GamerNode: Columns - Death from Above

With no intention to offend, I would consider a bit of fact-checking.

GFwL is a disaster so far, and the enormous problems around the Operation: Anchorage actually revealed why that man was fired: he was incompetent.

Warhammer Online didn't "hit" 300,000. It had 750k active players back in October, and now at the start of 2009 it had 300k left. That's a disaster that fully explained the need for layoffs. MMOs are risky business; NCSoft closed down and consolidated studios after the Tabula Rasa disaster, Funcom is set to go completely out of business (they were already unstable before AoC, and that game bombed), and Mythic is seeing the results of their game's numbers dwindling. It isn't shocking, it's pure business sense.

As for the Waterstones interview thing: the "games are recession proof" line has been sold before, but even publishers have better business sense than to swallow it hook, line and sinker. *All* entertainment industries are recession proof because of the massive escapism factor involved in their sales numbers, but no entertainment industry is as badly set up to receive economic blows as the games industry. The costs are too high and the margins too low, when the games industry does get hit it gets hit hard. Publishers know this even if store clerks do not, it's the nature of the business.

I agree that Ensemble's canning is a bit mysterious, but they never produced a lot of mega-uber-hits and publishers aren't big on those kind of studios, the solid quality steady seller type. It doesn't fit into the industry model. It's still odd, tho', but perhaps something was going on behind the screens that we don't know about.
All of the other layoffs I've seen so far have been tied directly to poor results: EA has had a horrible year and *needs* to downsize. Mythic's WAR was a flop. Sega has had a bad year and also needed to shed some weight. Activision-Blizzard did ok, so they're not downsizing.

I'm sorry, but this finger-wagging of yours looks farcical. You're talking as if there's an option about firing people or not: sales are down, enormous losses are being posted in financial reports, it's sink or swim right now, not "hey why don't we fire a few guys?" Nobody likes it but it is what it is.
Besides, people with more memory will recall the gaming industry thought it could be bigger than it should be before, and the video game crash of '83 was the result.

If it's fact checking you want, here it is.

Warhammer Online has 300 thousand players. I am fully aware it had more, I just don't see the sense in trying to save a title whilst firing key development staff at the same time. The same applies for Blizzard, who forced their key development team to leave shortly before the Burning Crusade. When you're pushing for new players, sometimes casually, sometimes in desperation, it's not wise to get rid of the people who can potentially make that happen. It isn't shocking when an MMO lays off a ton of GM staff. It is when they're laying off people attempting to make new content and bring the project forward into 2009.

Second of all, games, books and dvds are never fully recession proof, but UK sales statistics would disagree with you, my friend. Games sales went up in 2008 by 23%. This is not a fact from the Penny Arcade forums, this is statistical data direct from the ELSPA. Nothing is recession proof, such a phrase is redundant, hence why, interestingly enough, I never used it. However, if the sales go up, then it's not a wise idea to cut the titles that are worth spending money on. Quality over quantity is the rule to go buy as a consumer with disposable income they're less likely to want to part with.

Ensemble's canning is indeed mysterious, but you need to research more into it before you make wild claims such as Microsoft possibly not being as big on Ensemble as they could be due to a lack of a huge back catalogue of solid hits. Ensemble made the Age of Empires series. Is this a "solid quality seller type"? I'd argue it is.

EA employ far too many staff, hence my not including them in the column. They also employ risky staff, such as the head of EA Sports who would prefer to spend his time berating Eurogamer on their non-inclusion of FIFA 09 into their "best games of 2008" feature, instead of actually improving a title stagnating in its own unoriginality, 1.25million matches a day or not.

It's not finger-wagging, and it's not farcical. I'm stating that people are being sacked from companies that either need the staff they're sacking, or companies with a huge back catalogue of good games are facing the chop because of a small slip up (google Free Radical and their recent saved-by-the-Crytek bonanza).

I do fact check. I am trained to fact check. There's a strong difference between differing in opinion, and calling me out on facts that you think I haven't researched. I agree with you completely on most of your points, though I do think you should look into Mythic's specific list of lay-offs before you tell me why I think it's worrying they've only just got back up to 300k only to dump important staff. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to comment, I do appreciate it, but I will always defend my work when I know I devoted the time to making sure I didn't make mistakes. No one ever said here that WAR hadn't ever had higher player figures. I only said I didn't want them to sink any lower. Have a good day.

As for Games for Windows Live, by the way, as I failed to answer your main query and I apologise, but I feel that out of simple business sense, it's best to take him into a conference room and give him a "do or die" order, instead of booting him out publicly. They had the option of making him look incompetent, or making everyone there look incompetent, and by the amount of press he got and the amount of opportunities he therefore recieved to defend himself and poke fun at Microsoft as a result, I'd wager they took the latter option.

Just so we don't get mystified about each other's ability to fact check or access to info, I'm a paid freelance journalist, so I do know my numbers and am aware of what's going on officially and often unofficially.
Perhaps the editorial comes off as more based-on-nothing than it is because the logic is so hard to follow.

Take WAR (again). It's a 300k-MMO down from 750k. It was originally planned by EA as a 1-million MMO, and - and this is important - staffed as such. EA isn't insane, they're not going to run a studio set up for 1 million customers for an MMO that has less than a third of those numbers.
WAR is still going forward, which - if anything - is a good showing that EA's new look is more than smoke and mirrors, as many publishers would have already cut their losses and run at this point. But it is going forward with less staff because it has to. It's not going to regain the necessary 700k costumers overnight. Likely it will never regain those people no matter how much staff you invest. That's just reality.

Game sales went up in 2008 (23% UK, 15%/19% US, the second-biggest world market (Japan) shrunk by 13%), but almost every major publishers has just posted enormous losses. It was a bad year for gaming economically, and obviously economic results in this context should be seen in a wider sense than just game sale %s.

Midway just filed for bankruptcy. NCSoft already had to make major cuts last year. EA, Sega have shrunk. The few publishers who are doing well are vulturing smaller companies. This has all the hallmarks of a full recession, and that just is what it is.
Yet you're standing there as some kind of reverse cowboy going "invest!" Invest? It's sink or swim, full desperation hour. Unprofitable products need to be slashes. Games in early stages need to go. Not for fun and games, but because publishers don't have the money to support them. If you're going to pump money into products now, you're going out of business, that I can guarantee.
I'm not saying you have to like it, but to stand there and talk to "Mr games industry" advising them not to fire people working on projects that are not directly profitable is odd. Because these publishers need direct profits, Nintendo and Activision-Blizzard might actually be the only two that can take serious hits, EA and Take-Two certainly can't take a lot of it.
There's a lot wrong with gaming publishing models, and I've been agitating against the dominant industry model for years now. I can stand here and with a clean conscience say "told you so", but even I'm not going to say that cutting jobs when you're leaking money isn't just good business sense

Ensemble's canning is indeed mysterious, but you need to research more into it before you make wild claims such as Microsoft possibly not being as big on Ensemble as they could be due to a lack of a huge back catalogue of solid hits.

Read what I said more carefully. I said EA - like most major publishers - is more fond of studios that produce huge direct-sellers than studios that are dedicated to quality and create steady sellers. Troika had no publisher interest under the same logic, and in that sense it's not shocking Ensemble suffers the same path.

Personally, I don't like being referred to as a cowboy of any sort, let alone the reverse kind. I'm not saying "invest!" at random, writing an angsty column on a website because I can. I'm writing a column on a website not because I'm angry they're firing people, because I'm annoyed that they're firing the wrong people, in my opinion.

In my opinion, and I'm beginning to feel the need to heavily state that this is indeed my opinion, and not a fact, as it's a column, I think Ensemble got royally screwed by Microsoft, and you'd be hard pressed to find a single person who wasn't responsible for canning them that thinks differently, save, possibly, yourself. I wasn't saying they were the personification of awesomeness, come down from the heavens to save us all from a future of bleak, crappy titles all involving Bratz girls and Wii remotes. I was saying they made great games, made another great game, and got canned instead of congratulated. Microsoft weren't even expecting them to finish the project. It just feels like spite from Microsoft because the team who created the Halo universe left them so long ago, and they're not over it yet. Again, just an opinion.

I sat with Hans Lo of Midway for a very, very long interview in November, and I could hear the desperation in his voice. Here sat a man who, ten years ago, would have been a rockstar developer, flipping the bird to the ERSB and giggling over Sub Zero's new fatality. Now he sat desperately hoping that MK vs DC wasn't a complete flop. There needed to be cuts there, but it was sad to see them slowly sink down into bankruptcy rather than simply cut their losses.

Sony reported losses, as did most people. But I'm not concerned with that. I'm more concerned with the fact that they don't seem to recognise something I'd like to think was pretty evident to most people: if I'm going to spend more time at home, gaming, I'd want to do it with a few amazing titles, and not a lot of cheap, poorly made ones.

I don't find your logic hard to follow at all. I'm glad you can fact check. In fact, I know you can fact check otherwise you wouldn't have disputed the article's accuracy in the first place. My point to you was that I'm not concerned with WAR's loss of players. I'm concerned with Mythic firing the wrong people. It's the people I care about. Read the last blog post from Ensemble. The last few articles from the 1UP team. These "business sense" decisions are hurting real, talented people who worked harder than some of the ones not getting the sack.

When I write my column, I write it because I want to share my opinion with the world. I don't need to fact check my opinion. I just don't understand the need for a long-drawn out display of wise-assery simply because one person thinks side A of a number is important, and another person's more interested in side B. If you want to cover side B, about Mythic and their failings, then do so, noone's stopping you and as a freelancer I'm sure you have various places you could feasibly do this within the next couple of hours. But I'm going to cover side A, because I want to. Because it's side A, the people involved, not the numbers, that matter to me. Firing those staff was like firing the man who invented the wheel because someone else found a way to paint it a cool colour, and the painter then keeping their job while the other had to go. It's just poor choices.

Yes, by all means, it is desperation hour. I'm saying if you're going to cut down to 10% of what you once had under your "costs" column, you better damn well make sure that 10% is the best god-damn 10% anyone's ever had. Instead, most companies have dropped that percentage and gone for a random assortment of staff, firing people who look at them wrong. It's a shame and I'm sad, so I wrote about it. Please link me to your side B article if you choose to write it, and in case any offense was taken, I hope not, I enjoy being challenged on my work because it proved someone read the damn thing. But I stand by what I wrote.