Brash: Why did it go down?
(This is the first of eight or so posts going up throughout the holiday weekend tied to an article I have in the forthcoming weekly Variety that looks at the promise of Brash Entertainment, the first Hollywood videogame publisher, and the reasons it went from $400 million to out-of-business in a year and a half. The article and posts are all based on extensive interviews with nearly a dozen former employees, executives and developers who worked at or with Brash, most of whom understandably spoke only on background. The posts here on the Cut Scene will summarize and expand some of the key points from the Variety article and also provide some interesting details and anecdotes that didn't make print.
You can read the entire article here.
You can see all of my related posts, and get all the important background, on the Cut Scene's Brash category page.)
So why exactly did Brash go out of business? There were a lot of reasons, many of which I explored in my piece. But I also summarized them into a handy list, which I'm providing here. I wanted to make sure I didn't get led astray by an individual with an axe to grind, so these are all reasons mentioned by several different people:
- A lack of experience among company leaders. CEO Mitch Davis had never worked for a videogame publisher and prexy Nicholas Longano had never held a role that senior. No other members of the board of directors had significant videogame industry experience.
- Frequent conflict and lack of communication among the senior execs who served just below Davis and Longano. While most were experienced, many didn't get along and rarely worked cooperatively.
- A leadership vacuum. Davis spent most of his time in New York, leaving others to run things day to day. Between March and August, Brash's senior VP of biz affairs, president, chief creative officer, senior executive producer and co-founder all ankled due to differences over the company's direction. In the last few months, only Davis, CFO Bill Chardavoyne and sales/marketing chief Yasmin Naboa were left to run things.
- An ill-considered deal with Fox. In order to get its hands on desirable properties like "A Night at the Museum 2," Brash agreed to produce videogames based on "Alvin and the Chipmunks, " "Jumper" and "Space Chimps" in less than a year. The latter two were major bombs and all three were low quality, harming Brash's reputation with partners, the press and consumers -- as well as employee morale.
- Conflicts with Warner Bros., which originally distributed Brash's videogames. By summer, Brash had canceled its deal with the studio and started building its own distribution operation. Some say the move saved money, but others say it was a waste of resources at a critical time, particularly as the industry is moving toward digital downloads.
- A lack of understanding of the film biz. In one example repeated by several sources, Brash was projecting sales of its "Space Chimps" game on the assumption that the film would gross $150 million, similar to past Fox toons like "Ice Age" and "Horton Hears a Who." Execs were apparently unaware that the film wasn't made by Fox Animation and the studio was only distributing it. "Space Chimps" ended up grossing $30 million. (It sounds crazy, right? But two separate high-level sources told me this story unprompted, and a third verified it when prompted.)
- The collapse of the credit market. Despite all of Brash's problems, most insiders say the company probably could have raised more funds and continued had it not hit a moment of need just as the financial markets froze.
Chris Morris reports on the business and culture of video games and offers analysis of recent events and industry trends.
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Mr Fritz -- contact me. I have info.
Posted by: ain't over | December 13, 2008 at 08:53 AM
The truth is these were not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
This is what happens when you put together a bunch of narcissistic rich men who have zero idea of how the film industry works. These people are only interested in enriching themselves, and when cracks appear, they bail out and leave others to clean up the mess and have their finances ruined from getting laid off.
Posted by: Matthew White | December 13, 2008 at 08:51 AM
Just for the record, "shocked and offended," I've had probably 50-80 articles in the nationwide weekend edition of Variety. The Brash story didn't even make page 1, where I've had a dozen or so articles. So this definitely isn't a major "feather in my cap" in that respect. If this is my 15 minutes of fame, I'm officially depressed.
Also you'd be surprised how many companies don't send free review copies, or at least not until well after the game is released and we have to buy a retail copy ourselves. One of those two companies you mentioned has a particular habit of doing just that.
Posted by: Ben Fritz | November 30, 2008 at 06:23 PM
My God! Did Tagger just compare the producers at Brash to Nazis? Are you nuts?! I think you’re a bit naive about how the world and business works.
Here's another example of how business works. Milking Brash's closure as much as he has got Fritz an article in not only the print version of Variety, but the Nationwide Weekend Edition at that. A big feather in his cap it is.
That's why he's picking the bones so much of a dead company, because this is his 15 minutes and he wants it to last as long as possible. Sure beats blogs don't it.
Man I didn't see this many postings from Ben on the Activision or EA layoffs at a time when they are making money, which has literally put hundreds of video game professionals out of work and is teetering on destroying the industry. Where are the big series of articles and blogs on those? Heck, when I do a search for Activision on his blog I get more Brash articles than ones for Activision.
Perhaps if he wrote articles about the trouble those other publishers are doing to the business they would stop sending Fritz all those review copies?
Another example of the professionalism of gaming press.
Posted by: Shocked and Offended | November 30, 2008 at 05:01 PM
Seems simple to me:
start up+management issues+tough economy= closure
so many other companies, that are older and more established are tanking these days, that a start up with fledging management folding during a tough economy hardly seems noteworthy. execs not getting along? oooh shocking!
adding to the comment above being able to find disgruntled employees or former partners who feel betrayed by the closure does not seem to validate this as breaking news... go ask any of the wamu team or bear sterns people how they feel? bet they don't have lots of goodwill these days.
Not sure why this is an 8 piece story, except for maybe someone didn't want to spend time with his family on Thanksgiving. I think the writer could have just posted my equation above and been done with it. Pass the leftovers, please.
Posted by: SB | November 29, 2008 at 06:13 PM
Having worked with Brash, I can attest that the stupidity of the management, the aggressiveness of its "business development unit" and the assumption that you can work in this industry while breaking your contracts right and left is unlike anything I have encountered when working with the other companies in the business.
At one point I was told that because Brash is not paying to a third party what it owes, we'll have to seek alternative solution to the issue that involved that third party's product, and people assumed it is all right not to pay as a way of doing business, no one was saying "this is not going to happen again" -- on the contrary, it seems that this sort of behavior was exactly what Brash company's ethics was all about.
There were some good people, and these people left before Tull. Are they innocent? Hardly, as they should have fought the system and not simply shifted the responsibility for anything to their management. Is the producer of an external team guilty of his company's non-payment upon delivery of a milestone? But if not, then certainly we must embrace all of the Nazi soldiers who shot Jews in the camps, just because "their management told them to". This applies to legal and finance of Brash more than to anyone else in that company as these people were fully aware of their company's goings and yet they kept behaving in a ridiculous, juvenile way.
The more we focus on the story of Brash, the higher the chances that it won't happen again, under another name, here in Hollywood or anywhere else. So thank you, Ben.
Posted by: tagger | November 27, 2008 at 10:22 PM
Look at the About blurb for this blog: "Variety video games reporter and reviews editor Ben Fritz tracks the business of games and their intersection with Hollywood." Brash was the first publisher to explicitly tie themselves to the Hollywood movie business, therefore Brash, more than any other publisher, is exactly the company that this blog should be writing about.
Posted by: Alex | November 27, 2008 at 07:05 PM
This is a re-hash of a nonstory. It's adding nothing new to the previous stories Fritz has done. I don't know what his obsession with Brash is, but perhaps its that he has no access to other publishers and so is forced to cover one of the smallest entities in a huge industry that views him as a gnat.
This is not the story that will put him in the league of N'Gai Croal or Geoff Keighley. Rather than investigative, he seems fixated and petty.
Move on already.
Posted by: Over It | November 27, 2008 at 11:20 AM