through when I was in college and I was paying out of pocket. I got back paid for that, but no one through the Military or government under the guillotine.
@Lamesy @June-GS Reckoning was Always a Single player game. It used to be called Ascendant when it was under THQ. It was put out to bring awareness of the world of Amalur though.
@Tseng Not that I agree or disagree with you, however every company has an operating budget they work from. We don't know any details of what caused them to miss their payment other than about a week prior to them making it they were on track, and afterwards they were not. Supposedly the studio is on a revolving line of credit automatically every month that covers business expenses and payroll. So I suspect that account balance is kept about the same value every month at a certain range (like a credit card that gets paid off every month...) But in this case there was an extra random biannual fee that was millions added on top of that which was larger than the revolving credit that gets replenished. That sort of thing even happened to me in the military. I got back paid, but it took the military about 7 months. You don't see them on the news though. Even when I went to College my entitlement for my college loan from the military took almost a year to come in. I'm not making that up.
There's some ignorant posts in here regarding the studio. 38 Studios has been working on this MMO since mid/late 2006. That has never stopped or slowed down. They bought BHG right before THQ who owned them was about to close the doors on them, and 38 had BHG make Reckoning. The MMO is far superior than Reckoning in every way, but with a slightly different visual fidelity. It's also ginormous versus Reckoning. Some of us have already found ~50 named zones as of yet.
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