Big Huge Wednesdays
The emergency meeting between 38 Studios executives and the state of Rhode Island took place last week, and saw 38 Studios asking for yet more money from the state. Things were looking pretty grim at that point; the company still couldn’t make its loan payment to the state, and was also unable to pay its employees. Oh, and the director of the Rhode Island Ecomonic Development Corporation resigned over all the controversy. Other notable resignations included 38 Studios CEO Jen MacLean and senior VP John Blakely.
38 Studios was able, earlier this week, to make their first payment to the state, but news also broke yesterday of layoffs at the studio, which were confirmed by the governor of Rhode Island himself, who also urged the studio to try and secure private capital funding rather than look to the state for another handout.
The governor also let slip that the studio’s upcoming RPG, still known as Project Copernicus, will be released in June of 2013. One supposes that the governor should be taken at his word here, since it’s arguable that Rhode Island now effectively owns Amalur…which at least one analyst estimates to be worth about $20 million. Of course, this same analyst evidently thinks that Star Wars: The Old Republic fizzled, so take his words with a few grains of salt.
38 Studios, for their part, have released a short flyover video of some of the scenes that will feature in Copernicus, and have also posted a lengthy Q&A with company founder Curt Schilling.
Overall, the state of things is hovering somewhere between “uncertain” and “grim”. For now, at least, the studio will keep moving along, and hopefully will be able to start paying its employees again soon. And work evidently continues on Copernicus, which — should it see release — will hopefully be a source of solid revenue for the company.
But a lot can happen in a year. And fly-over videos don’t count for much.
I saw that video a few days ago on YouTube. Looks nice graphically, and (sorry to disagree, WtF) counts for a lot considering prior nothing had been shown. Showing something is the first step to being taken seriously in game development when you’re a bastard’s bastard.
The problem is that if you look at all the MMOs out there they’re just different vehicles for telling the same story. By vehicle I mean program and by story I mean gameplay. Someone on Gamasutra recently commented that the MMO genre was only beginning to touch on the possibilities afforded by a massively multiplayer environment (paraphrasing). If Copernicus doesn’t do anything new, -really- new, it’s going to be a dollar-sink with at best short-term glory and the studio will fold.
“Really good plot” isn’t enough. Neither is Amalur-like combat, or an open world, or classless players, or any of that tired old jazz. The game needs to offer things that players will just completely zone out into. Not minigames, but a level of depth and gameplay specialization that appeals to different types of players and to some degree allows them to ignore aspects of the game that -don’t- appeal to them. Accessibility for the novice, depth for the hard core and diversity for the wide array of potential player affinities.
So far it sounds like, “Yes, we fucked up, but give us one more chance because we have something great in the works.” The problem is how much money, how many studios, and how many years of trying have passed without a game emerging as respectably profitable and persistent within the MMO genre. It’s starting to become the holy grail of game design; a fool’s errand.
This update is called “Big Huge Wednesdays”, but haven’t actually heard what’s happening at Big Huge Games these days, only at their parent company.
None of this matters any more, unfortunately.