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Employee Exodus at Rockstar Games?
hammersuit writes "GameDaily Biz is reporting on recent troubles at Rockstar Games. 'A difficult console transition, FTC investigation, re-rating of GTA: San Andreas and more have put Rockstar and Take-Two in an unenviable position. We've received word that in addition to people who left because of studio closures, even more either fled or quit. Are Rockstar employees jumping ship or is this just a result of cost-cutting at Take-Two?'"
Actually, I thought I heard confirmations that the Table Tennis engine will be used for the next GTA. Which would make the game a sort of marketable proof-of-concept.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
If the ship is going down, the smart employees would jump first and probably ahead of any disasters in the making. When I left Atari in 2004 after being there for six years, my exit strategy was already planned out three years before. I been told that things got significantly worst after I left as Atari starting selling all there studios and laying people off.
Isn't that what josh just said? But it is not just about marketing. What better way to publicly beta test a new engine than to release a game that most GTA players and hardcore gamers will never touch? You avoid the "hardcore" crowds criticism if it sucks, and manage to get feedback enough to make sure it doesn't when it hits that "hardcore" market. A brilliant strategy in my opinion.
"And the heathens with their ways of trickery and deceit shall not prevail over the will of the righteous"
Honestly the fun of developing games is gone ...
...
It wasn't that long ago when every on the team had enough creative control over what they were doing that your fingerprint could be felt on any game you made. Now, if you're an artist, level designer, or scripter you are essentially a factory worker who does exactly what someone tells you to do without any input on your actions. I understand why it has to be this way (because how else do you produce a product with a 60 person dev team that takes 24-30 months) but it is no longer an enjoyable experience.
Every time I read a review where the reviewer is harsh because there is no normal maps (or whatever) I wonder why people even play games when they can get the graphics they want on DVD
A difficult console transition, FTC investigation, re-rating of GTA: San Andreas and more have put Rockstar and Take-Two in an unenviable position. We've received word that in addition to people who left because of studio closures, even more either fled or quit. Are Rockstar employees jumping ship or is this just a result of cost-cutting at Take-Two?
Maybe, or Rockstar was actually populated with conscientious people and most people didn't know it.
The development of Bully in which you play a schoolyard thug who tortures fellow classmates for fun might just have been the breaking point for some of Rockstars talent. It's time to move on when you're asked by your boss to do work that is morally contrary to your beliefs...I think a number of Rockstar's best and brightest did just that.
The GTA series was sylish and artistic, 'Bully' is irresponsible and sadistic.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Depends on how you look at it. A company that needs to work its employees until 2 AM would count as a sinking ship for me, even in the games market. Even when you factor in that the game companies do have a seemingly endless stream of young idealists willing to be overworked just because, hey, making games is cool, the worse you treat them, the faster anyone with marketable skills looks for a job somewhere else.
Well, yeah, but the point is you're talking about the entire game industry then. There's nothing unique to Rockstar about that, and there's nothing new to Rockstar about that that would warrant a news story about how suddenly it's all gone wrong.
I totally agree that this is a terrible way to run a company, and I've had conversations with my former co-workers both while I was there and afterwards about how the turnover would eventually bite the company in the ass.
But Rockstar is a young company even by game industry standards. I believe they were founded only something like 8 years ago, if I remember right. They haven't yet learned all the lessons a young company needs to learn; they don't know anything about retaining top talent, that much is obvious. But the first high-profile defections aren't happening now. The first high-profile defections happened around 2 years ago, when the two creative directors (who were the only creative directors the company had ever known, as far as I remember) left. That was a shock to the system, but the thought was it was an isolated incident. One of them took four people with her, though. Shortly after that, almost the entire web department turned over (including myself) and then it was like the floodgates opened.
It could be, in fact, that their recent issues are the result of, rather than the cause of, all this turnover. A lot of the things I've seen happen at Rockstar in the past 18 months would never have happened while I was there (not necessarily because of me, but because of all the other people who left at around that time, and before and shortly after). Some of the things I've seen coming out of their PR department lately have left me shocked - after years of running such a tight PR ship, it's like they've got two left feet lately. Their new web site design is at the least uninspired, and a lot of their recent marketing seems to basically be copying past marketing. Their games have lost that trademark sense of humor and are now just mean-spirited, except when they release a game like Table Tennis that just totally breaks their ethos completely. I could go on and on. They really seem like a company that's lost its way and I'm sure it's because the working conditions have just forced out all the top talent. I think assuming these problems are causing the turnover is probably backwards; the turnover was already going on, and it's causing the problems.
So yeah, you could consider them a slowly sinking ship, but if so, then the same is true for every publisher, and they've had a slow leak since they were founded and never even knew it. The question is whether or not they know it now. You can't consistently run a company forever staffed with 20 year olds that all have to learn the same lessons over and over, and most of whom are not going to be very talented and/or experienced at any given time. There was sort of a "golden age" at Rockstar for a while where a few of the early hires had come into their own, and in turn had trained the new hires well - a period when pretty much everybody was firing on all cylinders. Then people started leaving, and the new hires didn't have any mentors to really look up to, and things started falling apart. There's got to be a concerted effort to keep the top talent around at any company, even if it means concessions to their quality of life.
I will say that looking at the list of recent defections, I can only think of three people in positions of importance left from the early days of the company, or even from the days when I was there. Almost the entire upper ranks of the company has been replaced.
I suppose the one good thing about this is that Rockstar North is relatively immune from what goes on at Rockstar Games, so it's still pretty likely that GTA4 will be a killer game.