Legend Games (2)
After Block Valley succeeded, Steve Bostick belatedly turned around and demanded money from the company.
He claimed he had pitched the original idea and had been involved in the early development.
At first he asked for ten million dollars, but the founders refused. So Steve multiplied the amount by ten and filed a lawsuit for one hundred million.
To pursue a suit of that scale, it could cost anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to as much as a million.
But this was America, the land of lawsuits.
The moment the case looked profitable, a number of law firms rushed in, offering to take their fees on contingency, and the battle went to court.
There were two major points of contention.
One was that Steve had been a co-founder who invested fifty thousand dollars, not an employee. The other was that although he had left the company in the middle, he had never clearly stated that he was giving up his stake.
There was also disagreement over how much he had actually contributed to Block Valley’s development.
After a long legal fight, the two sides finally settled.
The exact settlement amount was never made public, but it was said that they paid at least twenty million dollars. On top of that, Steve was also guaranteed 0.5 percent of Block Valley’s revenue.
At the time, no one knew what that would amount to.
But not long after the settlement, Block Valley exploded in growth on the back of the metaverse craze, and Steve Bostick sat back and collected tens of millions of dollars every year.
If I left it alone, the same thing would happen again.
Charles had been voicing his grievances the whole time.
“Steve was always the kind of guy who only gave orders and never actually did the work. Once, jokingly, he told us he was the coach and we were the players.”
“But he did call you the quarterback. I was the wide receiver.”
“That was ridiculous too. Our team’s quarterback was Rufus.”
In American football, the quarterback is the single most important position.
Kenn said, “And yet every time it was mealtime, Steve would nag Rufus to stop eating so much. He’d say money was tight and food costs were getting out of hand.”
“He even tried to make Rufus pay for his meals separately, and we had to stop him. There’s a line, you know. You can’t go after someone for what they eat.”
“After that, Rufus was shocked and down in the dumps for a while. It was absurd. Sure, Rufus ate about twice as much as everyone else, but he also worked three or four times harder. If Rufus had been the one to leave instead of Steve, Purple Games would have folded ages ago.”
Charles shook his head. “Honestly, I was angry when he said he was leaving, but I tried to understand him. Everyone was struggling just as hard.”
Kenn nodded. “Honestly, I wanted to quit too, more than once. So when I heard that Steve had left the company and gotten a job at Dirty Dog, I even congratulated him.”
“But later, through a mutual acquaintance, I found out his offer had already been secured before he left the company.”
“While the rest of us were staying up all night killing ourselves, that bastard was sneaking around interviewing at dozens of companies! And now he wants his share.”
“What makes me even angrier is that he went around telling people he had single-handedly conceived and developed Hammer Warrior so he could get hired. That’s how he landed a job at a major studio like Dirty Dog.”
From the way he said it, it was obvious there was a lot bottled up inside him.
In truth, whenever a company was founded by multiple people, conflict among the founders was common.
No, it was probably rarer for that not to happen.
Listening only to the two of them, Steve Bostick sounded like the villain. But you could never really know a person by hearing only one side of the story.
Steve’s version might have been different.
But what mattered now wasn’t whether he was good or bad. The problem was that he would eventually reach into Block Valley’s revenue and take a cut.
I asked the two of them, “So what are you planning to do?”
Charles answered as if it were obvious. “Ignore him. That’s the answer.”
Kenn nodded. “I don’t want to give a guy like that even one penny.”
I understood how they felt.
It was bad enough that he’d walked out to save himself, and now he wanted to come back for his share. Of course they wouldn’t want to even talk to him.
But...
“No. I think this is a good chance to meet him once.”
They looked startled.
“Why?”
I said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You have to remove the cancerous trash before it spreads.”
That way, you wouldn’t end up with the disease later.
AAA games were usually made by giant publishers with huge budgets and huge teams. By contrast, games built on small budgets with small teams were called indie games.
After ESD emerged, distribution and sales became easier. Once it was possible for anyone to succeed simply by making a good game, the golden age of indie titles began.
One developer made a game alone and released it, only to strike it rich and land on a pile of tens of millions of dollars. And My Craft, released as an indie game, sold for a staggering two billion dollars to NS.
Steve Bostick, who worked at Stargate Studio, thought that if he wanted real money, he needed to make a game of his own.
But he couldn’t do it alone. So he started sweet-talking the talented people at the company.
“How much longer are we going to keep making contract work for other people? Let’s pool our strength and make a game ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we can build something huge.”
The others listened to him.
The four of them joined forces, quit the company, and founded a game studio called Purple Games. The first title they created was Hammer Warrior.
As the launch approached, Steve was overflowing with dreams.
If the game hits big, I’ll make a fortune. What if a major publisher offers to buy Purple Games for several million dollars? Would that mean I’d pocket a million dollars right away?
But that never happened.
Only a tiny fraction of indie games succeeded. Considering how most of them vanished without a trace, Hammer Warrior had sold pretty well.
They’d still made close to five hundred thousand dollars.
On paper, that sounded fine. But split four ways, it came to just one hundred thousand dollars per person.
And even that had to be poured into developing the next game.
At this rate, I would’ve been better off staying at the company.
They were working themselves to the bone and still not making any real money.
Funding kept drying up, and development on the follow-up title drifted aimlessly without direction. He gradually lost all enthusiasm for making games.
Even as he tried to save every penny he could, one of his coworkers kept eating like a horse. While everyone else ordered one meal, that guy would order two or three for himself.
Every time he saw it, irritation boiled up inside him.
“From now on, let’s pay for one menu item from the company fund like before, and anything extra should come out of personal money.”
In his mind, that was perfectly common-sense and completely reasonable.
If company money was paying and someone ate two dishes while another ate only one, the second person was the one taking the loss. Where in the world was the fairness in that?
And if he eats less because of this, it’ll be better for his health too.
But the other coworkers didn’t side with him.
Why can’t they understand what I’m saying? If they’re thinking this way while developing the game, no wonder it ended up like this.
As time passed, he became more and more anxious. It felt as if water was slowly rising around his feet.
Why did I leave a perfectly good company and get myself into this mess?
On a sinking ship, you had to get off as fast as possible.
While his coworkers threw themselves into development, Steve secretly went around interviewing with other game companies.
Just as luck would have it, he landed a job at Dirty Dog, a major studio and a subsidiary of Sonyu.
His salary was at least double what he had made at Stargate Studio.
Dirty Dog! So all that suffering wasn’t for nothing after all.
Once the job was secured, he kicked the co-founded company to the curb. He had no interest in the equity of some failing business.
“I can’t do this anymore. Do whatever you want and keep going without me.”
He was the leader of Purple Games.
So he assumed that once he left, the team would naturally fall apart. But his coworkers stayed behind and kept making the game.
He snickered when he saw it.
Before long, the company would surely shut its doors, and all of them would be scrambling to find work. When that happened, they’d beg him for help.
But...
Far from failing, the company got investment from somewhere, rented an office, and hired more people.
Later, when he heard the name of the investor, he was stunned.
Continue Capital?
Continue Capital, which had made its name by sending Thomas Motors into free fall, had also acquired the cloud company Snow Crash and risen to prominence as a new Wall Street star.
The fact that Purple Games had secured investment from a firm like that alone drew the attention of other studios and gamers alike.
The Block Valley he had dismissed as a sandcastle was being built one level at a time, laying foundations so solid it looked like a skyscraper rising from the ground.
As the game’s chances of success grew, whispers spread that the company was worth at least ten million dollars.
Steve felt like his stomach was turning inside out.
While he had been content with nothing more than a developer’s salary of one hundred thousand dollars a year, his former coworkers had become millionaires.
The company you’re working for. That should have been my company. The game you’re making. That should have been my game.
As recently as a few months ago, that had actually been true.
If he had just sat still, he would have been enjoying wealth and fame. But he had thrown it all away with his own hands.
He couldn’t just leave it at that.
Even if he couldn’t claw back his original twenty-five percent stake, he needed to secure something for himself. So he hurriedly contacted his former partners.
“I was the one who proposed the Block Valley idea, and I was involved in the early development too. So I should get something out of it, shouldn’t I?”
He had been the one who suggested starting the company, and he had handled the incorporation himself. Without him, those guys would still be in some subcontracting shop making games for other people.
But the others didn’t even bother pretending to listen.
He asked for back the fifty thousand dollars he had invested at the start, out of resentment if nothing else, but that too was refused.
He ground his teeth in private.
I hope the game crashes and burns.
The more he thought about it, the more wronged he felt. It got to the point where he couldn’t even sleep properly at night.
“Are you free now?”
A few days later, Charles suddenly called him.
When I met Steve Bostick in person, he looked polished and well put together. His skin was clean, and even his beard had been neatly trimmed.
He looked at me and asked, “Who are you?”
I held out my hand and introduced myself. “Hello. I’m Han Miru from Continue Capital.”
At the name Continue Capital, his expression changed in surprise, and he gripped my hand tightly. “I’m Steve Bostick.”
Steve looked at Charles and Kenn. “Long time no see. How’ve you all been? Why isn’t Rufus here?”
Charles cut in flatly. “He said he didn’t want to see your face.”
“...”
After the greetings were out of the way, we all sat down together.
The expression Steve wore when he looked at me was a little strange.
Maybe he was thinking that if he had stayed with the company, he would have been the one sitting across from me and negotiating the investment deal.
I got straight to the point. “I heard the story. You’re claiming a share because of the game you’re developing. Is that true?”
Steve nodded. “Yes. I’m a co-founder of Purple Games, after all. Block Valley is a game I helped plan too.”
Kenn looked at him in disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? I was the one who first proposed the sandbox game idea. If it hadn’t been for my idea, Block Valley wouldn’t even exist.”
Charles and Kenn looked utterly speechless.
Yes. To sue the company you had abandoned like this, you had to be shameless on a level like that.