38 Studios head Curt Schilling owns up to his mistakes
"Life is going to be different."
Curt Schilling, the founder of failed Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios has admitted to poor behaviour in his first interview since the company's recent collapse.
Schilling acknowledged that his employees - who were collectively owed millions of dollars in back wages - were given no warning about the company's dire financial situation.
"They have every right to be upset. I always told everybody if something were going to happen, you're going to have a month or two of lead time, and I bombed on that one in epic fashion," he told the Boston Globe in a recent interview.
Schilling stands to lose more than just face with this outcome as the ex-baseball player invested more than $50 million of his own money into the ailing business. "The money I saved and earned playing baseball was probably all gone…Life is going to be different," he said.
So how did things get this bad? For a long time Schilling believed things would pick up as he had promising prospects on the horizon.
He claimed that a major videogames publisher was on the verge of giving the company $35 million to fund a sequel to their critically acclaimed action-RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. This didn't pan out as the publisher withdrew their offer. Schilling believes this is due to Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee publicly discussing the studio's financial troubles after granting it a $75 million loan in government funds.
An investor later offered to grant the studio $15-20 million, but only if the state of Rhode Island would agree to give the company $6 million in tax credits and renegotiate the loan so the investor would be the first person to be paid back. "If that happened, he would come in and save the company," Schilling said, but the state refused the terms.
The studio didn't see much of the proceeds for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, because initial sales had to go towards paying back an advance to its publisher Electronic Arts.
Despite all his failures, Schilling remained firm in his belief in 38 Studios. "I put everything in my name in this company," he said. "I believed in it. I believed in what we built. I never took a penny in salary. I never took a penny for anything."