Curt Schilling Fires Entire Staff At 38 Studios 137
redletterdave writes "On Thursday, former Boston Red Sox pitcher and tech entrepreneur Curt Schilling fired his entire staff at 38 Studios, his Rhode Island-based video game company, leaving more than 300 employees without jobs because the company couldn't repay its debt to the state. 38 Studios failed to pay Rhode Island's economic development agency $1.1 million, which was due last week, and also failed to meet payroll for its staff in both its Providence office and its Maryland subsidiary, Big Huge Games."
The company's recent action RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, sold 1.2 million copies — which would have been great if they hadn't needed to sell 3 million to break even. An article at Massively goes through some of the lessons the video game industry needs to learn from this situation.
Re:Needed to sell 3M copies to break even? (Score:5, Informative)
>IOW a copy to one out of ever 100 living Americans?
Hello? There is this place called the rest of the world. It's a place where americans don't live. There are lots of us.
Re:Aww poop (Score:4, Informative)
This instance isn't quite as bad, because it's only the people of Rhode Island who were screwed. Maybe next time they'll elect a better governor.
They already did - the current governor was against the 38 Studios deal from the get-go. It's one of the reasons he's going to let the studio just die instead of pursue the fallacy of sunk costs.
Unfortunately he's still stuck with the fallout from the idiots who did give $75 million to a company trying to enter a saturated market with no actual shipping products. (The deal predated Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.)