You might know Tony Albrecht from The Great Debate, but what you may not know is that he was a programmer at Ratbag Games for 6 years, that is until Midway pulled the plug on the studio. Not a lot has been written about the reasons why Midway did this or what they gained or lost from the whole ordeal, but Tony has detailed how Midway's CEO, David Zucker, made a personal fortune of $8.5 million (US) from pumping and dumping Midway shares. Not bad while you're screwing over 70+ people's livelihoods as well. From Tony's blog (found via Kotaku AU)...
(Tony) He must have had a very nice Xmas. Personally, I was looking for work and wondering how long I could keep paying the bills to look after my pregnant wife and 1 year old child.
Now, I don't know much about the inner workings of share trading, so I'll just suggest you all head over to Tony's blog for the entire low-down, complete with graphs and stats. If anyone believes in Karma and just desserts, then Tony says Midway are in a massive world of pain at the moment due to their over-reliance on the Unreal 3 engine.
Personally, I would love to check out the recently released Unreal Tournament 3 (which runs on the Unreal 3 engine). In fact, I have it installed on my PC, but the damn game crashes right after a map loads. And when I say "crash", I'm talking about the unrecoverable kind, the type where you need to turn off / restart the computer and worry if any of your data is lost.
1. Anonymous Thu, 13 Dec
Anyone know how much the Unreal 3 engine costs? Our studio is about to use it.
You should quit while your ahead.
$1M USD last I heard... Don't quote me on that.
There's a royalty option as well.
It was actually Midway shares not Ratbag shares. Ratbag was never a public traded company. You could only say they were Ratbag shares technically as by were by that stage completely owned by Midway.
Thanks for the correction. See, I told yas I was clueless about shares. Who wants to sell me some Phantom console shares?
typical greedy American's >:(