Chronicles of Elyria Dev Soulbound Studios May Soon Run Out Of Money | MMORPG.com

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Chronicles of Elyria Dev Soulbound Studios May Soon Run Out Of Money | MMORPG.com

After months of silence, Chronicles of Elyria's Jeromy "Caspian" Walsh has provided an update on the MMO. However, based on the new dev journal, it looks like Soulbound Studios might see itself run out of money again, possibly by the end of the year.

Read the full story here

BrotherMaynard

Not to worry - after CoE and KoE the English alphabet has 18 more consonants to pick from for his next Plonkers of Elyria project.

Quizzical

Wait, they still have money? I'd think it would be illegal to collect money for a project, then not spend it all on the project or refund it, but just keep money that hasn't yet been spent and shut down the project. For that matter, it probably is illegal, which is what the lawsuits were about.

strawhat0981

You dont say, lol.

goldboyy45

Really hope Caspian empties all his life savings into CoE, you love to see it.

Truvidienn

If you are gonna go down big at least don't take the wife with you.

Iselin

Talking the talk again.

Grymmoire

rioha said:

If Caspian askith we giveth

The finger?

slowz2secret

Goty 2023 100% true, no fake!

Tokken

Okay People, hide your wallets!!

Slapshot1188

@lotrlore Your Headline is missing a word.  You need to add "AGAIN" to the end of it.

Ginaz

"wE ARe ThE sTOrM!!!"

Kyleran

Quizzical said:

Wait, they still have money? I'd think it would be illegal to collect money for a project, then not spend it all on the project or refund it, but just keep money that hasn't yet been spent and shut down the project. For that matter, it probably is illegal, which is what the lawsuits were about.

He's been living off of 2 yrs of PPP loans which he filed for based on having 30 employees the year before after laying most everyone off in March 2020 before the program even started.

Only fair he draw on his "personal" funds considering he used backer pledge money to pay off his original "investment" then paid he and his wife executive level salaries for several years, again with backer money.

Somewhere in the world there's a snake oil company looking for a pitchman, but no way would anyone ever hire him in the gaming world.

My guess, he ends up in Crypto gaming..
already has talked about incorporating into COE.

Scot

Broken by Slapshot, nice hat tip from Joseph.

CotC (Chronicles of the Courtroom) is the next title from this great studio.

BrotherMaynard

Scot said:

Broken by Slapshot, nice hat tip from Joseph.

That's why he's called the Harbinger. Broke the game and Jeromy's business model. Until Jeromy invented the Letter Swapping Method (TM) and the fog of war dev challenge, that is.

vegetableoil

the game sounds like ponzi scheme.

hayes303

The only thing I am shocked about in this is describing it as a "bombshell" instead of "people were surprised that the studio was still open".

Ungood

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

Vidahr

The UI example has the Apple and Twitter logo: https://media.chroniclesofelyria.com/articles/2022/July/parcel-info-box.png

The placeholders are almost all free Unity assets.

They've come a long way, I see.

Quizzical

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

You refer to what could have been, but perhaps it couldn't have been.  Competent game developers scale back their promises to be something that they can actually deliver.  That involves eschewing a lot of things that would be really great if someone could actually make them work on the basis that they're too hard to implement.

If you have no real intention to actually deliver a working game, then there's no need to scale back your promises like that.  You can promise whatever you think would make for a great game, without worrying too much about how to deliver it.  But when your project inevitably fails, it doesn't mean that your project failed to live up to the potential of doing all of the great things that you promised.  It only means that your project was a scam from the start that never even had the potential of mediocrity, let alone greatness.

goldboyy45

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

I can write a book on this quote, that the game idea was epic as you stated, and you know what you are correct, the game idea was epic...heck it was beyond epic...this is how Caspian was able to trick people to give him $8M in cash. The fact is CoE never ever had a chance to come to fruition..why? Because the scope of this game is beyond the capability what Soulbound Studios could ever do.

You think you can build CoE, a game where every server map size is equivalent to 1,700 skyrim maps and you think you can build this game for 10M dollars? It is complete nonsense.

CoE would need a shit ton more cash to ever come to life, i imagine at a minimum 100M dollars if not more.

Quizzical

goldboyy45 said:

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

I can write a book on this quote, that the game idea was epic as you stated, and you know what you are correct, the game idea was epic...heck it was beyond epic...this is how Caspian was able to trick people to give him $8M in cash. The fact is CoE never ever had a chance to come to fruition..why? Because the scope of this game is beyond the capability what Soulbound Studios could ever do.

You think you can build CoE, a game where every server map size is equivalent to 1,700 skyrim maps and you think you can build this game for 10M dollars? It is complete nonsense.

CoE would need a shit ton more cash to ever come to life, i imagine at a minimum 100M dollars if not more.

Building a game world with an enormous map is pretty easy to do.  See Kerbal Space Program, for example.  What's hard is making that enormous map actually interesting.  KSP has the excuse that the details of the map didn't need to be that interesting as they weren't the point of the game.

Ungood

Quizzical said:

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

You refer to what could have been, but perhaps it couldn't have been.  Competent game developers scale back their promises to be something that they can actually deliver.  That involves eschewing a lot of things that would be really great if someone could actually make them work on the basis that they're too hard to implement.

That was one of the things about CoE, that I think was the most insidious of what was put out.

Nothing was truly "Out of Scope" for a competent developer, in fact a lot of features were already in existence in other games.

To use an Example. Aging. This was a very common feature in Muds, where your character had an age, and it kept growing older. So this was not an out of scope concept, that a character would grow old and even die, in fact this sounds very doable. So nothing about this feature sends up a red flag, in fact, it sounds pretty cool all things said and done.

Always Active in game. EQ1, had players turn into NPC's upon "Disconnect" for around 5 min or so, so that a player's character would gain AI actions and responses, while crude, that meant that if you DC'ed, your character would continue to attack and even cast some class appropriate spells (regardless if those spells were memorized by your character or not). So just extending this time frame with a slightly better AI, to make you on par to a generic NPC, does not seem all that complex, all things said and done, when this kind of thing was implemented in MMO's back in 2001.

With the idea of population, BDO, is full to the gills of AFK players running scripts, so player load should be a non-issue. If they front ended it, like they talked about players being able to make their own scripts, even better.

Being able to design your own stuff, Second Life already does this, Project Entopia I think also does this, not to mention games like Trove do this to an extent, so.. again. Not something that would be OMG, this is so new wave, it's just something that has been lacking in other MMO's for, IMHO, no good reason. But this kind of thing already exists, the tech is there, so it's just a matter of putting it in, in way that would work for the game world.

I mean, even the Kingship, where players would be playing some kind of Fantasy MMO, Minecraft style game, is not something we have never seen before, ergo, Minecraft, even Trove offers this to an extent with Club Worlds, so again, this was not some feature list where anyone that played these other games would be going "Oh you can't do that, it can't happen"

I mean, most of what he was pitching, you could find working in other games already.. that were made in some cases, on a smaller budget., so ideally, when you looked at his pitch, nothing was really out of the realm of possibility.

So it was in fact feasible that this game could have been made, maybe not for 10 million, but, possible none the less.

Of course that would have required a competent team and not the sack of shit that conned people into investing into this dumpster fire, obviously.

Vrika

Ungood said:

Quizzical said:

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

You refer to what could have been, but perhaps it couldn't have been.  Competent game developers scale back their promises to be something that they can actually deliver.  That involves eschewing a lot of things that would be really great if someone could actually make them work on the basis that they're too hard to implement.

That was one of the things about CoE, that I think was the most insidious of what was put out.

Nothing was truly "Out of Scope" for a competent developer, in fact a lot of features were already in existence in other games.

To use an Example. Aging. This was a very common feature in Muds, where your character had an age, and it kept growing older. So this was not an out of scope concept, that a character would grow old and even die, in fact this sounds very doable. So nothing about this feature sends up a red flag, in fact, it sounds pretty cool all things said and done.

Always Active in game. EQ1, had players turn into NPC's upon "Disconnect" for around 5 min or so, so that a player's character would gain AI actions and responses, while crude, that meant that if you DC'ed, your character would continue to attack and even cast some class appropriate spells (regardless if those spells were memorized by your character or not). So just extending this time frame with a slightly better AI, to make you on par to a generic NPC, does not seem all that complex, all things said and done, when this kind of thing was implemented in MMO's back in 2001.

With the idea of population, BDO, is full to the gills of AFK players running scripts, so player load should be a non-issue. If they front ended it, like they talked about players being able to make their own scripts, even better.

Being able to design your own stuff, Second Life already does this, Project Entopia I think also does this, not to mention games like Trove do this to an extent, so.. again. Not something that would be OMG, this is so new wave, it's just something that has been lacking in other MMO's for, IMHO, no good reason. But this kind of thing already exists, the tech is there, so it's just a matter of putting it in, in way that would work for the game world.

I mean, even the Kingship, where players would be playing some kind of Fantasy MMO, Minecraft style game, is not something we have never seen before, ergo, Minecraft, even Trove offers this to an extent with Club Worlds, so again, this was not some feature list where anyone that played these other games would be going "Oh you can't do that, it can't happen"

I mean, most of what he was pitching, you could find working in other games already.. that were made in some cases, on a smaller budget., so ideally, when you looked at his pitch, nothing was really out of the realm of possibility.

So it was in fact feasible that this game could have been made, maybe not for 10 million, but, possible none the less.

Of course that would have required a competent team and not the sack of shit that conned people into investing into this dumpster fire, obviously.

If you were to develop a single idea from his pitch, none of those would be impossible.

But as a whole, the budget for developing all of them together into a single game would have been hundreds of millions. And that's assuming a developer with the organization and experience to run one of the largest and most expensive game development projects in the world.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Slapshot1188

Vrika said:

Ungood said:

Quizzical said:

Ungood said:

The absolute worst part of this, is that this game idea was fucking epic.

And ended up being a epic dumpster fire... so sad. I mean, I am sure, that above and beyond the loss of money, I would wager some gamers would want to beat Caspian with a wet chicken till it cooked his left buttcheek just for killing their dreams of what this game could have been.

You refer to what could have been, but perhaps it couldn't have been.  Competent game developers scale back their promises to be something that they can actually deliver.  That involves eschewing a lot of things that would be really great if someone could actually make them work on the basis that they're too hard to implement.

That was one of the things about CoE, that I think was the most insidious of what was put out.

Nothing was truly "Out of Scope" for a competent developer, in fact a lot of features were already in existence in other games.

To use an Example. Aging. This was a very common feature in Muds, where your character had an age, and it kept growing older. So this was not an out of scope concept, that a character would grow old and even die, in fact this sounds very doable. So nothing about this feature sends up a red flag, in fact, it sounds pretty cool all things said and done.

Always Active in game. EQ1, had players turn into NPC's upon "Disconnect" for around 5 min or so, so that a player's character would gain AI actions and responses, while crude, that meant that if you DC'ed, your character would continue to attack and even cast some class appropriate spells (regardless if those spells were memorized by your character or not). So just extending this time frame with a slightly better AI, to make you on par to a generic NPC, does not seem all that complex, all things said and done, when this kind of thing was implemented in MMO's back in 2001.

With the idea of population, BDO, is full to the gills of AFK players running scripts, so player load should be a non-issue. If they front ended it, like they talked about players being able to make their own scripts, even better.

Being able to design your own stuff, Second Life already does this, Project Entopia I think also does this, not to mention games like Trove do this to an extent, so.. again. Not something that would be OMG, this is so new wave, it's just something that has been lacking in other MMO's for, IMHO, no good reason. But this kind of thing already exists, the tech is there, so it's just a matter of putting it in, in way that would work for the game world.

I mean, even the Kingship, where players would be playing some kind of Fantasy MMO, Minecraft style game, is not something we have never seen before, ergo, Minecraft, even Trove offers this to an extent with Club Worlds, so again, this was not some feature list where anyone that played these other games would be going "Oh you can't do that, it can't happen"

I mean, most of what he was pitching, you could find working in other games already.. that were made in some cases, on a smaller budget., so ideally, when you looked at his pitch, nothing was really out of the realm of possibility.

So it was in fact feasible that this game could have been made, maybe not for 10 million, but, possible none the less.

Of course that would have required a competent team and not the sack of shit that conned people into investing into this dumpster fire, obviously.

If you were to develop a single idea from his pitch, none of those would be impossible.

But as a whole, the budget for developing all of them together into a single game would have been hundreds of millions. And that's assuming a developer with the organization and experience to run one of the largest and most expensive game development projects in the world.

Right.  Simply looking at his promises, his budget, his team size, and his timeline should have raised huge flashing red flags.

Then he claimed this was possible because SpatialOS was going to be “the fabric the game would be built on”.  And subsequently dropped SpatialOS… and said he was going to recreate it with his team.  

Somehow he got people to pay millions of dollars (many multiples more than his Kickstarter goal) as the years rolled by and milestone after milestone was missed.

I still say his greatest asset was his Psychology degree.