Company News Rumor: Strategy First about to go under?

Tags: Richard Therrien; Strategy First

Someone using a nickname <b>Miss Money Penny</b> (probably one of the ex-employees) has posted in <a target=_blank href=http://www.gonegold.com/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=007734>this thread</a> at <a target=_blank href=http://www.gonegold.com>Gone Gold</a> forum that <a target=_blank href=http://www.strategyfirst.com>Strategy First</a>, the publishers of such games as <i>Prince of Qin</i>, <i>Mistmare</i>, <i>Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire</i>, and the recently announced <i>JA3</i> and <i>JA3D</i>, is about to follow Interplay into the state of non-existence:
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Strategy First is about to go under.
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Gone from 120 employees to less than ten in less than a year...
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It is too bad. Even though sfi totally reamed the gaming community, they still brought great strategy games that would never have seen the market. I guess they messed up one game launch too many.
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Recent departures:
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<li>Director of Marketing: Steve Milburn</li>
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<li>PR and Marketing Manager: Kelly Ekins</li>
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<li>Development: SFI in three rounds of layoffs got rid of their ENTIRE development team … Disciples, ORB, Jagged Alliance.</li>
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Staff has not been paid in 1 month and a half.
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Nope, no axe to grind. Spent a lot of years, a lot of effort with these guys and they need some help. Nothing political, no bad blood, just keeping you informed as to the realities of this business.
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SFI is as close to an Indie publisher as you are going to get.
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<b>Richard Therrien</b>, one of the owners of SFI, has replied in <a target=_blank href=http://www.strategyfirst.com/forum/cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=47;t=000064>this topic</a> in the Strategy First forums:
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<ul>SFI is not going under and I have no clue who this guy is.</ul>
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He has, however, ignored the question from the same thread regarding the lack of payment to the maker of Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire.

 

In related news, Paradox Entertainment has dumped SFI.

 

To quote myself from earlier.
Heres a very informative post by Richard on the Bear-Pit forums:

I don't know who that fellow (he or she) may be. It just happen that we had no 'female' employee that was let go in quite a while, especially not one that went to Vancouver.

The only truth to this is that indeed, we had to scale somewhat down due to a number of reasons:

Firstly, we have lost a number of employees to Ubi Soft who have been raiding us and to EA who recently opened a development studio in Montreal.

Secondly, we have been moving away from fully using third party distributors to move our products around so that we will be going direct with a number of accounts (read retail stores) in the future.

The second reason has us experiencing a short-term cash crunch which is resolving itself now but that had an impact on what was left of the teams after number one above had happened.

Since we wanted to move along with both JA and Disciples, we found a studio that had the talent to get the projects started in cooperation with me and the SFI production team. For me, it was out of the question to wait 'till we had two or three fully experienced teams on board to get started, the delay since the last games had been long enough as it was.

Beamer:
As a matter of fact, JA2 has sold extremely well, especially in Germany. The North-American sales were decent but still a deception.

As for the rest of your post, well maybe will you just be that: surprised that is.

I prefer to not believe that you are implying that you and some others are the soul keepers of the game you never made. I consider myself one of those keepers and my experience with JA dates back from, dare I say, much longer than you could think.

Granted, I did not do the game myself either besides from some consulting work on the first JA but in my discussions with Ian on design work, we always seem to see eye to eye and pretty much be on agreement.

What else can be said?

Going in 3D can be complicated if you do not take the right approach. Knowing you are working on a tactical game should give a clue to the designer of what is necessary to help the player keep his orientation in terms of camera handling. The problem with games so far has not been the fact that they were in 3D,it has been more related to programmers and design team mostly falling in love with their technology and their environments, often forgetting that they were working on a game, not a tech demo.

Market pressures also have had a role to play. People want everything, from grand scale war number of units down to the details of a Quake model. Then, they will complain if the new game they bought hogs their system.

In this case, we have to face the balancing act of providing games that are both true to the JA essence and up to date on the visual side. That is what we will be working on achieving.

Hope this clarifies some

 

great... these guys are doing golden-land, right? grrrr...

taks

 

If any of this is true maybe the SF guys should hook up with Herve to get their excuses ready for the shareholders, lawmakers, angry ex-employees, creditors and everyone else who is generally upset when a company goes under.

As Herve has taught us, it's never too early to talk about how a company will soon be "returning to profitability".

 

This rumor is probably bullshit. Parts of it are real but it seems that whoever this person is took some facts and made them into fiction. It's what's commonly known as disinformation - probably a plant of a rival company or an investor intending to make a bid on SFI by lowering its stock value.

Also, take a look at what "Miss Money Penny" wrote:

What's that? SFI reamed the community with Prince of Qin? As far as I've been keeping up with the game they've been very active at putting out all of the latest patches and the game itself is quite good, so what the hell is she talking about?

ORB wasn't too bad a game, either... though it left much to be desired.

Most of the games in development by SFI are PC oriented, and they're about as independent a publisher as you can find in the market these days. There's a few European indy-oriented publishers like Digital Jesters, Nival and JoWood but SFI going under isn't a prospect that I'd like to consider. Companies like Atari and VU seldom, if ever, import European, Chinese and Russian games. When they do, they're usually put on hold for over a year and sometimes cancelled, much as the recent expansion to Gothic II was cancelled in the United States.

 

Most? I believe ALL of them are.

 

I think SFI going under would be horrible to the PC gaming community. Furthemore, they are making two of the games I most looking forward to.