Was the spirit of EA Violated? Or not

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

3 hours ago, K^2 said:

So saying Intercept got "fired" for doing bad job on KSP2 is simply not true. Individual people get fired for bad work. Studio shutdowns happen for absolutely unrelated reasons.

So you think if we hear a confirmation that the studio got shutdown, it had nothing to do with their “performance”?

So you’re saying if they had stellar performance with ever increasing sales numbers they would still have been fired?

That seems very unlikely to me. 

Edited May 8 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[K^2]

6 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

So you think if we hear a confirmation that the studio got shutdown, it had nothing to do with their “performance”?

So you’re saying if they had stellar performance with ever increasing sales numbers they would still have been fired?

That seems very unlikely to me. 

All that says is that your intuition about the industry is way off and you have not developed critical thinking skills to challenge it.

And if you feel like arguing about it, start by providing some numbers showing that Tango Gameworks was a failing studio not generating the revenue. We can all use a laugh.

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

3 minutes ago, K^2 said:

All that says is that your intuition about the industry is way off and you have not developed critical thinking skills to challenge it.

And if you feel like arguing about it, start by providing some numbers showing that Tango Gameworks was a failing studio not generating the revenue. We can all use a laugh.

I, and many others, say poor performance makes you more likely to get fired than not.

If you have something to back up this illogical claim that this is untrue, then I could use a good laugh too. 

Edited May 8 by GGG-GoodGuyGreg

[K^2]

2 minutes ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

I, and many others, say poor performance makes you more likely to get fired than not.

How many years of professional game development work do you and many others have combined? How many people have you hired to work on a game project? How many people have you had to fire for poor performance in game development? How many lay-offs in game development industry have you survived?

I have a decade of experience, led multiple development teams at companies ranging from start-up mobile games to Blizzard managing cross-platform development on a live title, put in people for promotions, put people on PIP, fired people, have been layed-off as the highest salary engineer on basis of that alone, have been hired for an even higher salary immediately after that, and have seen waves after waves of people come and go for more reasons than I care to name.

Never in my life have I seen a studio shut down for poor performance. Because if you're a VP and all you have is an underperforming studio, you fire five people at its head, replace them, and show how badass you are to your management when that studio starts delivering on target. That is the easiest way to score promotions and bonuses in management. You don't throw that opportunity away. This is a career move for absolutely anyone with high management aspirations.

But go on, tell me how you and many others are a better judge of that based on your career doing whatever it is you do.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, dave1904 said:

The profits are not high enough. 

But then why not just deinvest the Studio and recoup the money?

Like... I'm a taxi driver, and the costs of the car are eating badly the incoming and I want to quit this taxi business. In this situation, how I would recoup most of the money? By selling the car to someone willing to be in this business or by putting it down into a recycler for the money from the recycled materials?

It's the reason I think we are missing something important - the only situation in which the second option on my example above would be the best outcome is if the price of the recycled materials after writing the car off outweigh the money you would earn by selling the car to someone.

What's only true if the car is really a rotten tomato... Or you had stripped the car of anything valuable and then are going to deduct the price you paid for it from the taxes as losses.

 

24 minutes ago, K^2 said:

<...>

I have a decade of experience, led multiple development teams at companies ranging from start-up mobile games to Blizzard managing cross-platform development on a live title, put in people for promotions, put people on PIP, fired people, have been layed-off as the highest salary engineer on basis of that alone, have been hired for an even higher salary immediately after that, and have seen waves after waves of people come and go for more reasons than I care to name.

Never in my life have I seen a studio shut down for poor performance.  <....>

I have (had, switched industries) more than 25 years on development on embedded systems, and I had seen THREE Corporate take overs (one of then, absolutely hostile).

And I agree, no one shuts down a whole division for poor performance. They do it for money.

Once, I saw a division being shutdown after a merge (that hostile one) because there was already another division doing exactly the same job (bought on a previous merge), and this division were performing poorly when compared to that one, so they scrapped this division and kept the other.

In other situation, the buyer literally paid 1USD for the whole Company (the seller was desperate to get rid of the expenses and cut the losses). The buyer stripped the dead body from anything of value, and then terminated it, because this would be more profitable in the short run than sanitizing the Company and make it profitable again (and they could do it, but they had no interest on the Brand, that market was collapsing).

And there's that Nokia stunt, with Stephen Elop in the helm - Microsoft bought Nokia pretty cheap and literally wrote it off after some time, deducting the money invested from their taxes as losses.

Edited May 8 by Lisias
brute force post merge

[Jacke]

@K^2, you've got ooddles of industry experience and I'm only an outsider with some IT background looking in.

20 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Never in my life have I seen a studio shut down for poor performance. Because if you're a VP and all you have is an underperforming studio, you fire five people at its head, replace them, and show how badass you are to your management when that studio starts delivering on target. That is the easiest way to score promotions and bonuses in management. You don't throw that opportunity away. This is a career move for absolutely anyone with high management aspirations.

I think you've pointed out a very relevant situation here.  Because this isn't what happened with Intercept Games.  It's something different.

I think it's more what happens in other conditions, when the leadership of a corporation has decided (rightly, wrongly, or uncertainly) to contract.  Thus the announcement of 5% job reductions.

And even before that announcement, when they knew they were going to make it, they were looking to see where to cut.

And in that cold calculus, performance does come in as a factor.  Not just whether it's good or bad, but how much net revenue is going to come how fast with what certainty from an operation, from a studio.  What they're going to say in that upcoming earnings call to justify this decision.

In that case, I think they saw Intercept Games, they saw Kerbal Space Program 2, as poor, uncertain, low to negative net return, long running performers.

In other words, the test that was failed was not enough good in the answer to "What good have you done recently?"

Once the decision was made of where and what to cut, they then got into some of the details.  Who amongst the staff to keep (by moving them to Private Divison) and for what reasons.  What they're going to say about it on the upcoming earnings call.  Maybe a likely idea of what to do with KSP going forward.  Maybe they've ordered a detail review of what's there, what condition, what possibilities.

And they decided the best thing to do (for them) was minimize communication after the initial required announcements until the earnings call is done.

 

[Scarecrow71]

1 hour ago, GGG-GoodGuyGreg said:

I, and many others, say poor performance makes you more likely to get fired than not.

I don't just say it.  I have personal experience stemming from my own poor performance in the very first job I ever got.  16 years old, got hired at McDonald's, thought it would be a cakewalk and they'd just hand me a check.  Boy, did I ever find out differently 2 months in.  Walked in for a shift, got called into the office before I clocked in, was handed my final paycheck and told, in no uncertain terms, that "...your performance doesn't meet the McDonald's standard..." and was told I was no longer a part of the McDonald's family.

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

Never in my life have I seen a studio shut down for poor performance.

Poor performance in ANY industry can cause employees to get fired, or businesses to close.  But we are talking about game dev so...just because you haven't seen it means it hasn't happened?  Your personal experience does not mean others haven't had other experiences or seen/heard other things.  Your narrow view of what can happen is simply that - your own narrow view.

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

I have (had, switched industries) more than 25 years on development on embedded systems, and I had seen THREE Corporate take overs (one of then, absolutely hostile).

I have been in the same industry my entire career, and I've seen the company I work for gobble up multiple smaller insurance firms.  Promises are made, nobody is getting the axe...and then the smaller company ends up just getting gutted, employees laid off, and systems integrated.  It happens.

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

And I agree, no one shuts down a whole division for poor performance. They do it for money.

Poor performance can, and almost always does, lead to revenue hits.

[K^2]

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

And in that cold calculus, performance does come in as a factor.  Not just whether it's good or bad, but how much net revenue is going to come how fast with what certainty from an operation, from a studio.

The problem is that correlation between studio doing a good job with the resources they have and the revenue math is negligible. I mean, it's possible to very clearly and unambiguously be bad at things. If you took publisher money and went on a drinking spree and had absolutely nothing to show for it, yeah, sure. But drawing the correlation the other way, from failed projects to the quality of the team overall, is pretty much statistical noise.

In practice, a lot more is determined by the conditions of the project and the IP. Did PD trust your project enough to give you a budget to hire the best people in the field? No? You're kind of boned. People the Intercept hired for physics were just out of academia and had very little game dev experience. They were good at physics, but very, very green in games. Networking engineers they had also never had to work with a game like KSP2. I don't think that's because Intercept just didn't know how to find talented people. They didn't have the budget to hire people who could hit the ground running on absolutely everything. Finally, the engine. The only reason it's a Unity game is because heavy reuse of the KSP assets and code was promised by Star Theory, like, seven years ago, and it's been sunk costs ever since. That limits people you can hire to a specific set of skills, because you make certain kinds of games on Unity, and they aren't KSP. It's a big part of why Intercept ended up having to hire modders. They knew how to work with Unity, how to make things for KSP, and they were probably within budget.

Clearly PD wanted to make a game cheap. And the ambition they were sold on was not of a cheap game to make. Not a lot of it is on the studio that was created years after the decisions were made. Some of it is on the people who were at Star Theory from the start, but the majority of it has been PD decisions on how much they value the IP.

And the game was still happening. It was a buggy mess, it was wildly off schedule, but we were seeing a game being built. Just not fast enough. Not selling enough EA copies. Not getting glowing enough reviews.

Given the same constraints, I don't know if it was possible to do better. You can make a strong argument that people who ended up in charge of the Intercept should not have attempted to make KSP2 with these constraints. And, yeah, maybe? But to say they are a studio that deserved closing more than another studio because they decided to try is at a minimum a very cynical thing to claim. And I would argue unfair.

 

And then there are so many factors on top of that. It's not just about money you've earned it's how much you're going to earn soon. Again, Tango Gameworks are a great example. Hi-Fi Rush went above and beyond. Critical success, glowing user reviews, and it recouped its development costs several times over. Studio gets shut down. At the same time, the studio working on Fallout 76, whose beta launch makes KSP2 EA look good and who are running a bill tens of times higher are allowed to keep going. Because they are maintaining a title that continues to make money, and Tango Gameworks would have to start working on another game that will maybe be as successful as Hi-Fi Rush four years from now. So a studio that performed great got shutdown, and a studio that's been making mediocre work, taking years to put 76 back on track and massively over budget is allowed to keep going. It ain't about the the studio's performance. It's about the resources, and IP, and a type of project, and what the higher management thinks it means in terms of revenue over the next couple of quarters tops.

 

There are additional considerations and backroom talk that makes me think that some of the criticism towards Intercept leadership is deserved. But I would not have drawn this conclusion purely from how the development of KSP2 has been going. Knowing everything we've learned about the project over, eh, 2023 or so, they were always going to have to fight uphill. Some of it through more thorns than another studio, perhaps, but I have no reason to believe that any other studio working on the same budget would be able to make KSP2 good enough to not be cut at this point. And that's all that matters here. The rest is fluff and victim-blaming.

[snip]

Edited May 9 by Vanamonde

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. Please avoid making things personal. 

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

7 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I

Poor performance can, and almost always does, lead to revenue hits.

That’s what I meant, poor performance leads to money loss, so it’s what raises your chances to get you fired. 

[jost]

13 hours ago, Lisias said:

Obviously, this is not random, there's some methodology on this - but I just can't understand it right now.

More developers without a Job = More developers who agree with lower salaries

[HebaruSan]

7 hours ago, jost said:

More developers without a Job = More developers who agree with lower salaries

Yeah; one explanation for the business cycle is that when businesses close down, their remaining capital is sold off cheap, and new entrants to the market get an advantage by buying them. You could argue the same thing is being done now with game devs; mass layoffs, then re-hire a team made up of recently laid off devs desperate to work.