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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!
I bet the remaining Rockstar employees hunted them down, drove over them, beat them up with baseball bats and stole their money.
Is it just me or doesn't there seem to be a single coder or designer there? Nobody who actually makes these games?
Rockstar Games is a publisher, not a developer.
That said, they own outright all of the games they have gotten in trouble over, and the creative ideas and planning is all handled by them. So they can't turn around over Hot Coffee and say "it's Rockstar North's fault - they were the ones who developed the game." No. Rockstar Games is either directly or indirectly responsible for all of their own problems. But they don't employ a single coder - though parent company Take 2 does (as owners of Rockstar North and other developers).
If the ship is going down, the smart employees would jump first and probably ahead of any disasters in the making.
I don't have a lot of time to write this, so I may expand upon it later.
I'm about 6 months off that list, having left Rockstar about 18 months ago (maybe a bit more). I know all of the people on that list, and still talk to many of them. (A few of those departures are surprising, though, and I wasn't aware of all of them.)
I will just say that this is nothing new at Rockstar, which has always had a ridiculously high turnover. What you don't see on that list is that both of the marketing creative directors (print and online) quit at about the same time I did, along with two of the senior print designers, a game producer and several others. There was a steady stream of departures after I left as well.
The problem is poor working conditions. It's really got nothing to do with any of the company's recent troubles. We all always knew Rockstar was basically a one hit wonder and could go down at any time; none of us cared about that. What we cared about was working until 2 AM every night and never having any time to ourselves. You've all heard about EA; well, Rockstar is no better (and is probably worse).
Jen Gross, Jamie King and a few of these others, though, are some pretty big names. They were overworked just as much as the rest of us, though, and being management doesn't mean your mind and body is able to take any more abuse than anyone else. So it's still not totally unexpected to see.
The company's got some problems, but they're systemic - they have nothing to do with a "sinking ship" that's been caused by Hot Coffee or anything else recent. They're cultural, just as they are at EA and other developers.
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.