I work for a different department, but on a number of titles (I’ve actually done work on every single product in our lineup at one point or another), so no I wasn’t involved in it. I was affected though, as some of the people who were laid off kind of shocked me. I understand the business reasoning, but it still kinda sucks.
That being said, the directive from up high–across all territories–is to focus on the big titles in the pipeline and make sure we do what we can to make them great.
Tabula Rasa is unaffected. It still has its own goals and milestones and is pushing forward with an extensive marketing initiative (which you might have heard of). The DR team was hit, as were teams involved with several internal development projects (some of which came from other internal development projects). 21 people were laid off, which is not quite 6% of our current workforce. From what I understand they did have options to work elsewhere in the company (in the two California studios or in Seattle), but I have no idea how many accepted, or what was involved, etc.
It’s a harsh day; not as bad as the last one, but bad enough. I know the feeling, I’ve encountered five layoffs in this industry and survived three of them now. It sucks for pretty much everyone involved.
But seriously, how is WebWars going to be any different from PMOG (http://pmog.com/), ie a thinly veiled ‘game’ who’s real purpose is to gather your demographics and browsing habits.
Lum had his own pet project and, I think, was quite obvious that it lived on the shoulder of Tabula Rasa, as most of those people worked on it.
NCSoft releases regular financial updates for investors, as well as targets of growth that were always too optimist.
With Tabula Rasa going bad everything else was at risk, no matter how good or promising. Lum’s project was a small one, and so one of the most vulnerable.
I think one of the websites said something about the Garriotts having a reduced role in NCSoft going forward. That’s not a big surprise. I don’t think they’ve been an integral part of a successful game since UO, and I don’t even know how involved in that they were.
And TR did change a lot. I saw the previous version at an E3 a long time ago. It’s safe to say that what you can play now might as well be a completely different game. They burned a lot of time and dollars on TR that ended up in the bone pile.
Man, this industry is rough. I am the kind of person that needs some sort of stability with regards to a job and steady paycheck. Even before having kids/wife/house. Even the successful developers have to layoff folks because they do not have advances from a subsequent project to operate off of. Brutal.
While I appreciate your summary Rollory, I still would find the entire event interesting to read about. From the inception of the project and pitching it to publishers through the issues that cause restarts and changes in staff to the “before it’s done” release and then the eventual dismal news that the project is unsuccessful. Any of you that have lived through it, understandably, would care nothing about such a story, but I am truly interested in how it happens.
I think the answer here is that the people running PMOG wouldn’t ever testify before congress that your browsing habits prove that you’re a hardcore communist and want to subvert the American public.
Obviously I haven’t even started there yet, but none of the business/monetization plans I’ve heard involve anything even close to selling demographic data, and if it did I would have more than a little problem with it. (I used to work for an outfit that did that, and I think I have all the slime washed off now.)
