I don't know if anyone has been following what has been going on with 38 Studios lately or if anyone even knows who 38 Studios are, but if that's the case I'll give a quick run down of events. 38 Studios is the publishing/developing house behind the somewhat successful Kingdoms of Amalur RPG game owned by former baseball great Curt Schilling. Schilling was presented numerous locations where to set up his company and he ended up going with Rhode Island who invested hundreds of millions of tax payer money into his start up with the intention of his company hiring many people and bringing some prosperity to the state. Everything was looking great after they released Kingdoms of Amalur in February of this year. The game got solid review scores and was a commercial success for them. It didn't completely cover the start-up costs and return on investments costs put into the company but it was a start. Then it started to all go down-hill for them. Apparently some of that investment money was squandered or embezzled (that is unclear but there is an investigation going on regarding that possibility right now) they couldn't pay their debts and the studio declared bankruptcy and the state of Rhode Island is basically claiming all their assets as repayment for the massive investment essentially shafting the several hundred employees who went without pay over the last month. Many of the employees have been hired by other game companies at this point, Epic Games even started a new wing out of many of the Big Huge Games (bought by 38 studios) developers called Epic Baltimore. Anyway all that reading aside a wife of an ex-38 Studios employee wrote a fairly touching letter and sent it out to various media sources. It's pretty sick stuff when you read it. It's a long read but worth reading for anyone thinking this kind of stuff can't happen to them in the work place regardless of what industry you go into. [continue] [/continue]
Wow. I cried. Not because of this alone, but because this touches so close to home for me. Mine and my family's life got turned upside down because of **** like this an it took us almost 10 years to recover from it. It's ****ing bullshit what industry can do for the people who do all their dirty work for them. I guarantee all of those execs suffered minimal financial setbacks compared to what this family went through. It just pisses me off that there aren't more policies and regulations to make sure that things like this can't happen. And **** it all, Reckoning wasn't even a very good game...
This is a very sad and unfortunate thing to have happen, but it's good to see companies like Epic stepping in to help most of the families who were affected by this debacle. Epic just got +rep'd.
You take that back. I'm just glad to see Epic picking up some of the slack and giving some people their jobs back.
Reckoning was the child of Big Huge Games so its good that most of them got hired into Epic. 38 studios original project was the MMORPG copernicus which will now go unfinished as will the Amalur 2 game that was in pre-production at BHG.
I'd rather not. I was so bored of that game (story, mechanics, appeal, everything) about three hours in I couldn't be bothered to play it again.