SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

Astral Projection_sl said:

Off that page there's a link to Storybricks shutting down as well. In theirfarewell letterthey say they were going to buy SOE and the assets from 38 Studios.



Wait so .... a company of 10 guys who has been working on "Emergent AI" for 5 years with absolutely nothing to show for it, has suckers willing to give them enough cash to buy SOE and 38 Studios??? Does this sound like complete BS or is SOE not really worth much? The 38 studios assets obviously aren't worth anything.

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Bovine fecal content is high...

Elidroth_sl said:

Bovine fecal content is high...

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Care to share the other side?

Let's be honest, the SOE employees at Elidroth's level are probably just as in the dark as we are. If anyone knows the real story it's Smed, Columbus execs, and Sony corporate. And I doubt any of them are talking.

bwuceli_sl said:

It's one of the strangest statements I've ever read: or small company buys the big one out + assets from another company or fold... I was scratching my head when I read that.

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What didn't you get?

It wasn't SB that was going to Buy a faltering SOE, it was an investor group that an SB guy or guys had rounded up that was going to buy SOE.

Elidroth_sl said:

Bovine fecal content is high...

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To whom are you referring? If SB, then you don't know what you're talking about, if Astral Projection, then you do, and I agree.

Yeah, last time Elidroth gave us an "inside scope" it was "guys this is just a name change".

tad10_sl said:

What didn't you get?

It wasn't SB that was going to Buy a faltering SOE, it was an investor group that an SB guy or guys had rounded up that was going to buy SOE.

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I know how this works. And then what? This is a start-up walking to an investment company to pitch a deal... I mean come on...

bwuceli_sl said:

I know how this works. And then what? This is a start-up walking to an investment company to pitch a deal... I mean come on...

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And then nothing. The SB guys have stated they had the money lined up for the acquisition when they went to negotiate with Sony Japan with their offer. That and some M&A attorneys are all you ever really need for any acquisition ever in the history of the world (barring acquiring land from other countries - in that case you'll need an Army or Navy).

Though for larger acquisitions (which this wasn't) you'll also want an investment bank for additional CYA.

There is no secret sauce.

bwuceli_sl said:

I know how this works. And then what? This is a start-up walking to an investment company to pitch a deal... I mean come on...

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I am assuming at the time they still had an official partnership with SOE, so yeah, it's entirely conceivable that they could possibly have leveraged that with the right investors. I have seen dumber shit happen in business.

Reht_sl said:

I am assuming at the time they still had an official partnership with SOE

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Hard to say about the timing. I don't know, but I suspect that Smed fucked SB over with the classic: hey tech guys work for us for a year or two at a convict labor rate and if we like your stuff I'll get Sony to buy your tiny company for millions, honest. I suspect that SB saw the fuckup that was SOE from the inside, realized they were going to get screwed over by Smed (who was going to take their tech and then tell SB to fuck off), decided they didn't want to be screwed over by Smed so found investors to buy the company. Would have worked out fine except not only is SOE run by an idiot but Sony Japan is run by a bunch of idiots.

The last comment on the press release was so clearly aimed at Smedley.

zzeris_sl said:

Good point but I'm still not sold on Storybricks. This is a company that didn't quite accomplish... anything of note. No other company was waiting in the wings to snap these guys up. Very little background information ever got out. SOE decides not to follow through with the partnership. Everyone knows SOE was a poorly run ship. I don't see any evidence that Storybricks wasn't also just another shit sandwich.

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Eh. That's fine - my main point was directed to the guys who couldn't accept that SB could have found funding to buy SOE.

With respect to the technology, I too would have liked to seen a better demonstration of the technology than what I've seen (which is most of the old SB videos).

zzeris_sl said:

No other company was waiting in the wings to snap these guys up.

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rodolfotheinsaaane comments on Storybricks is closing down

And agree with you re lack of evidence. Talk is cheap.

I think most of the AI goals Daybreak is shooting for are reasonable, but Storybricks was selling untested and unproven snake oil.

90Proof_sl said:

I think most of the AI goals Daybreak is shooting for are reasonable, but Storybricks was selling untested and unproven snake oil.

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I have no idea what AI goal Daybreak is shooting for these days. Are these goals listed somewhere?

With respect to Storybricks: the basic concept seemed pretty simple in concept, no clue as to execution.

1. Instead of faction with groups, you have faction (let's call it "standing" to differentiate it) with individual NPCS. I suppose you probably also have group standing (lets call that faction) with a class of NPCs.

That just requires a lot of DB storage space, which is cheap these days.

2. Every NPC can have multiple triggers - and as I understood it - there would be a lot of generic triggers: the C++ programmers can chime in her, isn't that just an object which you can send various messages too (the triggers) and it'll either ignore them or do something, depending on the trigger.

That just seems like you've got two levels of programming and some kind of database for the NPC to "remember" what's been going on: generic triggers (Orc Group keeps getting killed in Spot A, Eventually this triggers them to start looking for a new spot) and special triggers (actual quests like - a Prince romance quest gets triggered when approached by a High Charisma female PC who has earned positive standing with the prince).

It seems like a lot of programming since you've got thousands of mobs, but doesn't really seem snake oil. I guess the romance triangle bit they described one time seems a bit more complicated - NPC would have to be able to trigger each other - but the base thing of having mobs move about, and NPC-based faction (standing) instead of NPC group based faction seem pretty doable.

I'll dump salt on what I wrote and admit maybe StoryBricks was promising a lot more than the above in which case... Meh.

Honestly, if their concept -was- that simple, there was literally no reason for SOE to have gotten involved with them in the first place. It would have been just more back end work on systems that they have already used in multiple games. It had to have been a lot more complex and then didn't pan out effectively in the end, or at least in enough of a time frame for the new owner to consider it a worthwhile investment.

It seems like it would have been substantially cheaper to just use their own quest/ai system and just add individual npc factions to it. As to the entire pathing thing... yeah, GW2 spouted their AI story crap a lot before it came out, and their developer team was substantially larger than SB, and look how that turned out. The SB idea sounds like it would have worked in a single player game (and reminds me a lot of the Radiant AI from Oblivion, actually) but it just doesn't seem that it would have worked out as they imagined it in an mmorpg. And it appears that internally at SOE/Daybreak, others thought so as well.

Rezz_sl said:

Honestly, if their concept -was- that simple, there was literally no reason for SOE to have gotten involved with them in the first place. It would have been just more back end work on systems that they have already used in multiple games. It had to have been a lot more complex and then didn't pan out effectively in the end, or at least in enough of a time frame for the new owner to consider it a worthwhile investment.

It seems like it would have been substantially cheaper to just use their own quest/ai system and just add individual npc factions to it. As to the entire pathing thing... yeah, GW2 spouted their AI story crap a lot before it came out, and their developer team was substantially larger than SB, and look how that turned out. The SB idea sounds like it would have worked in a single player game (and reminds me a lot of the Radiant AI from Oblivion, actually) but it just doesn't seem that it would have worked out as they imagined it in an mmorpg. And it appears that internally at SOE/Daybreak, others thought so as well.

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Fair enough. Except for the last bit - no telling WTF SOE/Daybreak is thinking these days.

Wasnt there talk about baddies targetting the most dangerous PC ("kill healer first"?). And NPCs calling for help, NPC camps moving to other spots if attacked too often? Bip public events ("baddies invading an area"?).
I guess it was just too CPU intensive in an MMO environment to pull off.
Or SOE simply did not see any progress at storybricks company. Maybe SOE has all the tech they think need for EQN and its already working internally