Let’s Not Be Brash
Variety has a postmortem on failed video game company Brash Entertainment. The studio was apparently helmed by clueless film execs who pushed out titles that were even worse than your usual licensed movie games. No small feat.
It reeks to me of a problem i’m seeing a lot lately in the games industry, particularly with kids’ virtual worlds: see something successful, and attempt to buy (rather than grow) that success. The best example was the $700 million Disney buy-out of Club Penguin. Suddenly, everyone i knew was grabbing investor dollars to build their own virtual kids’ world.
It’s logical, isn’t it? Club Penguin is outrageously successful. And it’s not very well drawn. i’d say it’d take, at most, a year to develop something like that – so the reasoning goes. So it logically follows that if i sink a big pile of investor money and a year of development building a product that’s very similar to Club Penguin, then i too will be bought by Disney for $700 million dollars.
Club Penguin: played (and apparently drawn) by six-year-olds.
It’s high stakes me-tooism, and obviously destined for failure. But everywhere i look, people are snatching up millions in investment dollars and trying to duplicate the success of these products. But they’re not seeing the bigger picture. Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Neopets and other kids’ virtual world forerunners have been around eight years in the making. Eight years of community building. Eight years of brand strengthening. Eight years of making mistakes, and learning from them. Why would a company think it could automagically duplicate that success?
Curse of the Munny
It’s GREEEED! Greed, i say! These companies have dollar signs in their eyes, and they can’t see the forest for the big evergreens made of hot, stinky cash. Supposed cash, because i don’t see many of these wanna-be’s making a red cent.
That’s how the Variety article paints the Brash execs. “Say … video games are making money. So if we get into video games, it logically follows that we will make money.” “But Hank, have you ever played a video game before?” “Quiet down, Fredericson. Go drain the swimming pool so we’ll have a place to put all the money.”
The other tidbit i gleaned from the article is that Brash worked on credit. They sunk themselves on their Space Chimps game because they operated under a misguided earnings projection. While i haven’t read it, apparently Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer writes about a similar practice that killed his company in Me, Myself and Bob – they anticipated making a certain amount of money, and operated as if it was cash-in-hand. And if you haven’t seen The Smartest Guys in the Room, a doc about the Enron collapse, i highly recommend it. Same shenanigans in that place. Apparently, it’s a common business practice, but one that i’m very gun-shy about.
Also on my to-watch list are I.O.U.S.A., Maxed Out, and In Debt We Trust. They’re all available on DVD, apparently … and i think i have a tiny bit of room left on my credit card to order them.
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