It's worth noting how much of a commercial disaster Otherside Entertainment is as a company.
Let's have a sober look:
- OS owners/management had to invest a substantial sum to get the company going. The UA kickstarter most definitely didn't pay all their bills in the time before publishers started to jump in.
- Last fall, they were compelled to pour $3.5 million into the company in order to pay to finish UA and meet contractual obligations like making a console version because 505 would sue them otherwise (see my earlier posts on that topic)
- OS didn't earn one dollar since it was founded. The little cash UA generated all went to 505. (oh, sorry, of course there was Underworld Overloard...)
- They have no other games or projects in the pipeline other than SS3 for which last month they lost their publisher
- Even if a new publisher is found, completing SS3 is going to take at least another 18 months (according to their own overoptimistic estimate that after about 2 years the game is "more than halfway completed")
- They pissed off the entire community with UA to a point that no one trusts them anymore and people "gleefully await our demise" (their own words)
https://forums.otherside-e.com/t/otherside-entertainment-please-do-not-do-ss3/9840/9
Bad news for them is they will never find a new publisher for SS3:
- From public filings, we know Starbreeze gave them about $7 million so far (link in a recent post of mine) - after Starbreeze pulled out, OS has to pay all of that back (wondering who would ever make such a stupid deal??? But that's another story...)
- To make SS3, they need at least $15 million to pay back Starbreeze and pay for the development of the other half of the game (if they are honest about the current state), plus marketing.
- So that's $15 million to be earned, plus 20% for the publisher (a standard margin in publishing contracts), plus bug-fixing and after-sales support. How many copies would SS3 have to sell just to break even? (remember, Steam gets a cut and there may be a launch discount)
- And although we all love it, let's be honest: This franchise has been a commercial failure. Both SS1 and SS2 lost money. SS2 sold just 80,000 copies.
- Any publisher who would seriously entertain to jump into this doomed sh*t would almost certainly demand that OS owners/management pay a significant amount - millions probably - of the remaining development out of their own pockets. Given how much money they already lost, it's hard to believe there will be much appetite to do that.
There is no business case to keep this company going. At some point, it will sink in that OS is nothing more than a cash-burning machine, a bottomless pit.
Starbreeze realized it and walked away. Who is going to be so dumb and pick this up now?
Mark my words: Spector and colleagues aren't going to fund any part of SS3 themselves. They'd rather mothball the company. Once they run out of other people's money, they'll walk away.
