Studio head Brendan McNamara personally owed AU $250,000
The remaining development staff at Team Bondi were together owed more than AU $1.3 million (£830,000) before the studio closed down, legal papers show.
Studio head Brendan McNamara (pictured) was personally owed AU $248,000, through unpaid salary and his private company Depth Analysis.
A cache of documents seen by Develop shows the studio owed money to a broad range of staff before Team Bondi's closure.
Studio general manager Vicky Lord was owed AU $99,000, while art director Chee Kin Chan was due AU $89,000.
Chief technology officer Frantisek Fulin had AU $74,000 left unpaid when the studio closed.
Advertisement
David Heironymus, a programmer who publicly defended his studio when it was engulfed by a working practices scandal, left Team Bondi with nearly AU $44,000 owed to him.
Team Bondi, developer of LA Noire, closed down in October following a voluntary administration process.
It is not known if the money due will be paid in full.
Finance executives have told Develop that, typically, creditors' debts are rarely paid in full when a company enters administration. There is usually not enough assets to finance the final sums.
Additional fees push the total amount Team Bondi owes to about AU $1.5 million.
The process of reimbursing creditors would mean that each person owed will take an even split of the remaining money, if any exists.
That means McNamara, who is owed AU $248,000, is the least likely person to be paid in full.
A large chunk of that debt comes from his other privately owned company, Depth Analysis, which created the ground-breaking technology behind LA Noire.
The full extent of debt further disputes recent comments made by market analyst Michael Pachter.
Pachter defended the controversial practice of crunch work - which Team Bondi had been embroiled in - because, he said, game developers on triple-A games tend to make "a ton of money" through royalty payments.
One of the key defences of the Team Bondi credits/crunch scandal was that people got paid huge bonuses.
These don't look like huge bonuses. Can you tell from the documents whether these amounts owed are salary or if they are performance-related bonuses which have not been paid.
BTW, your last paragraph is wrong. Unsecured creditors get paid the same percentage of the money they are owed (say 25 cents on the dollar). That means that *everyone* who is owed a dollar gets paid 25c instead. So McNamara is just as unlikely as anyone else to get paid in full.
Unless he has done something funky to make himself a secured creditor ranking above the unsecureds, which seems unlikely
The process is, in laymans terms, lining up all creditors and paying each a penny in turn until the pot runs out.
I've had this looked over by some finance execs so I'll take their word for it.
And absolutely, Mr Pachter defended unpaid crunch because he thought staff would make a lot of money by the end of it.
I suppose, for a lot of the studios he engages with, that's true. It's just not relevant to the rest of the world.
And the publisher is laughing all the way to the bank.
Shameful.
