The first game I worked on, The Great Battles of Hannibal, was only a six-month project. It was little more than a re-skin of Alexander with a few new rules, so I was confident of its schedule. We produced it almost exactly to schedule and made a 20 percent profit. Though relieved, one thing still bothered me: If I had deployed these same resources on a consulting project, Erudite could have easily brought in a 50 percent gross profit. In fact, if our software consulting arm only made 20 percent profit, we'd go out of business.
Though we talked big about making additional royalties if the game sold better, this proved a pipe dream. Alexander had sold to all of the approximately 30,000 people in the world that liked that sort of game. And they didn't just like it, they loved it. They loved it so much that almost all of them returned to buy Hannibal. Besides, as is typical in the developer/publisher world, we only made a few dollars on each game sold. We had found a niche and captured it. It wasn't possible to sell more units.
Concerned about the game's profit margin, I asked Jim what the original game had cost compared to its against royalties. Jim had to pick me up off the floor. It had cost nearly 10 times the amount of the royalty advance! I ran the numbers, taking into consideration the capitalization of the game engine, and found we'd have to publish 20 games as profitable as Hannibal before we'd break even! What had I gotten myself into?
Undaunted, the passionate people of our little game division moved on to The Great Battles of Caesar. Although we made our schedule and were profitable again, I still worried about how easy it would be to fail. Even a one-month slip would wipe out our profit margin. Our software consulting arm would walk away from such business, because, in software, a single unforeseeable problem can easily lead to such a delay. I was beginning to understand why the other company owners disliked the game division so much.
Jim's passion was the sole force allowing us to exist. A man with a mission, Jim was fulfilling a dream to bring these board games to videogame fans worldwide. So I knew we were in trouble when Jim announced he was leaving. He left saying, "I'm coming back for the game division. I'm going to convince my new company to buy it. Keep it in good shape." I saluted smartly and reassured the team that Jim would return for them.
We started work on what would be our final game using the Alexander engine. This Civil War game, North vs. South, was a departure from the previous games. Many on the team started to worry. They had grown tired of being the "ugly duckling" at a successful company. Would it be any different at Jim's new company? Some approached Jim with their concerns. He reassuringly said he'd find other types of games for them - perhaps web-based Java applets - if the new company wasn't interested in their current work. This revelation didn't sit well with many team members, who saw Java applets as featherweight programming.
