Against the Gods

Cold Equations: The Death of a Game Company

Fearing the worst, some programmers departed for greener pastures. One of them was going through a divorce partly caused by the job pressure, and he just couldn't take anymore. One of Erudite's game-division-hating owners offered him $80,000 to work as a software trainer. It was three times what he used to make. Passion? Ha! What had it gotten him? He quickly left and others soon followed.

Then, my worst fears were realized. Near the end of the NvS schedule, we ran into a problem: The new unit types (like cannons) were too big for the engine to properly display inside a single hex. In some circumstances, this caused the large units to turn invisible. We did not have time in the schedule to resolve this unforeseeable glitch. Working through the issue required all of our rapidly shrinking resources. Pouring salt on the wound, our financially struggling publisher canceled our follow-up project. Our future vanished before our eyes. By the time we finished NvS, there was exactly one programmer left, and all the artists had been laid off.

Joe, the remaining programmer, had a lot of talent and was passionate about games, but even he needed to feed his family. I helped him find a job in the game industry with a friend of mine. He alone stayed in the game industry. With the publisher's help, we figured out a way he could finish off NvS. We completed the game two months late and lost money in the process. Not long after NvS, they went out of business.

The sad truth is that we never had a shot at success. We were driven by Jim's passion to make computer games. From an economic standpoint, it is simply not worth making a game for the 30,000 "historically accurate turn-based" enthusiasts in the world. We were victims of the Cold Equation of supply and demand.

My perspective on computer games has changed forever. Soulless companies that don't take chances, show little originality, work their people to the point of lawsuits and let the accountants run the company may not be popular with hardcore gamers, but they do understand what it really takes to wrestle with the cold equations of our over-supplied industry and still stay in business.

The only real cure to this problem is worse than the disease: Remove the passion from the industry. But do we really want the entire industry to be like Electronic Arts? What a shame it would be to not have people like Jim, who have a driving passion in the industry and who take chances that were logically never worth taking. There are no villains in this story. Just a group of passionate people that believed they could defy the Cold Equations of economics.

Bruce Nielson's short experience as a game producer left him cold and he'd rather be a game consumer anyhow. If you're stupid enough to want to hire him anyhow, please offer a very large salary. He can be reached via The Online Roleplayer, which he runs.