Trouble Amidst The Gold Fields?
While visiting the virtual-economy.org blog for yet another wacky SL story (”Sweden establishes an embassy in SL! OMG!“) I noted something interesting; some anonymous comments to a very old story about IGE’s acquisitions, that read as though they are sour grapes from persons recently let go.
Bear in mind this is just random anonymous comments, and thus could be just fantasy, but the level of detail is, if nothing else, easy enough for Real Journalists(tm) to confirm!
ige is not profitable. they bought the korean rmt platforms with investment money they got from goldman sachs. but now gs wants its money back because they discovered that ige did not fully disclose financials. ige is in the process of trying to sell allakhazam and thottbot to raise the money to pay them back. they are closing the office in california and relocating everything to china so they can’t be sued. another thing i heard is that they are hiring a new ceo and cfo and plan to offshore all their money and assets to china until they can sell what is left of the business in the usa. also that the guys running the company are trying to hide money from the investment that they got in swiss bank accounts and trying to change the name of the company. a lot of people have lost their jobs there in the last few weeks and they think there is something big going to happen in january or february because they closed the california office and told everyone there is no forwarding address.
Its not surprising IGE is going down. The two owners Yantis and Alan who were the brains of the business left beginning of last year (I wonder why) and now those people who are running it are jokers. I’m sure anyone who has dealt with them would agree. It will be interesting to see what trick IGE and goldman sachs will pull out this year with half their management team gone
Buying the back page of Computer Games for nearly a year can’t have come cheap. What, desperate feeding frenzy in a company whose entire business model is based on the tragicomic state of players who can’t stand to play MMOs the way they were intended but can’t stand to quit?
Hilarious.
Or who can’t be arsed jumping through all the boring hoops to get to the actually FUN parts of games. Never mind J, you’ll make it to the 21st century one day.
Some of us have these job things these days…
RMT companies will rise and fall. As noted, Yantis is back doing his own thing. It’s not a downturn for anyone except IGE themselves.
I can’t comment on how accurate most of that is, but I’ve had dinner with Brock Pierce, IGE’s founder and CEO, and the impression I came away with was that he’s a sharp guy with a fairly deep understanding of virtual worlds as a business.
Also….did you REALLY just re-post a month-old anonymous blog comment??
So, what were Brock Pierce’s thoughts on underaged children?
IGE has been on the back cover of Computer Games for 22 months. http://razorwire.warcry.com/news/view/67575-CGMs-back-cover-isnt-IGEs-for-first-time-since-March-2005
And it only cost them $20,700 dollars total for that advertising. They made that back during the time it took me to make this post.
Computer Games is my favorite by far of the three pc-centric gaming magazines, so I’d be just as glad to see that back cover go away. I can’t really blame them though for not refusing it — of the three, they skate closest to the edge financially so far as I can tell, I’ve often worried they would finally just not be able to make it any longer.