Neverwinter Nights 2: The Saga of NWN 1's Death Continues

Steel_Wind, leader of the DLA, has a long article on the front page of the DLA site. In the article, and other DLA developer blogs, he gives a few down-and-dirty details of what has transpired behind the scenes for the past several weeks.

In terms of the situation right now and under the prior plan for this summer - technically Atari would have made money off of premium mods in the sense of a reduction of a liability on their accounts payable - but in terms of cashflow? My analysis says: Nothing. Zip. Nada.

As I have been saying repeatedly for a good while now, Atari is in a financial crisis and appears to be unable to meet all of its liabilities as they become due. Their principal line of credit has been cancelled and their secured lenders are turning hostile (When the secured creditors are girding for battle - you know it's bad).

At the same time, many of their unsecured creditors are going unpaid. This means they have not paid most of their developers the royalties owing to them on published skus Atari has sold in previous quarters. "Most", presumably, includes a failure to pay BioWare royalties on retail product from the latter part of 2005.

Accordingly, any money which would be owed to Atari from premium mod sales would most likely be offset by BioWare against monies Atari owes to BioWare. Remember - BioWare controls the BioWare store and they get the money first; they ain't sending Atari a cheque when Atari is not returning the favor. Atari would have been effectively forced to pay one of their accounts payable by way of set-off. So, in that sense, a liability is reduced on Atari's balance sheet - but Atari gets no cashflow out of it because Atari just isn't paying their bills as they should.

Read the rest on the DLA site.