Not The Best Of Signs

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 29 Comments

Ouch

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  • pharniel

    eek

  • houstoncollector

    Oooh. Not a good sign at all.

  • http://emergentfuture.com Arrakiv

    Uhh… No, definitely not at all.

  • http://www.imaekgaemz.com Patrick Rogers

    I’m betting the company didn’t sanction that page.

  • TPRJones

    How often are they supposed to be paid? I get paid once a month, myself, so that’s not odd at all. And since the December paycheck will be coming early because of the holidays, it’ll be 45 days between checks coming up soon.

  • http://www.cuppycake.org Cuppycake

    Eek.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com wowpanda

    somehow I didn’t get it this joke.. Some one explain?

  • Hanna
  • http://emergentfuture.com Arrakiv

    TPRJones: That’s a fair question. I’m usually paid bi-monthly, but that can vary from job to job.

    However, I’m willing to bet that this wouldn’t be an issue if they were normally paid monthly. I’d imagine they’re paid weekly or bi-monthly, which would make sense that this would be an issue after ’21 days’.

  • Klaitu

    Ahh, not Cheyenne Mountain, the place where the government has stashed the stargate..

    Cheyenne Mountain, the game developer making the crappy stargate MMO game.

    I guess when you agree to pay people money, you should pay them.

  • TPRJones

    omg not Stargate Worlds?!

    I was looking forward to that one. :(

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com wowpanda

    21 days is not a big deal. In my experience the higher the pay frequency, the lower the wage. When I was a waiter back in college days I was paid daily. GM CEO got paid $1 a month but he depend on his huge fat check at the end of the bail out.

  • J Thomas

    It’s a big deal when a company promises to pay its employees on a regular frequency, and misses those paydays. It’s a much bigger deal if the reason for the delay isn’t logistical (the printer broke, the checks were lost in the mail, etc.). Ask Bill Roper what happens when a company doesn’t have enough cash to pay its employees.

  • Zuzax
  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    I had a company not pay me once…

    We went out and got drunk and decided he’d never pay us. We took stuff from the company and sold it on eBay until we were all paid in full.

    The friend who owned the company secretly confided years later he preferred us getting the stuff rather than the creditors.

  • Gawain

    I had to go look up who these people were. I guess that says something about how hard stargate worlds is being pushed.

    In the same (but not same) vein:
    http://www.iscaliforniaonfire.com

  • Freakazoid

    Yeah, I had to ponder that for a bit too. Glad it was talking about the stargate devs and not NORAD. Still bad news though.

  • Jessica Mulligan

    The amazing thing is that these guys have gone through at least $31 million. From a year ago at the Austin GDC: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15415:

    Joe Ybarra: “… Completely different from that is my current company, which is funded entirely by angel investors. The biggest one is, I think, $1 million, and we have over 100 investors.”

    Joe Ybarra: “We have an LLC structure, in which we sell a percentage of a company, but it’s not a traditional equity-based structure. To date, we’ve raised about $31 million dollars, and are raising more for studios 2 and 3.”

    And then there is this:

    http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/395/RipOff0395659.htm

    As usual, it is the people in the trenches that are paying the price. And why does this crap always seem to happen at Christmas time?

  • Noel

    Gotta say, it’s not a huge surprise if they fail. The business plan of starting 7 studios before you have a single product is… well, not without its flaws.

  • Dan Gray

    Sucky.

  • Balasarius

    Totally thought this was about NORAD.

  • http://antipwn.wordpress.com/ IainC

    For what it’s worth there is a rebuttal of sorts over on TenTonHammer.

    Apparently it’s a temporary solvency blip. The marketing guy from CME doesn’t deny outright that people aren’t getting paid so it appears that the basic premise is probably true.

  • http://bifftheunderstudy.wordpress.com Dan Gray

    I just hope they haven’t leaked enough employees to seriously impeed development. Fingers crossed they get SGW out the door in good shape.

  • Grinless

    Not gonna happen Dan.

    If they are out of money now, they are not going to deliver a product in any kind of good shape.

  • Vaxhacker

    I was part of a startup that went through a “temporary solvency blip”. 4 months later, people were still not being paid (but still working – we were young and idealistic/stupid). As Grinless pointed out, running out of money before finishing only means bad things, especially for an MMO where the launch costs are significant.

  • http://emergentufuture.com Arrakiv

    Gamasutra also has a response from CME on the issue as well.

    http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21363

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    “Not gonna happen Dan.

    If they are out of money now, they are not going to deliver a product in any kind of good shape.”

    I’m not sure there’s enough miracles for this not to be an accurate assessment. NDA aside, the game isn’t good. I wish it was, I really do. That IP is ripe for an open-ended (yet familiar) landscape to putz around in to your hearts content fighting wave after wave of hilarious bad (good) guys. :sigh:

  • Joe

    Uh… by “NDA aside”, you mean “There’s a beta and I’m in it and I’m breaking the NDA”? Just checkin’.

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