Company News Interplay = fuct

[chrisbeddoes]

IPLY's death is because

a) They treated their creatives like assets and not like creatives (artists)

b)They treated their customers as assets and not as customers.


Have you have heard this expression ? Do not s**T the hand that feeds you ?

IP did that and they thought that all they did was "managing assets" .

EDIT

Oh and ppl in the codex here LOVE IP.


Oh look a nice picture i found in the web.Doesn't this girl looks cool ?

/edit

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

For a net cut of $1.1 million.

How many jobs is that?

A hell of a lot if it's just the savings for one fiscal quarter.

Sympathy for a company is a bizarre thing. Particularly when their problems are their own creation- costs are too high, and short term scrambling seems to win out over intelligent, well thought out plans every time.

Imagine how much money they wasted on Jefferson alone. If Van Buren is also cancelled(not much of an if, really), then pretty much everything done in that two years is a completedly wasted endevour. We're talking the initial money lost due to the licensing fees for the D&D/BG license from WotC/Atari, all the salaries for those people during that time, licensing the Granny technology they used to get started on the engine, any updates to the software they needed for this, the cost of office space for those people, and so on. Probably looking at around $5M-$7M for all that.

Now, Jefferson would have been done this year. It was only six months to a year from being done when it was cancelled, so we're talking a late summer through Christmas 2003 release. If Interplay made $20 on every box after the retailer and dsitributor takes their share, we're talking a good deal of money there. All it would take is about 300k units sold to make it's development cost back and that's a really low figure for this title. I mean, we're talking about Baldur's Gate 3 here. At 750k sales, which is reasonable for that title with the name and people working on it, we're talking about $15M coming back to Interplay, for a net profit on the title of $10M-$8M.

 

[Voss]

I think you're giving them a little too much credit there. From the crap they sold between the last two septembers, the report has the cost per product higher than the combined PC/console revenue. Before even getting into other figures, thats a really bad sign. Though I don't remember what titles came out in that period (though some of that is sales of older titles)... Lets see Lionheart near the end of that period, what else did they put out after Sept, 2002?

Edit: Oh. Yes, I realize BG3 would've sold well. But I don't think it would have saved them from their own financial irresponsibility. Of course, giving up the damn license is a good sign of that irresponsibility. "Hey, we've sunk money into this! Lets jus throw it away and hope we can continue to milk a console version long after people get sick of the sequels."