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With all the layoffs over the course of the year, we've seen more people kicked to the curb than ever before. It deeply saddens me, and I have also been personally impacted by it.
It used to be that if you did a good job, did what you were told and occasionally exceeded expectations to make up for the times when you didn't, you could feel comfortable that you can keep your job. Heck, if you were really good at what you did, you could have the personality and breath of a warthog and still keep your job. But nowadays, you could do a great job, bust your ass in crunch mode, and still lose your job because your game just wasn't the hit people were expecting.
Companies have always made the "painful" but arguably necessary decisions to cut costs by tossing off their dead weight, their underperformers, when money is tight. Yet with soaring game budgets these days, it seems that we're in a high-stakes game of poker, and our bosses have gone "all in". If they don't walk away with a bigger stack of chips than they came in with, they're going to make some deep cuts. The whole team's jobs are at stake.
It's these team-sized layoffs at Activision/Raven and EA/Maxis that illustrate my point. Here are two teams that have worked at America's top 2 publishers. The money is clearly there. They may have lost a hand of poker, but they still have a big stack of chips.
To a publisher its clear that some shake-up is necessary, as the project was well-funded, so some other factor in the recipe must be to blame. But allow me to go out on a limb here and suggest that seldom are the people cheifly responsible for a game's failure held responsible.
It could be that the game license, original IP or technical gimmick the game was based on just didn't catch on. Is that the fault of the team or the biz dev guy who bought the license or the marketing vice president or creative director who pitched the idea?
Maybe someone on the team is at fault. Maybe the game suffered from a lack of vision. Is that the rest of the team's fault or just the lead designer or producer's fault? Maybe it was poorly executed. At that point, it could be anyone's fault but clearly not everyone's.
So if layoffs are a necessary evil in this business ... if it comes down to some people having to lose their jobs, I would hope companies do some real failure analysis and lay off the right people. I can't imagine all those people at EA/Maxis and Activision/Raven were to blame, but the question remains whether the people they held onto will play a better hand of poker.
Tim Ryan (a fellow victim of layoff, Midway, Dec 08)
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The people who 'lead' businesses these days have targets they have to meet to get their obscene bonusses, and if they can't up the profit, they'll cut on costs over anyone's back, the future be damned.
On other hand as we know most profits don't go back into development but here:
http://www.marketrap.com/article/view_article/91133/activision-executives-sell-m
illions-of-shares-while-company-buys-back-millions-of-shares
But it is a matter of corporate culture not game development.
Sure, if you look at it that way it sure sounds like a stretch. But consider that the studios in question are part their respective publishers. The individual performances of these people (in general) wasn't the problem. It's not very constructive to just fire lots of people who didn't underperform individually, it doesn't fix the underlying problems. THOSE should be identified and fixed. Also, right now publishers are stopping lots of projects because of the bad economic circumstances -now-. And the result is that when the economy picks up, suddenly there's a 'shortage' of new games coming out.
Also Raven studios was always in bad position. They don't have their own tech, they work on IP owned by other studio and they themselfes owned by publisher that is competing with that studio, which is owned now by another publisher. All of their other games are done using unreal.
It is like EA asking Activision to work on next Battlefield using one of their internal studios and using Dice's tech. Not good.
Also who said that economy is going to pick up??? That is a bold statement.
The good news for devs is that there are other development companies that are hungry for experienced game developers. The industry is expanding into new niches and genres, I am sure the people with the Maxis pedigree will be snapped up quickly and treasured like the rare resource they are.
Good luck guys!
Wombat
When negotiating for salary with a large corporation with a love of layoffs, I think it's important to exact a premium from them in order to manage your risk to layoffs. It's a little like layoff insurance. If things go south, you will have a little extra cushion, and who knows, maybe if a company discovers that its reputation is making recruitment and / or salary negotiation difficult, it will start taking the long view on these things.
But I kinda doubt it :).
Best of luck to the Maxis peeps. It's hard to find a more skilled group of folks. I hope they get snatched up quickly.
I hope everyone who was let go yesterday had a better severance package and gets a job quickly. Good luck.
I told him: "Hey, I know that you want to be one of these guys that make a single game sell millions, this one game that sell millions, are one game in the middle of 13.000, so, this is a gamble."
His awnsers was: "I know that, but that is the purpose! I don't wanna receive a little money all the time, I want receive a good amount of money, even if it is risky!"
Well, he lost the gamble, and I lost the job (altough he lost more than me... Much more, he bought lots of stuff, and now he has several idling Mac workstations priced 3000 USD each... And idling engine licenses...)
Those Hollywood writers are not being hired as full time employees, and given the formal tour; they are full-time contractors. There is an awkward middle ground that game developers are stuck into where they are treated like they are here to stay and then dropped at the end of the project; that is simply immoral. It wouldn't be so bad if these laid-off developers were knowingly on an 18 month contract with benefits, but that didn't appear to be the case. It never does.
I think what you talking about will happen, but it is up to industry leaders on dev side to push for it.
But generally they don't have any incentive, because they are extremely well compensated.
For those who don't know, the Hollywood guilds require credits/hours earned in a given position to enter and advance within the respective guilds. Becoming a member of the DGA, for example, is no easy feat!
Not so in the game industry. Bad leadership is the norm, wheather it be in large game factories where the deadweight simpley gets moved from department to department or the boutique developers where a small group manage to secure funding then start awarding themselves titles and positions they are grossly unqualified for. These people are rarely held responsible for a companies failure until the whole thing goes under.
My contribution to this discussion is another reality check viewpoint. When these industries, using the specialized collaborative creative talents of many individuals for entertainment production, are small and in their infancy, it's the Wild West: a frontier with endless possibilities but lots of risk of the unknown and little agency by those willing to pioneer the field. When those pioneers just happen to strike gold, there is a Gold Rush: a flood of interest, bringing with it talent, investment and (if I can stretch this analogy) families. The explosion of rewards from this new frontier allows further agency, further exploration, further investment and some further rewards: a Boom. Inevitably, the frontier becomes saturated with agency (cheap dev tools) and pioneers (talented individuals) in relation to the rewards. At that point, investment is less about taking a huge risk on an unknown reward in that frontier, it's no longer about the early adopters cashing in on the current wave, and much more about honing efficiency, cutting expense and looking for the next frontier. This is the tipping point, where available talent outweighs available investment: a Bust. This is when the folks who pioneered the field, or who followed the Gold Rush, wonder why business doesn't consider the plight of their families, as the investment dries up and the Wild West becomes dotted with Ghost Towns. (enter next pioneer, next frontier)
Business will not be charitable to talent, ever. It is a contractual agreement that by compensating for work done, the business will reap rewards greater than said compensation. So, the notion that a studio would keep talent around without the next contractual agreement (literal or implied), is a fallacy; one that the studios are more than happy to perpetuate to keep the talent docile. Further, the notion that business would try to discern which individuals among the talent pool and outside it deserve blame for failure or credit for success, is irrelevant outside the scope of that contractual agreement. Some studios will in fact think longer term, maintain current contractual agreements with their talent pools and try to maintain a consistent talent pool as a way to offer a semblance of stability in contrast to others, but this is a risk that is simply unfathomable to most investors; it's a tough sell to define that strategy as anything but charity or folly.
Unfortunately, I do not think we can look to the film or animation talent's response for salvation. Guilds and unions do a fair job at maintaining compensation over the long term (or at least holding it together for longer than without them), but to the ire and detriment of the business. Not only will business fight unions and guilds in any way possible, and at all times, but eventually this tension applies pressure against the business model itself, making investment less attractive. So if the entertainment we present falls (even slightly) out of favor and causes a dip in reward, as it now has for TV/Film/Animation in relation to Games, the momentum heads in the direction of the Bust.
Sorry, that was quite a downer comment, but I feel its something important to contribute to this discussion, as I watch history repeat itself.
I wrote an article back in December of last year touching upon many of themes wrapped up in this subject, entitled "Transforming the Games Industry into a Well-Oiled Machine," and it is located at http://www.emscharf.com/blogosphere/genuinearticle/genuinearticle_2008/genuinear
ticle_2008_0005_01.htm.
Human nature, unfortunately, always seems to demolish even the most common sense approaches to the operational procedures that would help but not cure Wild West component of the games industry.
I have a few more thoughts to share, but I must catch myself and first dump them into another blog entry.