Broken Toys

Pretty soon only one MMO will rule them all….uh..I mean exist.

If you actually read up on what’s going on Turbine is growing, not shrinking. They duplicated most of their QA staff with a recent corporate expansion, and are getting rid of redundancies. Turbine is on a big enough hiring binge that thay are actually going to have more employees in six months than they did before the layoff.

The timing certainly sucks, but Turbine is doing just fine.

Since you weren’t entirely clear, it depends on how you define a good game vs a bad one.

If the distinction is the number of bugs and exploits and such, well then the answer should be pretty obvious.

If the distinction is the number of players (and all other things are more or less equal), then the difference between good and bad is a matter of scale. So, outside of scaling, they should be the same.

Scale is a bitch though. Heavy is the footprint of the bureaucratic hierarchy.

Well Jessica, is there ever a _good_ time to lay people off? Spring? in the middle of a school semester, for parents with kids? Summer? Happy summer vacation (I had that once, right before the first planned vacation my family was going to take in like five years, and was told I could keep looking for a job inside the company if I skipped my vacation, screw that)? Fall? Welcome back to school? At least before xmas you’re going to have time off with your family anyways, best time for family support, and then at least historically, hiring picks up post-xmas-retail as companies count their winnings and decide what they’ve got to do next. Really, just pointing a finger at “execs” is kinda silly.

Meh, the execs are beholden to the board & owners, who don’t interact with any resources (employees) on a daily basis and are only concerned about the return on investment and year over year growth. If it’s a bad year, the best way for the exec to keep his job is to say “hey look, I realize we didn’t meet the roi expectations, but look at the reduction of resources I’ve implemented in time for next year!” … the charts go up showing a 3% increase in roi, the board nods sagely at the exec’s wisdom, the exec goes home to his castle on the hill and forgets all about the resources who will be spending christmas looking for jobs and explaining to the kids why Santa isn’t being so generous.

So they’re eliminating positions while they are staffing up? I hope they had the moral fiber to at least interview the people they are firing to see if they would be a fit for their new openings.

Hellfire, in answer to your question:

It depends how well run your CS is.

It’s going to naturally get more expensive as you add more CS staff, just because of the natural tendency to add layers of management to keep the behemoth under control.

On the other hand, as you scale up, it becomes more cost effective to automate certain things, design tools to increase efficiency, and so on.

So, it costs more in order to scale up, but if well run, shouldn’t cost any more on a per user basis to support the big game than to support the small one. In some ways it will become cheaper.

Now, the real issue is: How much does good customer support lend itself to a healthy game that continues to grow?

Geek: What Tisirin said in #8. In fact, the period Jan-May is the best period to get laid off in the game industry, because that is when the public companies that shed people to make their 4th quarter and annual financials look good then hire back the positions they laid off in winter, so that their other projects will actually have a chance of making their schedules.

/general_rant_ON -not_aimed

But what I was alluding to, more specifically, was the thought that everyone laid off was going to have to go through the holiday period wondering what was going to happen to them and their families. Whether they’d have a job come the new year, whether they’d have to move to take a new job and what about our health coverage with the wife just diagnosed with that chronic condition and COBRA wants $1,200 per month to cover us and jesus christ what about the kids and can we even afford to have a holiday season this year, am I going to have to borrow money from my parents…

So no, there is no good season to lay off people, but you can at least plan it understanding that human beings are involved and that timing counts. It isn’t like they don’t know far in advance what the financial situation of the company is going to be, in most situations; a significant chunk of an executive’s time is spent running budgets and projections for every period from the next 3 months to five years out. I’ve been there and done that; believe me, THEY KNOW.

IMO, a sizable chunk of what is wrong with industry in America – and the game industry specifically – is the whole concept of “It is just business,” as if people weren’t involved at all. To me, that’s just an easy way of saying “Fuck ‘em; I’ve got my stock options and salary and it is going to be a *great* Christmas for me.” I’m sure they rationalize it differently inside their own heads – who thinks of themselves as an heartless asshole, after all? – but the end result is the same: somehow, being a dick doesn’t count if it is “just business.” In fact, the mantra of “just business” is there to make it *easy* for otherwise good people to be dicks.

At the risk of setting up a straw man to knock down: I disagree. You can plan some disasters for a graceful landing and this is one of them.

/general_rant_OFF

On execs in general, I agree, JuJutsu.

However, most publishers don’t live on credit; they have cash in the bank to pay the bills and can, in many if not most cases, project their expenses vs. cash needs out for a year or more.