This CEO Just Destroyed Their Own Studio In 1 Day
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- Опубліковано 21 кві 2024
- Today's story is too strange not to share: a studio with ex Undead Labs, Arena Net & Blizzard staff, and their rather strange CEO. Join us at bellular.games for early access content, 20 editions of 'Loading Screen' a month and to support our team!
Sources:
www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
www.ign.com/articles/possibil...
kotaku.com/state-of-decay-3-x...
www.ign.com/articles/jeff-str...
www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
x.com/SomeGuyNamedKai/status/...
/ 1778837645797335183
www.windowscentral.com/xbox-g...
possibility.co/
x.com/ethangach/status/177883...
www.ign.com/articles/palia-de... - Ігри
Join us at bellular.games for early access content, 20 editions of 'Loading Screen' a month and to support our team!
this dude & his wife spent all the monies
sounds to me like the CEO wanted to step away and didn't want someone else to take over the company so intentially killed the studios
Yeah that sounds like a cop-out.
Intentionally*
I started and ran a guild in a game I played online. I hit a point where I was burnt out and decided to leave. I decided to dissolve the guild but before I did, I talked to the second most powerful guild (we were third) and got an agreement that they would take my players. Pretty much everyone was fine with it, except for one random guy. So, I can see not wanting to hand over something you built to somebody else. Still though, you should do right by the people who are with you. Other than that one guy, everyone was fine joining the other guild. Makes sense, considering my guild was formed by my going to smaller guilds and getting them to join me, lol
@@MuscarV2 Didn't ask.
I don't think he'd care about someone taking it over, at least not so much as to nuke the entire studio. My guess is that there was something shady going on with thee money- emptying the pension fund, embezzling advances from the publishers, stuff like that. The fact the couple shut up shop and effectively disappeared into the wilderness kind of suggests (at least to me) that they were both involved in some shady dealings and now want to run away before it goes public.
"I'm afraid a journalist will tell people I have MS and it will destroy the studio ..."
"So I'm telling people I have MS and I'm destroying the studio"
*WHAT*
This guy could've told the story in 5 minutes. He also left out alot of information that's been trending. He's using it as misdirection because bellular has recently come under fire in a related rumor. I'm sick of hearing about it and this video was pointless. It's all about the sbi bs.
Trying to blame a _unpublished_ leak to the press for the demise of one's company is much like trying to blame a negative product review for the same thing: at best, it just sped up the inevitable.
I bet MKBD leaked it right before he took down humane AI lel
I suspect he was looking for a way out and this was just a convenient excuse.
Sounds to me like maybe something fishy was going on with money. Maybe some of the publishers money had got lost somewhere and no one had told the publisher yet. So when he found out about a journalist sniffing around he decided he had to come clean to the publisher before the journalist found out and made it public, the publisher were pissed and not willing to give more money to someone who’d lost some of the previous batch. So pulled the plug on the whole project
Not even. It would be like a negative review that wasn’t published. Nobody saw the contents, just that someone, let’s say Jeremy Jahns, or MKBHD had made a negative review but never uploaded the video.
Or like, someone made an awful cake or pizza or something, but never gave it to a customer. Just KNOWING something negative EXISTS was enough to ruin it? Nah.
If someone breaks an NDA in the woods, and the company doesn't exist to hear it, is it still a lawsuit?
Seriously, if the company doesn't exist, who is going to sue, have the funds to sue, or have an option to recover damages?
Sure, but I'd still want a lawyer to give this the once over before I broke cover...
Law be weird.
@@TheFoggyjones Law do be weird. I think they deliberately make that stuff esoteric and scary so normal people are too intimidated to try shit.
That was my question. Wouldn't they have to prove damages? How do you harm a dead company legally? 'Desecrating a corpse' maybe?
Usually when someone closes down a company and goes radio silent, it's a good possibility that someone was cooking the books. Not saying that's what happened here, but with "reporter snooping about" and "questions about the company", it's a strong possibility.
I will say it, someone was stealing while doing nothing for a company, with ESG-DIE at the helm of everything, useless tantrum throwing children, the ESG-DIE crowd don't know how to do anything at all beyond pandering, getting paid to exist and forcing everyone else to OBEY.
Yeah, my conclusion is fraud or embezzlement as well.
That or they had DEI funding 😂
Translation
CEO Jeff: I need some more money to finish the game
Publisher: What happened to the money we gave you? We gave you 10% over what you ask for
CEO Jeff: We had a few unforeseen problems (I legally filter off most of the money you gave me)
Publisher: We are done no more money !
CEO Jeff: I will be closing the company's now and will be taking some time to focus on my family ( I'm taking all the money I have made from you and retiring with my family and all the $ Thank you for doubling my wealth as I fly off in to the Sun
This is becoming a frequent trend, Volition spending $100 million on a Saints Row reboot, $100 million on marvels avengers, $319 million for Spiderman 2, unknown tens/hundreds of millions on Starfield and S Squad. Games never used to cost more than a blockbuster movie.
Funny! But ceo David zazlav shelves content for tax breaks and he gets a huge pay bump. Cap*talism doesn't breed innovation people do
@@forbiddenruinThat's been happening for *years*.
Exactly my thoughts too, a classic cut and run when the money dries up.
@@forbiddenruin would this be considered the same situation? At least the dumpster fire that is saints row reboot came out and faced the music
Imagine the article actually wasn't all that bad and his own paranoia just did him in.
Gach works for Polygon. It was no doubt a hit-piece.
Paranoia? Seems more like the guy thought the world revolved around him and couldn't stand the idea of anyone else heading his studio.
One of those 'If I can't have it, no-one can.' sort of things. In other words, I think the CEO was a bit of a Man-child.
Idk am i the only one who thinks some money laundering was going on behind the scenes? And that following the money, might dig up their crimes? Just seems so weird that as soon as someone tries digging into it, the entire studio shuts down in such a rash and brazen way, it's like they were chickens running around with their head cut off over a single article. Which if the article was so bad, then it would make sense for him to close the studio and sell it as soon as possible, that way he can actually get a lot of the money out of the companys value and doesnt get kicked out by the board.
@@Kratos-eg7ez and that's criminal
Palias Devs had a super big mouth in their discord how experienced they are and that they exactly know what they are do fincanically when
many people, including me, warned them that their monetarization as planned will never work out.
Their own ignorance brought them there.
My spider sense says we're behind a smoke screen and something else is being manipulated behind the veil.
Tell us more Balthazar the Wise 😂
@@LordBathtub The said leaked information could've been a piece of bait laid out as a trap in an effort to root out a perceived potential information leak or as others have suggested, the ceo wanted a reason to get the hell out of dodge without direct implications for the studio being shut down, was it a pat on the back from a previous friend at higher places?
@@LazyLifeIFreak Golly Balthy ol' pal, what a rabbit hole! So many alleyways, but where do they lead?!
@@LordBathtubThat's the million dollar question chum, if you get the right answer you'll win the grand prize of absolutely nothing.
@@LazyLifeIFreak gee willikers, well I'm stumped Balthy. Honest and for true
"I've looted all I can before the forensic accountants get called in, I'm out of here, byeeeeeee! "
"No before this Jeff had a legit career, he worked at Blizzard"
Well there's your first flag
Hey hey hey. Hey. Blizzard was actually good 25 years ago lol.
@@daniellacomb917I mean, in terms of output? Yeah. But the sexual harassment was probably going on because a lot of the people from those days got stuck with allegations when everything came out.
He worked for Blizzard when it was good. He was the dude who pitched Wow as a project. Working for Blizzard today is a very different thing from in the late 90s.
@@loke6664 Okay but you do realize a lot of those early WoW guys were implicated in the scandals, right? Like. McCree's name was changed for a reason.
@@THB192 ... Because you know all the details of who was invovled and what happened, but yet you kept your mouth shut legally till it went public.. GG... Such a lame freeking take.
My assumption is that someone(s?) used company money as a slush fund and now people are trying to cut and run before their reputation gets affected.
What's funny is the NDAs might not be enforceable anymore. They're made with the company. Company dies....
Yeah, who's going to sue them?
Being a CEO doesn't mean you're sane. It certainly doesn't mean you're ethical. Employees must be scratching their heads.
Being a CEO almost certainly means you have some degree of sociopathy or psycopathy.
What especially puzzles me about this response is that it doesn't seem helpful for any of the possible states of play:
If the project is going badly you might want to blame something that isn't your leadership; but if the project is going badly in a way that's embarrassing rather than just unfortunate the company probably already knows that, and once things wind up one way or another your colleagues will end up knowing it as well: the general public might never know; but they have short attention spans and can only remember a small handful of really notorious characters anyway, so that barely matters(plus, the CEO deliberately setting things on fire is way weirder than a normal studio closure; so it probably increases the odds of them noticing).
If things are going badly in a lawsuits-and-white-collar-crimes sense you would have good reason to be nervous about journalists with insider information; but it's not like your website being down is going to stop opposing counsel proceeding to discovery; and it's commonly the case that your odds are better if you can keep those plates in the air a bit longer: best case things go well and you can paper over earlier indiscretions; worst case you at least delay the trial.
If things are going indifferently or better you might not be thrilled to have a journalist around; but they'll be hard pressed to do anything like the sort of damage you've just done.
I just don't see the case where doing this works out better for the CEO than basically any other PR mitigation move would.
Bro was cookin the books. It really seems that way to me.
Sounds like a cut and run. Like the Strains paid themselves very well and folded shop when the money ran out since the publisher was not giving them any more.
“Oh boy, I can’t wait to finish this article about this studio that seems quite promising and- hey, where did the studio go?”
Its rather simply: He and his dear wife & assorted staff + management are stealing from their employees and investors hand over fist, they sense the jig is up, and they are packing up their toys and going home, breaking as many people's professional live as possible in fit of pique.
Where there's smoke, there's fire. In this case, a small candle was turned into a wildfire over night, lmao.
Please cover the Embracer Group breakup tomorrow
Breakup?
@@Arcademan09 Apparently they're gonna split into 3 companies to try and manage their debt...
@@Shoxec dang, I knew there were stories about them going into debt, I didn't think it was that bad though. What major studios did they acquire again? I remember they bought Borderlands but recently sold that
Such an ironically named company lol
They went on a spending spree like they had a bank account like Microsoft, whoever thought it was a good idea is a moron imo. Game dev has a long tail and unless you're buying these studios close to a game drop (even then it's likely they have other financial arrangements) you'll be waiting a while to re-coup that investment while bleeding more money.
This sounds like a fraud, looks like one as well.
How bad can one article be ? Like it would have to be about rape charges or something... Fraud seems much more plausible...
Looking forward to the articles, going to juicy.
On the in-person meeting vs over video or whatever. It is pretty common (in my experience) that investors prefer you to come and show up in person. You're also waaaay more likely to secure funds from people if you can talk to them effectively and body language is key here. This was true even when I was working with a company that specialised in video call and streaming tech. Silly, but true.
When your studio's future is on the line (as the context suggests), you get on the plane and give yourself every chance of success.
Follow the money and the links of that person. The red flag is that they are not being paid.
Well...! That escalated quickly
Impossibility Space
I'm kinda curious whats the CEO's networth before starting the studio vs how much he's worth after.
Man, some of these big names...
It sounds to me...like someone, somewhere, was skimming funds.. and realized that they couldnt cover the tracks well enough so just up and shut down..
I think the game was trash and they knew it. The leak only took away any chance of them preying on people for pre-orders and 1st day sales? I dunno but it seems to be the way games are made anymore. 😢
Fraud or shame
Palia was all monetization and almost no substance from what I saw. Classic Destiny 2 selling single use colors, and super expensive cosmetics to boot.
if the Workers sign a Contract with a Studio so things stay confidential and the Studio closses down, does the Contract still have any legal bindings?
to me it seems as they are now free to talk as they like
No one runs away that has nothing to hide. Very suspicious indeed. Wonder what was in that article that made him throw in the towel and run off.
Fraud
would be really funny that the article they publish is going to be a nothing burger and the CEO snapped for nothing.
That was such an interesting video lol, thanks for sharing
Jeff used to be one of the best programmers out there. I really liked Guildwars for instance. He does seem to have gotten weirder and weirder though and just because you are a great programmer and good at making interesting ideas for games (at least in the 90s and 00s) does not mean you have a business sense and should buy up studios.
To me it sounds like they company over reached and those sweet BlackRock (or whatever investment companies) money stopped coming in.
'we're not a game company were "possibility space" 'it's like a satirical cartoon name.
something stinks and it ain't the rotting meat in my basement...
"Of all the possibilities you could have embraced, you chose oblivion."
"Hey we're closing our doors, you're not getting a severance package or any benefits, and you're still expected to work." Wtf...
Sounds like a control freak. The kind of guy that would flip the table before losing a board game.
TL:DR: VC bait company gets destroyed when VC money bubble collapsed. CEOs of group struggle with mental health issues and and publicly snap, doesn't change outcome of lack of base (VC buyout bait & "growth" instead of solid products ensuring cashflow). They might have hoped Embrace & Co would buy them out but that never happened due to the bubble bursting.
"I'd not that often you see someone kill their reputation in one day..."
Nikita Buyanov would like a word with you
I suspect this story will end up becoming a feature documentary on the Crime Channel in a few years.
What was that reporter really looking into? perhaps something that has him so spooked he closed everything down to cover it up? he might be hoping that money laundering or something similar will go away if he kills the company.
@BellularNews I thought for a second this was about Colossal Order for a second lol
Sound like someone overcook their books
Listening to this in the background and I am extremely confused about what is happening and why.
I want even a fraction of the power Gach has.
@BellularNews Thanks for doing the vid, I couldn't agree more about presentation of things not being necessarily anywhere close to the way things are. I think we need to keep in mind companies often gaslight to further their own agenda. Lets face it given the mass layoffs developers it isn't an understatement to say many studios including top ones often overestimate the marketplace in terms of potential sales or make disaster projects that just have to be scrapped. But rather than be forthcoming or transparent like "we tried and failed..." companies will instead gaslight. It would suck if the MS allegations were true, but given the current climate of inclusivity in gaming and strong narrative tones, feet to the fire I am suspect of that statement. The idea of publishing a story because of a CEO or company staff struggle with a legitimate disability and possible related struggles e.g. mental health... It would just seem to be a way to get fired and something many conservative grifters would load into their content bazooka and launch into many-a-video. I think the finances and the timeline you draw to 2023 seems a lot more plausible. However I would have issue being a manager and bringing in investors etc etc and having privacy leaks that breach more than likely in place confidentiality agreements. If the financier, publisher or investor just says "we are through" what other choice would the manager have? In a rocky game market invest in the company who breaches confidentiality... I've seen deals get broken just because people found staff rude, let alone a breach of a confidentiality agreement which rather than simply an issue with ettiquette has legal and contractual ramifications. If this guy is watching his wife slip by and hes spending hours on hours trying to rescue this project from ruin only for this to happen I wish him the very best and understand well where his priorities lay. I think there is more to this story but I think there is probably enough sincerity in-part just being 'enough is enough' from his perspective.
Seems fairly straightforward to me. There was a leak that included financials, then the publisher denies funding. Obviously there was something less than ideal going on with their financials or there wouldn't have been a reason to leak it in the first place. Publisher got wind of it and pulled funding.
This next part is a bit more speculative. His quick closure and immediate departure from the industry indicates that he is running from something, fast. Likely something that could implicate him in a career ending way with legal ramifications.
Feels like financial shenanigans.
Sounds like they pulled an Embracer move, expanded/mismanaged too much and he was worried was gonna be caught out in it, told the publisher in advance before they found out that way and dissolved the company rather than let it all come out.
Wow, I almost went to work here a few months ago.
Discord mod doesn't count
Embezzlement of the company's money?
Never heard of any of these names -- not into that sort of games, myself, but I do like this channel -- but the business owner in me says that Jeff's report of the meeting was doublespeak for "the publisher fired *me* but I have to cover it up".
Lots of possibilities here, one being that they badly low balled what they needed in time/money for the game development; a second possibility is there was something seriously wrong with the finances that would show up at the end of the quarter that could lead to lawsuits or criminal charges for someone; three that they had a secret internal scandal that was going to break that would have broken things apart at the seams anyway; and there are probably several more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.
I think Battlestate games is trying to go for the record at this moment in time
Whats the background music ?😢
Surely it makes way more sense that the meeting was already planned and there was already funding issues
He seems to write for Kotaku.
Sounds to me like Jeff got in over his head and the leak provided him an exit ramp.
Palias issue is while its a fun game, and has a lot going for it, its cash shop is way over priced, the cost per costume, is the price of some whole games.
If they want to keep afloat they need to reduce prices, and make it worth peoples time to invest.
Ethan Gatch's power level is... OVER 9000!!!111oneone... or simply said: Godlike!
Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Gatch
Also: Ha, the US, "Land of the Free", where your health insurance can be held hostage until you sign off your rights...
Btw, what's this "emerging player tastes" BS? Good games will find buyers, as long as it isn't another Vampire Survivors clone... well, if it's amazing and brings lots of own ideas it most likely will still sell. Always find it bad when games are being developed (or cancelled) by market research "results".
I tried Palia and it was fun enough for a while but in the end there are too many similar games out there. I also don't like pure online games when there are alternatives that have local single player, local multiplayer and servers if you want to. It felt like another "online multiplayer 'sandboxy' games are cool right now, lets make one too".
The first word to come to mind is Embezzlement...
I can imagine a world where someone going through serious family health issues just says fuck it I don't want to deal with this business stuff anymore. Maybe not a likely scenario, but I think it's a possibility.
I expect the studio was having funding problems, as a lot of them are now that money has dried up due to high interest rates, and disclosure of P&L info was likely going to kill any future tranches from the publisher (no publisher is going to give money to a studio that's likely to run out of runway before they finish). The dude felt betrayed that current employees would sabotage the studio like that and decided he'd had enough given everything that's going on with his wife. This seems entirely plausible.
@@paulie-g Very good points. It does kind of make me reflect on whether or not we as consumers are entitled to know or pry into something that could be the worst year of this guys life. I guess at this point we're used to this kind of news being the result of malice, greed, or some kind of scam rather that it being business venture that just couldn't make it.
@@MadeThisStuff Beyond the 'personal life' angle, there is a reason why companies keep financial information confidential whenever they can. There's a non-0 probability he could've rustled up some additional funding from a 3rd party by giving up some equity in the game or the studio, but those chances would rapidly hit 0 once it was widely publicised they were in financial trouble, as well as kill the publishing deal. What in the world is the public interest in doing a story on this, especially if the story is likely to kill a studio and lose people their jobs? No public funds are involved, no illegality, corruption or moral turpitude is alleged. Who is interested in this? Not gamers. It's just Kotaku and its stable of parasites stirring up sh-t, they're one step removed from "News of the World" and similar predatory tabloids.
@@paulie-g I'd go a step further and posit that Kotaku _et al_ , with the stream of bile some of their "journalists" have been spewing forth in their op-ed pieces - are _several steps _*_below_*_ Murdoch's tabloid media empire_ ... that takes some doing!
Welcome back to the news everybody
Gonna be some financial fraud ...
I thought that you where talking about yourself in the video.
killing your studio in a single day... sounds like something Bellular did when they endorsed SBI
Oh man, dude did something BAD to react like that. 😂😂😂
He has to sue himself for bad management
This guy should get together with Dungeons & Discourse so they can brainstorm new ways to make 15min+ videos out of tiny snippets of information.
Either the CEO wanted out with a bag of assets and cash, or the game was utter trash and he wanted an easy way to avoid responsibility for it.
"Fun" was mentioned multiple times here... people lost their jobs. Yowzaaa.
Guess Prytania couldn't take the Strain.
This is so bizarre.
Thanks for the timeline recap on this. Was contemplating doing a video on it myself. I might skip now that this one is so comprehensive. The situation is pretty bizarre. Also when you consider the amount of toxicity surrounding games journalists and sites like IGN, Kotaku, etc. from subsets of very vocal gaming communities - there certainly is a more incideous read of the events. Both the Strains letters kind of put facts next to each other to allude to conclusions without saying them directly. My guess was also that the financial info Gach came across probably had to do with studio size / burn rate versus what the publishing partner was told... so in a sense yeah maybe the leak caused the shutdown but maybe that's only because Strain lied to the publishing partner about the scope or milestones or something like that.
Why couldn't an employee step up, contact the VC and ask what is going on and fix the issue? Perhaps as a new studio? Who knows. Worst case. If the company's going bankrupt, they can buy the game on the cheap at auction right?
I'm gonna speculate and think that the publisher was looking for some external reason to blow up the studio and he found it in the journalist. I think it's just a flimsy excuse.
If it actually does have anything to do with the unpublished article. It sounds like the publishers funds were miss appropriated to buy the other studios. Or at least make the parent company look solvent enough to acquire the funds elsewhere to buy the other studios.
Sounds like he was done. Like he build a studio for developers and they still ratted out on him. 😢
He truly was done and took his ball home.
Does seem a touch suspicious.
humans, humans went on. People get cold feet when they went in shaky to begin with. We need publisher confirmation.
Kinda like your channel with SBI?
I for sure think that the money need to be followed in this case.
This totally stinks of some financial rotten play and maybe even breaking laws.
It's gonna be really funny if the report doesn't end up containing anything actually explosive, and they just knee-jerked their own studios into oblivion over nothing.
At which point you'd stop and ask "but what DID they expect to get exposed?"
I’m not at all surprised egotism gone wild produces stupid outcomes by wildly overconfident braggarts. I really wish professionals would stop enabling delusional management. Not working for a terrible boss is always the most ethical choice, however that occurs.
siphon money
leak info to the public
"oh no I need to close the company, bye everyone nothing to see anymore, unlucky"
This dude must I’ve bee a really big fan of Arthas Menethil.
Ironic.
Equity being mentioned😂
When the CEO doesn't know what the game actually is, doesn't trust their own product, and only thinks about profits, this is what happens.
Why does an indie company have a CEO?
This was a really rambling video
"how we continue to build the kind of systemic culture we need to build to make sure that as we hire people over the next 5, 10 years, that we build a culture that would survive me. You don't want that all going away the moment certain key people walk out the door."
Huh
Generous interpretation: We need to build up institutional knowledge and structural robustness to counter the bus factor. We also need some sort of positive company culture.
Suspicious interpretation: I'm a nightmare, people realise that and leave. We have retention issues, and key people walking out is affecting our day-to-day operations
The way companies these days are going out of their way to run their companies into the ground is astounding. And this one even made the effort to simply end it on the most petty and minor way possible. Just what gives?
Sounds to me like maybe something fishy was going on with money. Maybe some of the publishers money had got lost somewhere and no one had told the publisher yet. So when he found out about a journalist sniffing around he decided he had to come clean to the publisher before the journalist found out and made it public, the publisher were pissed and not willing to give more money to someone who’d lost some of the previous batch. So pulled the plug on the whole project
Sounds like a fake it till you make it situation
My guess. He shut down the company and is pocketing whatever liquid assets it had. Or was stealing money from.the company
Wait…is this the same Jeff from overwatch?