Carl: Will you be developing these plugins and SDKs internally, or will you be outsourcing them?

John: A combination, we’ve got some industry contacts that we will probably be outsourcing a lot of this to.  People that specialize in, say, just Unity or just Game Maker.

Steve: Yeah, and they are going to want money for it, right?  Like, that is how we allocate this.  It is an unknown amount.

John: No, we know.

Carl: It is not public.

John: Exactly, that is what Steve means.

Steve: Having this stuff written costs money.  If we do it ourselves, then I can’t manage the whole software chain of games that are happening, so we have to figure out how to best utilize our resources.  Stuff is going to have to happen in parallel and be written by outside people.  Whether they become part of the ecosystem or not, or it is a contract or…I don’t know.  We are very particular about who we hire for this.  We do a lot of work, a lot of vetting , to figure out who we are actually going to go with.

Carl: I know everyone is wanting me to ask about Kevin.

Mike: Mmm hmm.

Steve: Kevin, who?

John: [Chuckles]

Steve: Kevin who?  No seriously.

Carl: Kevin Horn [butchered his last name], I only know him by his AtariAge…

Mike: Yes, we know who you are talking about.

John: Yeah, we know.

Steve: I didn’t know which Kevin.

Mike: Here Carl, so again, not to stoop to everybody else’s level– I mean, this Is where we are at on this thing. We have been talking to Kevin for the last four months, or longer.  You know, we identified him quickly as being kind of one of the foremost kind of gurus in the FPGA world.  We knew he had already created some solid cores for the 8-Bit systems.  We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we reached out to Kevin and had some great conversations about, you know, paying him what his asking price was for each individual core, and then also letting him know that we would be happy to help fund the development of any new cores.  Right now, there are no 16-bit cores, no Neo-Geo cores out there.  He had indicated that he wanted to do that but time and money and effort wasn’t there. So we said, if we helped fund this, is it something he would be willing to do for us?  It wouldn’t be exclusive to us, Carl, we would let him use it for anything he wants or anybody else wanted or whatever.  We were just like, we would be happy to help fund you this because we want to use it and we would like to use you.  That is where it was all left up until last week.

Steve: Wait, he doesn’t want to work with us?  I don’t get it [sounding concerned].

John: [chuckles] Yeah, I don’t know.

Steve: No, no, I am not reading the forums.  Carl, I want you to understand, Carl, I don’t understand these forums at all.  It takes too much to process.  So, did he leave it at a state that he was not working with us?  I thought he was.

Mike: Yeah, uh, he threw us under the bus and that was it.

Steve: But did he say he didn’t want to write the cores?

John: [trying to explain]

Mike: John, no, Steve, he is saying that he is going to come out with a competing product and that was the gist of it.

Steve: Whatever, that is fine.  But he doesn’t want to license any cores to us?  That is money he is…he could have done both.

Mike interjects: Yeah, he could have done both.  We had no, I mean, we didn’t back out on him.  Word has gotten around that we let him go.  He was a contractor that we were going to use if and when we were funded.  We didn’t want to waste his time, upfront, you know, ’til we knew this was a done deal.  We all agreed he was going to do these and we were going to pay him his asking price.  That was it.  Then a few days ago, he is basically, I think he saw us raise a good chunk of money that first day and all of a sudden, ‘Wow, I can do that!’.  I didn’t want to be brought into all of this so, whatever, it is what it is.  We think our products are completely different, you know, for him to do a polished consumer product with FCC [regulation] and [certification] and the shells, and the controllers, and the pack-in games, and whatever output he is putting on that thing, and making a polished consumer product, we don’t think he can do it.  Certainly not any cheaper than we can.  Again, it goes back to the MIST board and the FPGA Arcade boards that are very similar to the board that he has ‘got’, you know, those are two, two hundred and fifty dollar products.  When you add a pack-in game, I mean that adds forty, fifty bucks to it right there.  You add a controller to it, that adds twenty, twenty-five bucks.  You add output power, you know, you do all of these things you have to do and there is no way he can do it.  If he can, then more power to him.  We spent a lot longer talking to him as far as figuring out how to bring a product to market and how much it costs and these back-end things that we are not seeing that he has got.  You know, just for him to go out and create a shell, which again, everyone poo-poo’s this, but I mean, when I delivered that tooling to the injection mold shop here, I asked them what would that have cost me if I bought it in today’s dollars.  They said two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars.  That is a big expense and to go in and say that you can do a product like ours for fifty to one hundred dollars less just seems ridiculous, honestly, you know.  Hey, if he can do it, great.  He may sell a few there in the forums, but to go out and mass market? I don’t see it.

John: We have been over the numbers in our expenses for months and months, we know how much we can manufacture this for.  I am no stranger to lean development and to lean manufacturing. We know our costs and we are skeptical that anyone can do what we are doing for cheaper.

Steve: We wish it were zero. [back and forth with John] – We would love to give these systems away.  We can’t.  We CAN’T.

Mike: In the past, right Carl, is: hardware companies typically lose money.  It is the razor blade model.  We are just not set up, we are a small volume branding company trying to get this cool product out, and we don’t have the luxury of selling these things at little to no margin, or at a loss.  We have boiled it down as low as we can.

Carl Williams

It is time gaming journalism takes its rightful place as proper sources and not fanboys giving free advertising. If you wish to support writers like Carl please use the links below. https://www.paypal.me/WCW https://www.patreon.com/CarlWilliams

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