Testimony for a former employee who details how much of an obstacle it was to work at the studio under John Gibson’s leadership:
I’m hoping that John going away means he’s also selling his shares in the company over time, otherwise he’s still going to have money coming in from it. That’s going to be a complicated mess to unwind, and I’m hoping to see at least some indication of what the plan is there.
I’d honestly be surprised if TW has the money in the bank to buy him out of his shares, so ultimately it may be fruitless, but a plan to move his shares to better investors would be nice. Either way he’s getting a golden parachute for being an ass.
Him going away is going to be massively beneficial to Tripwire employees, and for that I’m grateful. John was like another Georgia game company CEO in that the company ran well despite him, not because of him, and him going away will hopefully unleash a great team.
This is part of what I put in my exit interview paperwork, and is the part specifically about my problems with John. Ultimately he was a bad manager and a bad person to be studio head, and that was besides the fact that politically we all knew he didn’t align with most of us.
Unfortunately for Tripwire, his presence was a huge damaging factor. I was one of 7 engineering staff that left within the year between summer 2019 and summer 2020, let alone other departments. You can’t lose that kind of manpower in a small studio and ship games in good shape.
A lot of the engineering staff problems ran back to him. He had a massively inflated sense of his programming skill, and it constantly ran off programmers who got fed up with dealing with him ignoring recommendations or outright being disrespectful to the engineering staff.
He wasn’t the only issue that I had with the studio, but things not being fixed generally led back to him. Him being gone gives them a great opportunity to grow and rebuild and come out much stronger on the other side. It just sucks it took nuking the company rep to remove him.
Look out for the employees that are going to leave because of this. There’s a lot of great talent at Tripwire that deserve to be in good spots. Don’t judge them by John.
Also look out for those that stay. They’re going to be more patient than I was in trying to fix the problems with the studio now that they have the room. They deserve a chance to show what they’re capable of without having to drag this along with their future projects.
TL;DR - Good riddance. Please don’t stay in the game industry, we don’t want you.
The exit interview mentioned above:
