merchantwagon This post has been coming for a month or so now.  I and EPI are no longer pursuing the idea of developing and producing Ages of Athiria.  I'm sure there's quite a few people that will come out and tell me that they told me so.  There's been plenty of naysayers along our journey over the past ten years.  To them, I say we tried which is exactly the same thing I would say to our many loyal followers; we tried.

The idea behind Ages of Athiria is a strong idea that I hope someone, someday will get a chance to bring to market.  Perhaps that someone will be me but there's more than a few things that have to happen in my life in order for that to become my reality.  After ten years of trying, I accept that now. 

One of the things that makes for a great entrepreneur is persistence and resilience.  Those traits drive innovation by allowing an entrepreneur to continue on in the face of naysayers.  Those same traits can, at times, cause an entrepreneur to lose sight of reality.  While raising funding, one "No" answer simply becomes a blip in a long line of "No" answers to funding efforts.  We condition ourselves to have thick skins while pitching VC/angels and to not take it personally.  Every additional "No" is another layer in our armor against future "No" answers.  This whole mentality is reinforced by the stories from other successful entrepreneurs that proudly declare that it took 100 or more pitches (read “No” answers) to find funding.  You can do it they'll all tell you.  Eventually, it takes either a "Yes" answer or a few well articulated “No” answers explaining why "No" is their answer to resolve the conflict between "Can I really get this funded?" and "This is fundable, I just haven't found the right person yet."  The latter is the foundation of the armor that we layer on ourselves when we're given a "No" without real reason.  "Can I really get this funded?" gets lost in translation as we sink deeper and deeper into the idea we're trying to get off the ground. 

When I was given a chance to speak with Mr. Suster at GRP Partners in LA about the Ages of Athiria project and the prospect of building Elysian Productions Inc., I was excited.  Finally, I thought to myself, I'm getting to the level where I'm talking to people with enough money to make this happen.  The Louisville VC market is simply way too small time for our idea.  $20M or so total VC money was invested in 2009 and we need $15M - $18M for our company alone.  My conversation with Mr. Suster was to the point and his assessment of what I was trying to do hit home.  While I believe that I can execute EPI to bring Ages of Athiria to market successfully, I have a few major hurdles working against me, some of which I can control and others that I cannot.  His point was that if I was asking for someone to ignore one hurdle, the numbers behind the other hurdles had better be so good that they were off the chart.

First is the attitude of investors towards video games.  Their general stance is that the public is fickle and as such VC prefers to invest in platforms and not titles.  References to throwing away money on what might amount to the game equivalent of the “Waterworld” movie were thrown around and it's hard to argue against that notion no matter how much I believe Ages of Athiria would have been successful.  The public is fickle.  This mostly explains why web sites get millions of users first and then go looking for funding. 

Secondly, we are headquartered in Louisville, KY.  That hurts when looking for the level of money that we were looking to secure.  This year’s Louisville Mayoral races are all about job creation and job attraction. Mr. Suster’s preference was to have companies that he invests in be located in his backyard; perfectly acceptable requirement.  More attention can be given to those companies as a result and I've seen that thought echoed by other VCs as well.  The Louisville VC market cannot do our deal because of its size.  Outside VCs do not want to do our deal because we're not in their backyard and there isn’t a VC in our backyard that can do our deal.  There’s a pattern there.

The last thing we came to is my experience.  I've had experience running teams and running companies.  I've built MUDs from the ground up and have worked on web games off and on over the past few years.  That's not enough to secure the money that I was going after without other factors.  I'm a first time entrepreneur so I do not have a startup company with an exit under my belt.  I am not coming from EA or Activision so there's little title-based credibility there.  He didn't know who I was and while he didn't make an assessment of my abilities, it was because he couldn't make an assessment of my abilities.  What I had was enough to get me in front of many people in a market like Louisville.  When stepping up to the bigger VC game, I was playing ball with former Google/Facebook/Microsoft execs competing for the same cash.  My story wasn't compelling enough and I understand that.

In the end, I need a personal story that is off the charts if I want to start a AAA game developer in Louisville, KY with outside money.  It makes sense and it took a reasoned conversation with someone that didn't turn his nose down at video games for me to realize what I had to do next.  Many people that invest are still stuck in the "Video games are things my grand kids play." mentality and treat proposals in kind.  Mr. Suster was not like this and it made his advice easier to swallow.  I probably should have realized it earlier but now I know I have some work to do before coming back to the idea of Ages of Athiria.

So, I'm no longer actively working on Ages of Athiria.  The two Ages of Athiria web sites will be taken offline in the coming weeks and their domains will be pointed to a static page on elysianonline.com.  While we’re retaining the IP for the Athiria universe and the design for the game, we’re not actively developing it.  We're turning the lights off to pursue other opportunities that may, possibly, eventually lead to our being able to fund and develop Ages of Athiria in the future.  Until then, I want to express to everyone that has followed us through the years that I wish the end result was different.  I wish that we were all running around in the world of Athiria.  Maybe someday, we will, but EPI is moving on.  Your loyalty and optimism never went unnoticed and the decision to shut down Ages of Athiria has been a difficult one.  Thank you.  It was a privilege to champion the vision that was and is Ages of Athiria.  Mr. Suster, thank you for helping me realize that it is time to pivot and JFDI. (Just Fucking Do It for the uninitiated.)