10tacle Studios

» see 10tacle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

10tacle Studios was assembled in Darmstadt from 2003 onward by Michele Pes, and the method was acquisition. Reakktor in Hannover came first, in February 2004, then Elsewhere Entertainment in Charleroi in October 2005 and a studio in Singapore with state backing that December. February 2006 bought a majority of Blimey! Games in London, August 2006 bought the production and brand rights to three cdv titles, and June 2007 bought StormRegion in Budapest. By 2007 there were seven development studios in six countries, and the money behind them had come substantially from German media funds, the tax-advantaged kind whose advantage the legislature removed in 2005.

The listing is where the trouble is first visible on paper. 10tacle went onto the regulated market in Frankfurt on 22 June 2006 hoping to place up to 1.8 million new shares in a range of 11.75 to 13.50 euros, for about 22 million euros. It placed 778,151 shares at 11.75, the bottom of the range. The first price was 11.50, below the issue price, and the share was at 10.99 by a quarter to twelve on the first morning. Revenue for 2006 came in at 29.0 million euros against 17.9 million the year before, which looked like the plan working.

Then two games slipped at once. The March 2008 profit warning named Elveon and Totems and the cost overruns on both, the Bratislava studio was closed, a quarter of the staff were to go, and a Hamburg shipowner put in enough cash to get through the spring. By April the share was down about eighty percent and the annual accounts had been postponed. A rescue was arranged in July: a convertible bond and a capital increase worth 6.2 million euros, subscribed by investors who then did not pay. The board applied to the Amtsgericht for insolvency on 6 August 2008, and by 13 August the business was reported as essentially stopped, with the telephone lines switched off.

A publisher's name is the line on the box nobody memorizes. SimBin's sim racers, GTR and GT Legends, still have players who have never heard of the Darmstadt holding company that put them out, and Elveon has an audience too, which is stranger, since Elveon does not exist. I came to the name from the other direction, looking for whoever had been paying for a game that was shown at E3 in 2006 and never released.

~ the record ~

~ seven studios in four years ~

The studios died in sequence, and most of them died before the parent did. Bratislava was closed in March 2008. Budapest emptied out the month after, when 10tacle stopped paying the salaries there and the staff left. Charleroi ceased operating on 5 August 2008, one day before the filing, taking Totems with it. The mobile studio closed with the parent that month.

Two got out. Blimey! Games in London went into administration and was bought on 12 January 2009 by Slightly Mad Studios, a company founded by Blimey!'s own Ian Bell, with the jobs intact, and that studio went on to make Project CARS. Reakktor in Hannover was restructured by investors in 2009, finished Black Prophecy with gamigo, and is still shipping games today. Michele Pes turned up as chief operating officer of Slightly Mad in 2012.

~ elveon ~

Elveon was announced at the Games Convention in 2004 as an action role-playing game from a Slovak studio built for the purpose and staffed partly with people who had made Mafia. It had the name by 2005, Unreal Engine 3 under it, and a showing at E3 in 2006 that drew comparisons to Oblivion. When Bratislava closed in March 2008 the remaining work was pushed out to Climax in Portsmouth and to other 10tacle sites, by which point there was no PC version in development at all. It was cancelled, and a designer confirmed as much in 2010.

Former staff bought the trademark and the assets in 2015 and restarted it on Unreal Engine 4. A prototype build dated 14 August 2015 survives, and the revived project was shown at Gamescom that year. The site went down around 2017 and the domain now points at a Slovenian web agency.

~ what the administrator said ~

Olaf Sührer, the provisional administrator, gave his reading to the German press agency on 13 August 2008: management error, specifically in project and product management, and also in the handling of investors. Of the Slovak studio he said it had not managed to deliver the required quality within the budget applied for. That is a dry sentence for four years of work on a game nobody ever bought.

The share had opened its life at 11.50 euros and was at 25 cents on the Wednesday after the filing. In March 2007, seventeen months before the end, Pes had told the market that the company was only at the beginning of what was possible.

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