Gambling with People's Jobs - Response to Raven and Maxis Layoffs

With all the layoffs over the course of the year, we've seen more people kicked to the curb than ever before.   It deeply saddens me, and I have also been personally impacted by it. 

It used to be that if you did a good job, did what you were told and occasionally exceeded expectations to make up for the times when you didn't, you could feel comfortable that you can keep your job.  Heck, if you were really good at what you did, you could have the personality and breath of a warthog and still keep your job.  But nowadays, you could do a great job, bust your ass in crunch mode, and still lose your job because your game just wasn't the hit people were expecting.

Companies have always made the "painful" but arguably necessary decisions to cut costs by tossing off their dead weight, their underperformers, when money is tight. Yet with soaring game budgets these days,  it seems that we're in a high-stakes game of poker, and our bosses have gone "all in".  If they don't walk away with a bigger stack of chips than  they came in with, they're going to make some deep cuts.  The whole team's jobs are at stake. 

It's these team-sized layoffs at Activision/Raven and EA/Maxis that illustrate my point.  Here are two teams that have worked at America's top 2 publishers.  The money is clearly there.  They may have lost a hand of poker, but they still have a big stack of chips. 

To a publisher its clear that some shake-up is necessary, as the project was well-funded, so some other factor in the recipe must be to blame.  But allow me to go out on a limb here and suggest that seldom are the people cheifly responsible for a game's failure held responsible.

It could be that the game license, original IP or technical gimmick the game was based on just didn't catch on.  Is that the fault of the team or the biz dev guy who bought the license or the marketing vice president or creative director who pitched the idea?

Maybe someone on the team is at fault.  Maybe the game suffered from a lack of vision.  Is that the rest of the team's fault or just the lead designer or producer's fault? Maybe it was poorly executed.   At that point, it could be anyone's fault but clearly not everyone's.

So if layoffs are a necessary evil in this business ... if it comes down to some people having to lose their jobs, I would hope companies do some real failure analysis and lay off the right people.  I can't imagine all those people at EA/Maxis and Activision/Raven were to blame, but the question remains whether the people they held onto will play a better hand of poker.

Tim Ryan (a fellow victim of layoff, Midway, Dec 08)