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[HE-Cooper]

38 Studios, who saw some reasonable success by purchasing Big Huge Games and shipping Kingdoms of Amalur, appear to have fallen to the money sink that is online game development. They had an MMO in development for a number of years using Unreal wired into Bigworld (daunting task), and after a 75 million dollar loan from Rhode Island, an initial private investor round of funding, and even 400k sales of Kingdoms of Amalur, appear to be insolvent.

It's hard making games, online games especially, but there seems to more failures then ever nowadays, but boy is this a big one. We wish them the best of luck, and hope that the hundreds of employees find jobs soon. We have a slot for a senior C++ engineer, so we'll make some calls and try to at least bail one guy out.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/17/38-studios-doesnt-make-payroll/

[LastJudge]

that's sad

I enjoyed Kingdoms of Amalur

[TGSRofar]

Sad news indeed. 
I have been looking forward to see what 38 Studios came out with since they formed and announced their project.

[JMurdick]

Very sad, yes.  380 people out of work.  However, they fell into the same trap that Cheyenne Mountain did.  BigWorld themselves told Cheyenne that Unreal was not a good renderer to try and tie into their server architecture, but Cheyenne went ahead and tried to do it anyway.  And failed.  38 Studios tried to do the same thing and also failed.

Course, look at their "walkthrough" video on YouTube.  They spent a TON of money on art.  Wow.

[Stadi_Thompson]

380 people out of work.

That's the problem right there, you can do the same game with 38 skilled people. All comes down poor staffing IMO, I have seen it first hand at studios so doesn't surprise me at all. If you can't make an mmo with 75 million you are in the wrong field and you hired the wrong people to do the job.

[Dragorth]

Unfortunately, reading through the different discussions on the matter, the money they took from the government was stipulate to increase the number of jobs in the area. Now, they did have way to any artist for the game, but they could have made many more games with the amount of people they had.

Still, there first game was pretty fun, and I am a fan of R.A. Salvatore, so we will continue to see good things from these folks, just not from this company.

[ProjectDiomedes]

It seems that often having large amounts of money available is more of a trap than a blessing, though it's a trap I wish I were in right now  .  When there are large amounts of cash available a lot of it tends to get wasted or lost in an over build up.  Even with successful launches like SWTOR you can see where at stages in the process huge amounts of resources were wasted because the teams grew too large too fast.  In reading the developer blogs for SWTOR they refer to the days when they were hiring so fast that noone knew what the other people were doing.  And frankly that project could have gone down the tubes very easily at several stages because of that "cushion" of cash and the gold rush fever it tends to strike in developers. 

In the end, it just goes to show that no matter how much money a project does or doesn't have it all comes down to smart use of the assets.  Bioware adjusted, 38 studios didn't.  Having money does increase the margin of error though that a development project has.  But to me, if you have more than 10 million and you fail to at least reach Beta, it's just bad resource management.    Actually in my opinion if you can't get to an early beta, or at least a late stage alpha,  on more than a million you probably should never be in charge of a project again, but that's my opinion