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.
If anyone knows (or has a theory) – does it take more to support a good game or a bad one? Outside of scaling, does it take more effort to support WoW than say… DAoC?
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.
I understand if have to lay people off, but do they have to be like many other publishers and butt-ram people just before Christmas, for the love of god?
What is it about executives in this industry that they A) can’t plan any better than this, and/or B) care so little about their people that they don’t even appear to TRY to plan to avoid it? I’m sure they got severance pay, but what can make up for being laid off a week before Christmas?
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.
Actually, Spring is a much better time to be laid off than right before Christmas, if it has to happen at all. Primarily because interviewing and hiring activity grinds pretty much to a halt in November / December. For a lot of companies, new positions are approved and new budgets go into effect in January, so hiring activity starts to pick up. February / March is a MUCH better time to be job hunting than December.
#9 written by damn you, capitalism!
about 1 year ago
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.
Which is also the reason you see some companies shedding lbs during that period as well. The last company I worked for as a direct-employee actually did a re-organization and moved their fiscal end of year to October to avoid having the double-impact around the holidays.
To clarify myself – I’m interested in how the per-capita costs to CS WoW (a game that is both popular and bug-free) compare to say Vanguard, a game that was a comparatively tiny AAA title and seemed rather glitchy months after launch. Are there ANY economies of scale? I’m certain Blizzard spends an order of magnitude more $$ than anyone else on CS/QA simply due to the volume, but I’m quite curious about the per-player match-ups.
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.
for what its worth, turbine puts out a QUALITY product with lord of the rings online. A near perfect launch, and the content they continue to add is staggering.
i didnt have much faith in turbine before lotro, but i do now…
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.
“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.”
/looks around at the smoking ruin of the global economy
I’m not as impressed with the forecasting abilities of execs as you are.
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.
about 1 year ago
Pretty soon only one MMO will rule them all….uh..I mean exist.
about 1 year ago
My first thought was what game does Turbine make? Once I remembered I thought maybe that’s part of the problem.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
If anyone knows (or has a theory) – does it take more to support a good game or a bad one? Outside of scaling, does it take more effort to support WoW than say… DAoC?
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
I understand if have to lay people off, but do they have to be like many other publishers and butt-ram people just before Christmas, for the love of god?
What is it about executives in this industry that they A) can’t plan any better than this, and/or B) care so little about their people that they don’t even appear to TRY to plan to avoid it? I’m sure they got severance pay, but what can make up for being laid off a week before Christmas?
Happy Holidays.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
Actually, Spring is a much better time to be laid off than right before Christmas, if it has to happen at all. Primarily because interviewing and hiring activity grinds pretty much to a halt in November / December. For a lot of companies, new positions are approved and new budgets go into effect in January, so hiring activity starts to pick up. February / March is a MUCH better time to be job hunting than December.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
Which is also the reason you see some companies shedding lbs during that period as well. The last company I worked for as a direct-employee actually did a re-organization and moved their fiscal end of year to October to avoid having the double-impact around the holidays.
To clarify myself – I’m interested in how the per-capita costs to CS WoW (a game that is both popular and bug-free) compare to say Vanguard, a game that was a comparatively tiny AAA title and seemed rather glitchy months after launch. Are there ANY economies of scale? I’m certain Blizzard spends an order of magnitude more $$ than anyone else on CS/QA simply due to the volume, but I’m quite curious about the per-player match-ups.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
for what its worth, turbine puts out a QUALITY product with lord of the rings online. A near perfect launch, and the content they continue to add is staggering.
i didnt have much faith in turbine before lotro, but i do now…
about 1 year ago
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?
about 1 year ago
I can’t tell you about the Customer Service aspect but I can tell you about the Quality Assurance side.
Because QA is a entry level job having lots of QA vs having good QA makes the difference. Having 20 crappy testers won’t equate to 5 good testers.
Blizzard obviously has more CS jobs and needs as they have larger volumes of players and larger international player base then Lord of the Rings.
about 1 year ago
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
about 1 year ago
“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.”
/looks around at the smoking ruin of the global economy
I’m not as impressed with the forecasting abilities of execs as you are.
about 1 year ago
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.