How it feels when everyone you know gets laid off
staringispolite.com
staringispolite.com
They consistently provided grossly inflated (by an order of magnitude) numbers for their user counts and revenue. I honestly would not be surprised if they had lied to 6Waves in order get a merger in the first place.
They were almost banned from Facebook for selling user data to third parties.
Recently, they were contracted to help publish a game developed by an indie. As publishers, they got to see a game that hadn't yet been released. They stalled the indie shop in publishing the game while rushing to create a blatant clone. They then ditched the indie shop and released their own clone.
The Facebook ban was due to one of many small ad tests (<<1% of users each IIRC) we did with third parties, and had already stopped. Turns out one of them was later banned from Facebook, as was anyone who did business with them, regardless of how small or how short. IIRC we weren't even working with them when we got the punishment. But once accused, this kind of thing tends to stick with public perception.
Can't speak to the indie dev thing as I wasn't there at the time and haven't followed it. I will say that the studio that shut down wasn't the same studio as this controversy, but another in the "6L" umbrella.
The fact remains that the people there were some of the best I've worked with, and no one I knew wanted to screw anyone over or copy games. If anything, we had to scale back our vision at times. They were mostly engineers/artists/etc just incredibly happy to be getting paid to make original games after trying to 'break in' to the industry for so long. And the many people who played our games & our competitors' - even other game designers - thought that ours were pushing the boundaries of the industry forward.
And hey, I'm not saying you didn't have good engineers or artists. I think Ravenwood looked great and creating something like that is no joke.
1) We had a TON of users across many apps and not just our games (many thousands of apps when you include our user-generated ones).
2) These types of numbers were often "sum(MAU-app1 + MAU-app2 + ... + MAU-appN)". This point was always communicated clearly, but may not have been in the press, or could be a source of confusion? Even if communicated clearly, this may still seem like bloating the numbers: but my understanding is it more accurately represents the amount of impressions one would expect (from say a cross-promo with other games, or ad sales) than if you were to de-dupe them by Facebook ID. In other words, say you have 2 games with 10M MAU each, and 2M users play both: it's preferable to make decisions based on 20M as opposed to 18.
3) All apps' MAU/DAU numbers are public anyway, so there's not much to hide.
Thanks for complementing Ravenwood, btw. I really appreciate that. (I was a pre-alpha engineer)
I worked at a startup that began expanding very quickly in early 2008 (i.e., the worst possible time in recent history). When the economy collapsed that summer and they couldn't raise capital, they had to do layoffs.
That in itself isn't really interesting, but the way they carried out the layoffs was... suboptimal. At some point on a Tuesday, they had the HR manager walking around the cubicle areas, tapping people on the shoulder and calling them in for a meeting. After that, they would return to their desk, pack up their stuff, and leave the building forever.
No one really knew what was going on and those of us who hadn't been tapped by this "Angel of Death" were confused and afraid that we would be next on the list. It wasn't until after the herd was culled that management told the rest of us what happened.
I'm no HR expert, but there must have been a better way to do that.
I bet installing a nursery for colicky babies in the now-empty cubicles would have less of an impact on productivity.
I think they may have considered your colicky-baby-nursery idea as a way to make up for office space costs, but they eventually settled on renting 33% of the floorspace to another company.
Perhaps due to my imperfect English, from the title I thought that everyone he knows was laid off, instead of the developers at a former employer he no longer works for.
I will use that line next time!
Update: NO, I really will!
Update: Oh ok! I misunderstood
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Good luck to all the guys who were laid off, I'm sure things will work out!
EDIT: removed the quote
(Note: I am neither American nor German, and all my problems are definitely of the first-world variety. I hope to be thoughtful, but I am sure to be ignorant.)
In the one case, millions of people (say 5% of the country?) were terrorized, then kidnapped from their homes, then treated astonishingly badly, and then many of them were murdered. And it happened during a brief period of 5 years or so, 60 years ago. Short duration, but pretty recent.
In the other case, first of all, consider only the so-called Middle Passage. The total number of people involved is roughly comparable (over 10M), and mortality rate was perhaps a little lower, but roughly comparable (millions died). There then followed generations of maltreatment; appalling as the physical treatment is, the long-term cultural impact of generations of forced ignorance is arguably worse. (I think we can all agree that the oppressed people of Germany are doing much better now [65 years after 1945] than were, say, the Americans of African descent in 1930 [that's 65 years after 1865].) The only thing that seems less horrifying about the era of slavery is that it's a little more distant, at least the really brain-wreckingly horrifying parts.
So, in conclusion, it's not at all clear to this outsider why references to "death marches" are "way worse" than references to "niggers". Seems to me like they're pretty comparable.
I don't really think there is a point in putting up a comparison whose crimes were worse. It's more an emotional response when people get offended than a rational one, anyway. Maybe it's only worth pointing out that genocide is seen a more grave category of crime than other forms of homicide in international law.
That's crunch time.
A death march project takes months or even years, ruins the health of the workers and takes years off their lives, destroys their marriages and causes them to lose their children, leaves them believing they failed personally rather than being victims of poor leadership, and so forth. Outright literal death is uncommon but not unheard of.
Like OP's title I used a hyperbole to make a point and that should be clear from the context in my opinion. I apologize in case you have fallen a victim to this phenomenon, I did not mean to trivialize this problem either. However, if what you are suggesting is that what you have been though is comparable to the victims of the Holocaust, you should get a reality check.
I used to perceive that a game industry is a place where you only need to know C++ forever and thought for a while that "hey... that's not bad, just C++ instead of Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Maven, XML, XSDL, SOAP, REST, HTML, HTML5, CSS", but then I learned the long hours and suboptimal development practices.
Tough.
And not just slow-paced games either; the Lua Foundation gets a credit in some of the recent Street Fighter games.
When big legislation changes hit it's not uncommon for hundreds of people being fired overnight.
I worked at a big publisher studio for quite some time. They laid off people nearly every year, yet it felt relatively 'safe' compared to the rest of the industry.
It's really tricky for the company... I don't think moral ever came back, and there had been continued attrition after the layoff. :(
From my understanding in talking with some of the ex-employees: it doesn't seem to have been the issue in this case. But it's a huge point to consider if you're looking for take-aways for your own startup.