[David E. Gervais]

The history of SFI as I know it,..

1) Small group of 6 people that wanted to make strategy games.
2) Same small group made a Hockey Game instead (due to it being easier to sell) That bombed.. Game Name "Solid Ice".
3) They than managed to secure a deal to develope an Indianna Jones game for Lucasarts. SFI spent allot of money in the dev and in the end Lucasarts decided to cancel the project due to not wanting it released when the 'Last Crusade' came out. Lucasarts made an adventure game based on the movie instead.
4) In order to try and generate income SFI used the talent of it's artists to do artwork for games. Steel Panthers, Age of Rifles, Jagged Alliance, etc. Things were looking better.
5) Work began on Deciples,.. they also turned to 'publishing' to help generate more money.. Things were looking good for several years..
6) IMHO they grew too fast in the development dept.(having close to 100 employees at their peak) Making the payroll was a high priority at that point because the government had been pulling all the strings and forced them to pay employees before contracts,.. As I understand it all of the money recieved from the government was conditional on creating employment.
6) BAM! as a publisher they made the mistake of investing close to 800k$$ in an external development house. They virtually lost that and this happend when things were just starting to look good.
7) This caused a massive leak in the HMS SFI and drastic measures needed to be taken.. How drastic? The company was forced (by the government comiteee that was overseeing SFI) to file for "Bankruptcy Protection" the result,.. the entire in-house dev team(s) were laid off. (100 good people lost their jobs) And the amounts due to external developers was put on hold. Afecting not just Stardock,.. Mind you they have been the most 'Verbal' in spreading the news that they felt they got the shaft.
8) No one said the developers were never going to get their due, No one said that SFI is 'Still' Working to make things right. (SFI seems to be a bit 'classier' in the sense they do not spread bad news just to vent. That is called slander.) And when the storm passes, All Stardock will need to say is "Finally we got what they owed us" But can they undo the 'Badmouthing' they perpertrated over the net? SFI gets a bad rep because thay didn't want to play the crybaby game? I know the people at SFI. They have always tried to do the right thing.

Tim, as a businessman you of all people should know that sometimes things happen beyond your control. All anyone can do is try to make things right. It happens to be a slow process. Stardock got 'wounded' but A Lot of my friends got 'Killed' when SFI was forced to shut down it's in-house dev. I have no doubt Stardock has and will recover from this event,.. but they are not making it easier for SFI to makes things right.

Nuf said,.. Cheers!