| Even if SOE did pay off the 30mil debt for the rights to VG, that's still cheap considering everything else. The cost of running a studio, all the employees, with all those expenses, SOE made out like a bandit. It's like a reverse hostile take-over. Force a guy out and watch him make his own mmo and then buy it back on the cheap? It's like identity theft, letting Brad take all the heat.
From what I know of SOE's business practices, they'll probably hire back anyone that didn't previously work for them thats new to the industry and produced good results on VG. They'll put them on the SOE-VG team and have them train a new group of SOE devs on how to use the system. In a year or two they'll dump a lot of the original VG devs in-favor of their in-house trained devs, but probably keep a handful of the originals onboard. When I say handful, I really mean that, like 12 or less of the originals will still be working there in 4 years.
If they decide to make VG a "premier" product, we'll be able to tell based on how many expansions SOE will announce for VG. I'd say if they don't announce a VG expansion within the next 4 months they're going to back-burner VG like they did to TMO.
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