38 Studios - Judge Allows Rhode Island Lawsuit

Rhode Island's lawsuit against Curt Schilling and others involved with a $75 million loan guarantee to bankrupt developer 38 Studios can proceed, according to a ruling from Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein.

"I am gratified by the Court's initial ruling in the 38 Studios case," Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee said in a statement provided to Polygon. "It allows the important claims to proceed and is a significant first step to recovering the taxpayers' losses."

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GhanBuriGhan said:

This became such an ugly mess. I still remember being quite hopeful when the initial reports on the plans for the studio and KoA came out…

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Couchpotato said:

I look at this as a lesson of how not to run a business. They should of never bothered making the MMO it wasted to many resources.

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JuliusMagnus said:

But that's the reason the company was founded in the first place. Buying up Big Huge Games was something they did along the way.

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Asked about 38 Studios’ failure, Schilling says his management team suffered from “significant dysfunction” and that his video-game developers worked too slowly. Those problems, he allows, are his fault. “As the chairman and founder,” he says, “who’s above me?”

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Lucky Day said:

The more I look at this, the more I think the lawsuit should go the other way. There were promises the State didn't seem to keep. Since its a judge in Rhode Island I'm thinking there's a bias here and the Governor is using a hammer to try and get what they can out of Schilling and Co by circumventing bankruptcy laws that protect the studio.

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Dusk said:

It's not the first time for me to see pop sports players are exploited their nativity and, while Schelling, indeed, seems to have a part of the responsibility, I've gotten an impression that he is being politically used as a scapegoat, at the same time. When politicians call out for "taxpayer money", posing as being on the right side, my intuition tells me that they might as well be trying to hide something inconvenient for themselves. Here, we are talking of a money pool of 75m which every single accountant dropped like a hot potato - Has nobody tried to take an advantage of it? Did it actually "disappear" exclusively due to a single individual? Doesn't it sound too convenient? Also, when does mass media begin to tell bias-less truth?

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Grangokhan said:

This is still going on? 38 is dead and everyone laughs at Amalur. It was a financial failure and as a game it was a copy and paste of Fable and Oblivion.

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Lucky Day said:

I'm not so sure. Lots of elected officials think they can kickstart their economy by investing a lot of money into a big industrial project. In turn, the taxes from the employees and the business it would generate in the form of shops and services would pay the state back. A lot of areas dream of being the next silicon valley. I remember watching Pittsburgh Penguins games where some commercials centered around a job faerie who touted the joys of living in cold, drab, rusted out Pennsylvania to a tech graduate over the terrible conditions of sunny California.

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