Jason Rubin To Leave Naughty Dog

Thanks to GameSpot for its story revealing Naughty Dog co-founder Jason Rubin is leaving the company after Jak III is completed. Rubin, who has a long history in the games industry, helping create both the Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter franchises, mentions he's "made a conscious decision to leave Naughty Dog and explore other options in the gaming sector", arguably not a surprise since his recent DICE Conference speech on the disrespect paid to game developers. The GameSpot article notes: "While Rubin's speech took game publishers to task for not valuing talent, he maintains he was not singling out Sony", and a separate interview fleshes out Rubin's feedback from the speech, noting: "So far nobody has said anything negative, but those who do not want to hear what was said won't be the types to comment directly."

Comments

Who care?

[Anonymous Coward]

stuff that matters? yeah right.

in other news a bird was seen flying IN THE SKY today!!!

More power to this man

[Ty]

To answer your question more directly, Hollywood studios still finance a large proportion of movies, but talent runs the business and is respected. Money is cheap and can be found outside the game industry. Talent is expensive, and only game developers have it.

I read this and was reminded how sad the reality of this is. Of those of us who are gamers, who can name the lead designers on our 5 favorite games? I can't name any of them myself. I can name all of the publishers though. It's really sad that the most important people responsible for the game are hardly acknowledged.

Until this changes, we can expect the game industry to further spiral into sequal and cross-licenced stagnation, since those are the "safe bets" that publishers are generally only willing to finance.

Re:More power to this man

[DougWhite]

The difference is with hollywood you cannot replicate something as easily. There aren't two Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts. So you can only get that PR a couple times a year. You have to think of each big star as a brand name, and not just somebody who has talent. Almost everybody behind the screen doesn't count for anything and can be replaced. Director and Writer are really as about as far as it goes, and most people can't run off more than a dozen of each.

As for the gaming industry, I am not by any means knocking their ability. But how often does anybody really say "That is some awesome code, nobody else could do this". This isn't to say that what was produced was obvious, but it certainly can be duplicated. Every gaming revolution in the game industry has been followed with a hundreds of clones. Game Developers and software engineers are selling what they can do. Actors/actresses are selling what they are, and that can't be duplicated