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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?'"
Come on, after releasing a game like TABLE TENNIS, if employees there are leaving because of anything, it's because they got bored silly programming pong all over again.
Yes, I know the came's supposed to be incredibly good and realistic, but it's a drastic turn from what they'd been doing no matter how you see it.
...Rockstar's HQ is next to a killing spree spawn point.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
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.
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games? noNow if people from HR are leaving, then their is a reason to be worried. When HR quits update your resume yesterday.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I bet the remaining Rockstar employees hunted them down, drove over them, beat them up with baseball bats and stole their money.
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
Uh, please don't base your whole post off of your assumptions and 3 screenshots on their site.
E3 preview of bully
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/611/611166p1.html
excerpt:
"It follows the story of a troublesome schoolboy in reform school as he tries to _stand up to bullies_, gets picked on by teachers, plays pranks, and even tries to get the girl. All of this takes place in the fictional Bullworth Academy."
Emphasis mine.
Don't listen to Jack Thompson, k? He has no clue what he's talking about.
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.
Not to be an English nazi, but since when has there been a discrepancy between quitting and fleeing from a job?
Like you, the Nazis probably weren't very good at English either.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Can you pick out one person from this list that is invaluable? Hell, they're all upper managers and marketing/PR flunkies. Getting rid of them can only improve game development.
And you hereby demonstrate your utter lack of knowledge of the game industry.
What exactly do you think upper management does at a game company? Who do you think manages development of the games? What do you think the title "VP of Development" (it's actually VP for Development) means? What do you think product managers do? Do you have any idea?
As for marketing, Rockstar has always been about image, and it's now lost almost all of its image makers. The image any company projects comes from its marketing and PR departments. Rockstar's fall in public perception (including among hardcore gamers, as this submission demonstrates) is directly related to the loss of a large part of that marketing department, and the entire PR department (two times over, in fact).
People like you apparently think the world would be a better place if it was just made up of a bunch of coders. Where do you think all the artwork for Rockstar's games come from? It comes from the marketing department, which is where all the designers are. Ditto for the music in the games; the soundtracks for all the GTA games comes from marketing. Who do you think makes sure the games hit their milestones? Who do you think project manages, produces, writes the scripts, hires the voice talent, does the recording, does the game testing? It ain't the coders.
Every single one of the people on that list was important. These were some of the top people at Rockstar, responsible for making decisions both big and small. A coder can be replaced in a day. A good manager that has a larger understanding of the industry and the company is almost impossible to replace in any time frame.
Whoever modded that Insightful embarrassed the both of you...