Friday, May 25, 2012

Curt Schilling's Gaming Company May Default

Boston Globe:
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’m stunned, and I’m heartbroken,’’ said R.A. Salvatore, a Leominster fantasy author who was a consultant to 38 Studios and whose son worked at the company. “This is one of the best teams I’ve ever seen assembled. They were doing amazing work.’’
The company, which employed more than 400 full-time workers and contractors, moved to Providence in April 2011 and by February of this year had released its first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
But 38 Studios missed its May 1 payment of $1.1 million to Rhode Island and did not have enough cash to meet its payroll on May 15. To stay afloat, it asked Rhode Island for more money, applying for $8.4 million in film-tax credits, which it could then sell to other companies seeking to lower their tax bills.
WTF?  Why would a state guarantee loans for a former star baseball player who made something like $114 million during his career?  Didn't Lenny Dykstra have any ideas the state could fund?   The '93 Phillies don't look like a team to invest with off the field.  That is unless John Kruk comes up with an idea.


1 comment:

  1. I would like to share this, Gaming Industry today is one of the fastest growing entertainment industries. Game testing is a process of quality control of the software used in games.
    Indium uses industry-standard testing methods and quality assurance processes to meticulously testing gaming software. Our team keeps an eye out for the bugs that can potentially crash or break the game. We would like to break it before the users do! Fatal errors and failures in the game software is what our game testing team looks out for be it in the Alpha testing phase of the game or the release testing phase. Our game testers build a bug database for each game and keep updating that with every release. It is critical that the bugs are logged in a manner that can easily be replicated by the game developers - a key value is the comprehensiveness of the bug reports from our team especially during the alpha testing phase of the lifecycle.

    ReplyDelete