Back to the subject of this thread for just a moment, please.

CME staff talked to Brad Wright, and Brad's response that was "what I said was taken out of context".

I am having a hard time visioning how anything that was printed in those interviews could be ‘in context’ and still not damaging.

Now I realize that some reporters like to put a spin on words, but if Brad’s words were misrepresented and he believed in the SGW game & CME staff, wouldn’t you think he would take a moment to correct it?

Heck, even Paula Abdul has corrected her ‘out of context’ statements that were printed!
 

Originally posted by tigam

 

As for knowledge relay, the books are secret but the reality is Knowledge Relay was revenue generating and unlike CME profitable for many quarters.  in fact when the money crunch first hit, they used KR funds to pay CME payroll at least once.  However employees perceived KR to be yet another "waste" of money.  Jensen was all to happy to "sell" it to himself (for worthless CME stock) when money got tight and the perception was the company needs to scale back to just SGW.  However, it wasn't as if KR was "free" for CME.  Jensen operated it with CME staff (CFO, Finance, HR, were all shared, offly hard to grow a game company focused on game development when management staff also had to grow an entirely different business and model as well).  What's worse is even after he bought it he continued to run it with CME resources. So employees and fans have a right to feel management wasn't really focused on building SGW as much as it was on making money off investors anyway they could.

 

Whiting and Jensen are very good at playing good cop, bad cop – they are two peas in a pod. Also, don’t forget that Jensen works for the Board of Directors, which is Whiting.

I believe there were many administrative employees shed over the payroll tax payments, or lack thereof. The officers of the company didn’t want to be on the hook for not paying the taxes. Whiting made a choice to pay employees in January over the taxes, they had some signed agreements that the officers weren’t liable the lack of tax payments.

Now onto scaling back to just SGW -- that just never happened!   They still have a bunch of losers at these other companies/studios that do not contribute to SGW, even when asked. Of course, Hand Cranked was formed by putting the folks from SGW’s that couldn’t cut it into that company. The stuff that Mass Illusions produced looked like poop. The stuff that Hand Cranked produced, looked like worse poop. Overall, they don’t have enough employees at these ‘fake’ studios to even begin to write a design document, so most of them are just sitting around collecting paychecks week after week, to keep the façade of multiple studios, and therefore keeping Mr. Whiting out of jail.   But they are probably all mormons at these fake companies, too so I'm sure this makes it all okay.
 

Happy Easter and Good Passover!

Originally posted by tigam

Much of Agricola's conjecture's are accurate, or close enough to accuracy for forum wars anyway.  Not sure where he gets *his* information, I know where I get mine and seeing his posts often corraborates what I already knew.   I will say though that he's wrong on his assumptions about how much Gary Whiting has control of day to day.

Gary is definately a pain in the arse at CME however Gary's in the office even less frequently than Tim Jenson (the CEO who has a 2 day a week contract... part of the endemic problems at the company from the start).  Gary rarely, if ever directly communicates with any CME employees, not even via e-mail.  Most of the employees are controlled by Tim Jenson, who is sometimes a Whiting  shil and sometimes has his own agenda (why on earth did a video game company acquire a business information development company for 2 million, which 2 years later was sold to Tim Jenson directly for nothing but some CME stock? This is the same stuff Jenson was convicted of at Merisel by the SEC).  

Gary controls the money.  Few employees enjoy his presence but they do appreciate his ability to raise funds (regardless of source, MMOGULs or otherwise it does pay payroll).  But Kevin Ballentine doesn't talk to Gary before he makes a PR startement.  He *might* talk to Tim Jenson who rarely, if every, converses with Gary on such things.

Now what MGM will do about all of this is the giant unknown.  MGM just audited CME's books last week and flew in to see the game.  Mum's the word on how that went.

Oh wow, so part of the 40-50 million to fund SGW went to purchase Knowledge Relay? I would suspect that CME was also assisting in funding Knowledge Relay operations and payroll as well? Would make sense why CME ran out of money!!

So if this company was given to Tim Jenson (maybe to stop the bleed on CME?) Why does Knowledge Relay still advertise and run day-to-day business operations under the CME Logo? Why do they use CME HR Resources (see advertisements on monster.com or flipdog)? Why does Roger Piskulick still work for KR and not CME ?So many questions!

Certainly, someone knows something about the MGM two-day visit. Maybe they were auditing the books to find out the true investment in SGW to pay off CME and get the license back ! <one can hope>
 

In breaking news, I came across a Stargate Worlds tee-shirt at the local GoodWill in the men's department.   

Now don't panic, yes, yes I bought it.   Just wished I had my iPhone with me to take that sad picture.