cdv Software Entertainment

» see cdv.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Wolfgang Gäbler and Christina Oppermann founded cdv in Karlsruhe in 1989, as a partnership rather than a company, and spent the early 1990s as one of the two largest shareware and public-domain software distributors in Germany. That is a catalog business. You print a list and post floppies to whoever sends money back. The games that made the name later came through the same channel from the other direction, and Doom and Duke Nukem are both on the list of titles cdv put into the German charts.

The turn came in 2000. Sudden Strike, a real-time tactics game built by Fireglow in Russia, entered Media Control's German chart at number one in September and went on to around 800,000 copies worldwide by 2002, taking a VUD Platinum award on the way. Cossacks: European Wars, from GSC Game World in Ukraine, did comparable numbers. Neither was made in Germany. Both were found and localized by a publisher in Karlsruhe that had gone public on 17 April 2000, and in the year of the listing revenue more than doubled to 14.5 million euros with 1.8 million in profit.

Almost nobody outside the trade knew the name. A publisher's logo sits on the box for two seconds while the game loads, and the brands that traveled were Sudden Strike and Cossacks. The 800,000 copies of Sudden Strike went out across the world; the publisher's name stayed inside the trade press.

~ shareware by mail ~

The shareware years are the part worth keeping, because they explain the rest. A shareware distributor's skill is picking: knowing what is worth putting in front of people, and getting it cheap enough that the postage still leaves a margin. cdv ran that playbook on retail games for a decade and it worked twice at a scale almost no German publisher managed.

It kept working as long as the finding kept working. Codename: Panzers, built by the Hungarian studio StormRegion, carried 2004 and brought in 2.5 million euros of profit alongside a Blitzkrieg add-on, and Blitzkrieg had come out of Russia as well. Through the whole run the house specialty was the same: eastern European strategy studios whose work German retail would otherwise never have seen.

~ 4.6 percent ~

2001 was the top. Revenue of almost 22 million euros, profit of 1.2 million, and a 4.6 percent share of the German full-price PC games market, enough to make cdv the largest domestic publisher in that segment. Four point six percent is a small number to be first with, and it describes the German market of that era exactly: almost all of it belonged to American and Japanese publishers, and the biggest local player held about one box in twenty.

Then 2002 went flat and posted a 185,000 euro loss, a warning rather than a wound for a company that had doubled its revenue two years before. 2003 was the wound. Write-downs of 7.2 million euros went against titles that had either been canceled or missed their forecasts, producing a loss of almost 11 million euros and a liquidity position the company itself described as threatening its continued existence. About half the staff went that year. The two write-downs the record names are Neocron, a cyberpunk MMO built in Hannover, and Lula 3D, an adult adventure cdv developed itself. Both were its own bets, close to home, in genres nothing in the catalog had prepared it for.

~ hervorragend aufgestellt ~

By the 2006 accounts the loss was over 8.2 million euros, the share price was at a record low, and more than half the share capital had been consumed. Under section 92 of the German Stock Corporation Act that obliged the board to call an extraordinary general meeting. The presentation prepared for that meeting warned of insolvency in the third quarter and recorded that the rights to three unreleased titles had already been sold in August to raise cash, War Front: Turning Point among them. It also floated cutting a third of the workforce, a cut carried out by the end of the quarter. The same presentation ends with the sentence: "cdv ist im Vergleich zum Wettbewerb hervorragend aufgestellt!" Outstandingly positioned compared with the competition.

~ 7 april 2010 ~

What followed was three years of financial engineering. A zero-coupon convertible bond in 2007. Share capital cut from 1.62 million euros to 202,500, then raised again by 810,000 when a holding company called GDD contributed three subsidiaries into the AG, briefly leaving its owner Jens Röhrborn with more than 71 percent of the votes. The business moved off publishing and onto distribution. By the end there were only a handful of employees left, and the audit of the 2008 annual accounts had still not been signed off.

The trigger was a debt somebody else owed. cdv had won two rulings against its former American distribution partner SouthPeak and had collected none of the money. SouthPeak then bought up a 4.4 million euro repayment claim against cdv and said the two canceled out; cdv's lawyers said they did not. Every games outlet reported that cdv filed for preliminary insolvency on 12 April 2010 and intended to keep trading, and the administrator's own notice, dated Frankfurt, 9 April, records an order of 7 April already placing the company under preliminary administration with Dr. Robert Schiebe in charge. The court opened full proceedings on 1 June 2010, citing insolvency and over-indebtedness together. A publisher that had made its living finding other people's games died waiting for another company to pay a judgment.

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