ownership question

[klousia]

Who owns Sports Mogul?

[takaplan]

http://www.sportsmogul.com/corp/bios.htm

[cshiel63]

Thats ok but all those people have supposedly quit.

Maybe there needs to be an update.

[edeutsch77]

Originally posted by cshiel63
Thats ok but all those people have supposedly quit.

Maybe there needs to be an update.

Says the sheep. Believe what you want. ;) Can I sell you some pills? They're called placebo's and they're a real kicker. :p

[DaveHorn]

Originally posted by cshiel63
Thats ok but all those people have supposedly quit.

Maybe there needs to be an update.

Management != Ownership. Although, according to the website Sports Mogul is a privately held corporation formed in Massachusetts. I would imagine that the ownership is split up among the management and I would guess the Clay is majority or at least plurality owner.

[knightly]

Just curious but exactly who is running Sports Mogul (http://forum.sportsmogul.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40087) is the thread. I have also received a couple of private messages from others on the subject.

Time and time again it is obvious (to me):
1. Sports Mogul is no longer a priority for these folks. Apparently Ian and Clay are involved part-time and focused on programming only. Web and Marketing, Dee and James are no longer involved. Jokerswild is unpaid moderator. The company is being run by programmers not business and marketing people.
2. They are concerned with control, apparently they feel previous efforts to help were counter productive. They do not want anyone else representing the company, the use the excuse of legal liability, but they allow commissioners, so I really do not understand this.
3. Directly related to 1. there is absolutely no marketing effort being undertaken and minimal customer servicing.
4. Apparently this was caused by a billing failure, and loss of substantial income. So, they want to milk income as a safety net before making an effort.
5 There are no plans, naming marketing under development or being implemented.
6. No one is running the proverbial ship, so my guess is that have not even noticed the great exodus and loss of revenue, or choose to blame it on "external influences.'

I know they feel it is a pain-in-the-*** to respond to these threads, so they ignore them. They do not WANT any assistance.

So, the options are, cross your fingers and hope they survive, or hope the figure it out or hope they find a buyer. Online gaming is a growth area and the company has potential, but it despartely needs business and marketing help!

That is my take on things as a former Marketing Manager for a software company.

[stealthdog666]

Well said.

[takaplan]

All right, for those who are confused about what's going on with Sports Mogul right now:

Sports Mogul was approached by an investor last year, I believe last summer. He was to provide a *lot* of funding to produce Baseball Mogul, Football Mogul, and Basketball, and the online game. The money also would have paid to hire additional employees, including customer support people and programmers.

This investor turned out to be a fraud. After Football Mogul was published, he took the money and ran.

This left Sports Mogul with no investors and no revenue from the game.

Remember they had a problem with the baseball game the previous spring, where the price was lowered by a distributor or something like that which cost them to make *much* less money than they expected. Like, a fraction of the hundred something thousand they expected.

So, they couldn't really afford James, so he had to leave. The company really couldn't support Ian and Clay and Dee, especially with no major funding or revenue. The BBMO game was always in the red, as far as I heard, and it may still be that way. They realized at this point that the business could not support them by itself, so they had to look for other jobs. The decision was made to support the game on the side, but not as a full time job I believe. I don't want to call it a hobby, as they work very hard to keep it running, but it's not a full time venture I do not believe.

This should be relatively accurate based on what I know, but I'm not 100% sure.