Playlogic Entertainment

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

~ the last words ~

Playlogic is a name i would not have recognized in 2010 and barely recognize now, and that is not a failure of memory. A publisher's job is to put its mark on the spine of a box whose front belongs to somebody else. Playlogic did that job out of Amsterdam for eight years.

It was founded in 2002 by Rogier Smit. The publishing arm was Playlogic International N.V. in Amsterdam and the development arm was Playlogic Game Factory BV in Breda, a studio of around eighty people. Between them they were the biggest thing the Netherlands had aimed at the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation, in a country that mostly exported programmers rather than published titles.

In June 2005 the group listed itself on the over-the-counter board in New York under the ticker PLGC and kept filing with the SEC until the first quarter of 2010. So a Dutch console publisher spent five years explaining its quarterly losses to American retail investors who would never touch one of its games. Every number that eventually described the death is public because of that decision.

What reached Turkey from a company like this was a disc in a bin with a price sticker on it. Nobody turned the box over to read who had published it. That is the arrangement a publisher signs up for and it works fine right up until the moment the company disappears, at which point there is nobody left who remembers it well enough to write the ending down.

~ the record ~

~ the arithmetic ~

Publishing runs on money that leaves before it arrives. You advance cash to a studio that ships late, and the retailer who takes the result pays you ninety days after that. When the Dutch press reported the collapse it printed the reasons the company had given, which were large customers paying late and projects running behind. Both are descriptions of the same cash-flow hole seen from different ends.

Fairytale Fights was the one that had to work. Built in-house in Breda and released in late 2009, it was a slapstick brawler in which storybook characters cut each other apart in a bright children's-illustration world. The idea was better than the execution and the reviews said so. The SEC filings put the 2009 loss at twenty million dollars and another 2.2 million on top of it in the first quarter of 2010.

~ what really happened ~

On 28 July 2010 the company filed for surseance van betaling, the Dutch suspension of payments, which is the local equivalent of asking a court for room to breathe. It did not get any. On 4 August the court declared Playlogic bankrupt outright. Around 110 people were on the books at the time, with roughly three hundred more working on its projects from outside.

~ the second death ~

The name came back before the year was out. A restructured Playlogic Entertainment NV reopened with some of the original staff, pointed at digital re-releases and gambling software running under a Maltese license. It bought a mobile gambling company called WannaGaming International BV in 2011. That April the New York listing quietly stopped being Playlogic and became Donar Ventures.

That second company went bankrupt in December 2014, and this time nothing came back. The most-played thing anyone in Breda ever worked on is probably EyePet, where the studio was a contractor to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and the mark on the box was Sony's. A publisher that dies leaves a catalog with somebody else's name on all of it.

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