controller1.com

Hey Kids- It’s Layoff O’Clock!

Today was a weird day. Some friends of mine worked at a games company up the road at a now closed Pandemic office. Its a shitty time to lose your job and I’ll always grateful mine is still (touch wood) around. So I’m going to raise a glass of Diet Coke to my friends at that now deserted place. Join me if you will.

It’s interesting. Last week, Ziff Davis Media closed long-running magazine EGM one month shy of its 20th anniversary issue (obsessive compulsive completists- you may now start pulling out your hair- though wash your hands first. And again afterwards. And again) along with laying off around 40 EGM and 1up.com staff. The Fanboys have reacted with sorrow, sadness, poetry, rap and donations to keep these guys in podcasting equipment. The 100+ Neogaf thread is testament to the impact these guys and gals had on videogame geekdom. Hey, I loved 1upyours, even though the music was just Electric Rodeo in Soundtrack Pro.

In the last month, Crystal Dynamics shed some staff (30), Free Radical nearly went broke and made most of its staff redundant (140), Pandemic closing brisbane (as part of EA’s cutting of 1000 positions, Factor 5 shedding half of its staff, Midway issuing pink slips like its going out of fashion, THQ, Turbine, Aspyr, Brash. Even Sony and MS are getting in on the act “Hey guys if they’re firing 10 000, we can’t be seen to not fire more.” The last two may not actually be cutting games jobs yet but this is on top of most major industries. We’re in a recession. We get the message. This is after a year where Silicon Knights cut staff, Lucasarts cut numbers, Activision dropped a number of projects after its merger with Vivendi (with some redundancies I believe) and EA already closed studios earlier when they acquired Bioware/Pandemic from Bono and, oh, John Ricitello. You could imagine the bloodbath now if EA had managed to take over Take 2?

Losing your job sucks if you didn’t want to lose it. Ron Livingstone tried to get fired in Office Space and he merely got a promotion. But something of a double standard has emerged. Internet assholes, being the assholes they are are quick to add their comments (try moderating the comments- for spam- of even a small website like this and you know its a decent sized job each day). On the Kotaku comments underneath the Pandemic Brisbane closure story, the general sentiment is “oh, they only made Destroy All Humans 1 and 2 and that cancelled Dark Knight game (allegedly)? Not Mercenaries or Saboteur- the games I want to play? Then I’m all right. Their games weren’t good anyway and they deserve to be fired and shot and bulldozed into a mass grave.”

I’m exaggerating slightly but the point is, they don’t deserve this. No one does. No one in games sets out to make shitty or less than great games. The guys who are making Imagine Babies would probably rather make games like WoW, TF2 or Gears but that’s the job they got. The guys making Nickelodeon games do so since that’s the work on offer. They’ll try their best with the budget (manpower),time, publisher and licensing constraints (the number one reason many licensed games suck is not because of the devs are incompetent, its because the license holders can be incredibly protective of their moneymakers).

So we have the love for 1up’s very talented guys and gals, and we have hatred for the 1500 or so videogame developers who’ve lost their job. There’s sometimes satisfaction expressed that people who are laid of from a developer of anything less than AAA titles lose their jobs. Wow- that’s pretty fucked up.