Spoonless wrote:
idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
The governor was strongly against it, and has actually been a giant douche through all of this. He closed his speech the other day by trashing the "sexism and violence" in the KoA:R game. Thanks, a$$hole, for completely fueling the typical gaming stereotypes to fuel your own campaign agenda off the backs of the developers who were losing their jobs after putting out an extremely well-received game.
I'm not a fan of Chafee, but to be fair, he wasn't the governor when the deal was made; it was made by a governor who was on his way out of office, and then Chafee was stuck with it. Basically, the whole thing was FUBAR from the start. People saw it as "creating jobs" but it didn't really create many jobs for RI residents; it brought in peopel from out of state to work here. I know it brought in income tax revenue, but the whole thing that was plastered in all the stories was the number of jobs it was going to create. The worst part to me is that basically the state pursued Schilling, not the other way around. A loan of that size from the state shouldn't have been given out unless Schilling had some other investors.
I like some of Linc Chafee's political positions, but overall tend to dislike him. He's in damage control mode with this whole thing. I can't really blame him for detracting from the game itself and whatnot. He's got to distance himself from it as much as possible if he wants to run for re-election.
Edited, May 27th 2012 11:15am by Spoonless I was only actually talking about his reinforcement of gaming industry stereotypes, not the economic issues. I should have clarified that. I'm not actually following the economic aspects of the story that closely, because I don't have sufficient background knowledge to do so without serious effort.
I don't really quite understand the concept of creating jobs, though, since the whole deal was organized to bring talent and industry into the state. I guess they figured they'd create jobs when they put down roots? That's going to take more time than 3-4 years, and it also suggests a serious lack of understanding in how the game design industry tends to operate. Since studios aren't widespread, talent comes to them from all over. They aren't going to recruit locally when they'll get better applicants from all over the country who are perfectly willing to relocate.
And ax, I really, really hope that isn't true. It would be pretty awful if it was, for
everyone involved. Because the people of RI are the ones who ultimately have to foot the bill, and if the credits could have realistically extended the company's financial stability far enough to allow for some new deals or for Copernicus' release, things might have gone very differently.