Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment is out of money, out of employees, and nearly out of time.
The studio behind the new video game Stargate: Resistance and the long-anticipated MMO Stargate Worlds is currently undergoing evaluation by a court-appointed receiver, and has effectively ceased operations. Because the leadership of the company is currently in dispute (story), the receiver is empowered by the court to take over management in the interim.
The receiver, Edward Burr, has released his initial findings regarding the current state of the company in a release directed at shareholders, posted on the CME and Firesky Web sites and sent by e-mail to all known shareholders.
According to the release CME currently has no employees and less than $10,000 in the bank. It owes at least $2 million to creditors, unpaid payroll of about $1.1 million dating to March 2009, and federal and state payroll taxes of $3 million. The company has also been named in five legal complaints with a potential liability that the receiver estimates at approximately $10.1 million.
The company cannot pay the rent on its space in Phoenix, Arizona, and the landlord has indicated that he will “lock the doors” at midnight on March 31. To make matters worse, there is also a question about whether CME was the one to sign the original lease at all.
Needless to say, with no employees in an office space about to be closed down, work on Stargate Worlds has come to a halt. “With regard to actual operations, game development has ceased,” according to the report. “Not to be redundant, but there are no employees.”
Stargate: Resistance
Things look brighter for the game that has been released, however. In partnering with Phoenix-based Fresh Start Studios, Cheyenne Mountain Games (an operational subsidiary of CME) has effectively sold off Stargate: Resistance and held on to continuing royalty rights for having developed the game. FSS is run by a number of CME shareholders concerned with keeping the online game up and running. The company is now paying for the maintenance and development of the game, and is responsible for making the licensing payments to MGM.
“As represented to the Receiver, their sole intent was to preserve the game and prevent it from going offline due to lack of funding, employees leaving because they had not been paid, etc.,” the report says.
But as part of the agreement, CMG reserves the right to repurchase Resistance. It would need to repay the $300,000 that FSS paid to take over the game, plus 10 percent, within the first year.
The Receiver must now either ratify the deal with Fresh Start, or the CME shareholders must act to repay FSS and nullify the arrangement. Assuming that Resistance stays with Fresh Start its development can continue unencumbered. In fact, the company released a new update for the game just yesterday.
What is next for Cheyenne Mountain? The company is awaiting dispensation on a $3 million state tax credit to ease some of its immediate debt. Otherwise, its only income is in royalties from Stargate: Resistance paid by Fresh Start, tied to the game’s net receipts.
CME remains in litigation over both its rightful leadership and a February 12 bankruptcy filing. The receiver is evaluating whether it makes sense to keep the company in bankruptcy court, and may request that the bankruptcy petition be withdrawn if he deems that it is not in the company’s best interests.
(Thanks to Aaron at SG Gaming Info for the tip)
MMO development is not to be messed with. It is the single most expensive game development project a studio could undertake.
Seriously, MGN should never have allowed development for a SG MMO to begin without an existing Stargate presence in video games. I hate seeing this news. But it’s to be expected. Start small, then once you have a foothold on how to use the license in a video game format, then you can expand to other endeavors.
*tsk* best of luck CME & FSS
wow I can not believe it once again we get left waiting for nothing. Hope that whoever ends up buying the stargate franchise does a better job than MGM
Fantastic. What a giant let down for all the fans who stuck through their bulls**t cover-ups and tried to stay positive. MGM, don’t EVER let a bunch of inexperienced, incompetent developers touch Stargate again. Stargate Resistance sucks, and I refuse to purchase it. We deserve better. We deserve WAY better.
MGM needs to give the Stargate videogame license to qualified and experienced developers. And I agree with Mrja84, they should not start with an mmo. Start with a FPS or something easier to develop to build up the fanbase. I’d love to see a Bioware-developed Stargate game.
I saw this coming for a long long time; I’ll give them credit for limping this long though lol. Although, it seems that ‘Fresh Start’ knows what they’re doing, looking at what the updates fixed. It actually inspires me to want and play the game again. We’ll see where it goes with Resistance I suppose. But seriously, MGM cant find 10 people to put together a kick ass stargate game… I actually wrote up a design document a long time ago for a stargate space combat game, hoping by some act of god that MGM would notice it and use… Read more »
No kidding, I completely agree with Mrja84 and JohnSN7. Start small and build up. Stargate SG-1 The Alliance may have been a great start had it actually made it to retail shelves. An MMO, however a great idea considering the series, should have been handled by a more experienced developer not to mention the financial power to actually complete from start to finish.
Wow things go from bad to worse for CME. Oh and a Bioware made Stargate Game = WIN!
CME, and Firesky just need to release the source code for Stargate Worlds, and make it a community maintained project.
I would like to point out that SGR will continue past this and it is only the studio i name only closing to my understanding.
MGM’s choice in developers for Stargate games has been poor to say the least. JoWood has garnered a bit of a reputation of bullying their development teams around and releasing incomplete, bugged software; CME had no prior experience and was a questionable choice of an MMO for a first-time project. MGM needs to shop around for a reputable development team if they want to break into the medium anytime soon. EA would seem a safe bet at this point, and they’ve mostly shaken off their “evil empire” reputation after Activision basically claimed that stigma as their own. As long as… Read more »
I would have started out with a Single Player game for both CONSOLES and Computers . Some with a full story line to it .. Some things that would take you in the world of STARGATE SG-1 . maybe have it fully co-op style game where you and 3 friends could play threw the game as the main characters . Heck they have the best story line for the game , Take the main plots from season 1 to season 8 with some side missions for fun . the main story was for the SG-1 Team was to explore and… Read more »
they will never come up with that money. EVER. this so called studio will never release any stargate games.
@ PITBULL831
Personally, I think they should do it like the new Ghostbusters game, in that you play a new member of SG-1 (perhaps a replacement for Carter), sometime after Season 5 of SGA.
I’d rather go out exploring WITH SG-1 than BE SG-1.
Well this is just great!
Waitin for a good few years for this to be let down. . . AGAIN!
Resistance better not fall through ether because i actually enjoy playing it!
Thats what happens when you aim WAY higher than you can ever reach. I called this long time ago. Next time, MGM, make a deal with someone that actually knows how to make games, yeah?
As a person massively against MMO’s, I think this is good news. Why not give us a contained story based game where it’s first person featuring characters we already know and give a damn about.
Oh, wait, that was The Alliance and it, too, failed. I’m starting to think a good Stargate game is never going to happen. It seems to be a curse for this franchise.
I think Stargate is easily right up there with Star Trek & Star Wars (and Babylon 5, for that matter) in terms what the franchise’s universe has to offer for game content to be built off of. But at the same time, it’s also a game developer’s Achilles’ Heel because it is so big and overwhelming.
If done properly with the right developer/publisher and enough time and money, it could be an amazing gaming experience. For that reason, I’m really looking forward to seeing what Bioware does with Star Wars next year when it comes out.
I’m absolutely sure that a good team of developers (Bioware is my favorite) would be able to make a high-quality Stargate game. There’s so much lore, mythology, and richness to the story that it would work beautifully. MGM just has poor judgement when selecting videogame developers.
I hope they can sought this messed out, but I do still think that MMO is the right place to take Stargate in, Stargate is gigantic universe an the Stargate effectively makes it unlimited.
I wish I had the money to buy the company, relocate it the UK an begin development again, I probably do it better than those guys. An you can be a new developer an developed perfectly good games, so it was not that cause the problems it was the management of the company.
there has to be some way to help them get the game back on track . this could be as big as or bigger the world of warcaft if it could get some more money to get it done .
Hope this isn’t going to be the end of Stargate Worlds.
I expected this. What kinda of idiot would even loan them the start up capital if their first project was going to be an MMO.
(Laughs) Again, I laugh at this studio. They could of made anything, and they made a third-person piece of crap with no single player. Um, hello, what the hell are you thinking? Why is someone going to play this junk if they already have a wide selection of good games? OH! It’s because it’s in the Stargate world, so, it’s got to bring in the fans, right? RIGHT? RIIIIGHT!?
16.2 million in debt, only 10k in the bank, no employees, ownership in dispute and the doors about to be locked up…. does anyone still doubt that this project is doomed?
Ive said it before and I will say it again, MMOs based on preexisting franchises are deliberate attempts to bank on the popularity of said franchise and put out a sub par product. One can only hope that game studios that engage in this sort of intent suffer similar fates.
What I want to see is a GOOD SG-1 FPS, where you play through a campaign as a new member of SG-1, along side Cam, Vala, Daniel etc. The campaign would be based around looking for new tech off world and we could visit some of the classic environments from the history of the game. It would also be an easy way to introduce with lots of varieties of enemies rather than just Jaffa. However it would also have awesome team based online multiplayer. Where you can pick from a selection of races such as Go’uld, Jaffa, Ori, Humans, Wraith… Read more »
Stargate games are doomed to fail. At least when given into the hands of either unexperienced people or people that are not really fans. Weird that MGM does not verify if teams that start on a stargate game are actually up for the task. As mentioned before it would be really nice to have a nice game set in the stargate world. Preferably you would shoose a character of a newly formed sg team and go on an epic stargate rollercoaster, meeting characters and locations from the series along the way and ofcourse new characters and location. Just needs decent… Read more »
Yep, starting with an MMO is a really really bad idea. If they’d started with Resistance and then if that worked out moved on to Worlds, then they might have had a higher chance of succeeding or at least the company might still be afloat with Resistance rather than in serious debt.
That said, I’d prefer to start out with a decent RPG, in the style of Bioware. Oh well, at least I have Mass Effect, that keeps me plenty busy :D
Really, must money drive everything that happens in the SG universe? Not only are all the series highly susceptible to the need to post ratings and satisfy the studio managers (I know all series are, but I bet the Stargate creators have had to make quite a few more concessions to the “market forces” than usual), but every single Stargate endeavor so far has received very little in the way of funding (perhaps Universe doesn’t have budget issues, but the other series and the films sure did, and you could often see it onscreen, too). This, apparently, extends to the… Read more »
I have no problem with the devs. Bu I have been collecting video games for 20+ years so I might have a good eye for games. 1 I never saw or herd of there game at E3 or any other show. 2. There was no WOW footage…. I mean there must not have been since I never saw it and something that awesome would have been un escapable hype. 3 they did not seem to get enough hype on any stargate game by MGM or who ever ther epublish was to make a splash. 3 the game seems to have… Read more »
I think everyone is forgetting the simple fact that they were already screwed but not because of the franchise or because of how they build the games or even because of the fandom’s constant and unending doubt of their success from the very start, but because of the guy that had been running their company all this time, the man that’s being sued by all involved parties, that screwed Cheyenne Mountain over financially for his own personal benefit and, basically, ran the company into the ground. Everyone can blame whoever it is they think should take the blame for the… Read more »
[…] title called Stargate Resistance that launched in 2010 only to announce bankruptcy days later with less than US$10k in the bank, no employees and millions owing to creditors. Gary Whiting was fired from CME, with CME starting litigation against him. Stargate Resistance […]