One of my former coworkers has spent the day live-casting himself drinking heavily and playing through Adventure World maps one last time before the game shuts down on the 14th. A bunch of us have been chatting while he does it. It's absolutely not SFW, and may in fact be a horrible career decision for him. It is, however, funny as hell.
Aaand he's done for the day. Because he ran out of in-game energy, obviously. He blew a crap ton of saved-up Adventure Cash (the game's premium currency,) to play as long as he did today. He claims he's going to do this every day until the game shuts down, but I don't know if he has the persistence. He certainly doesn't have that cache of Adventure Cash anymore, so future sessions won't be nearly as long.
So I'm officially making this the "Boston Studios Shutting Down" thread, because god damn it. Confirmed by friends of mine who worked there. I'm still looking for a job too, so in addition to feeling bad for my friends and everyone else there, now I'm worrying about this whole new batch of people looking for an ever-shrinking number of game dev jobs in the Boston area.
Just throwing it out here that my company is still hiring devs, project managers and analysts. It not games, but it's work. PM if you want details.
Brian Reynolds is leaving Zynga: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/185678/Zynga_loses_its_design_chief.php Can't wait for the retrospective a couple years from now. Now go make us some awesome mobile strategy games!
Reynolds wrote a goodbye letter: http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/01/brian-reynolds-on-zynga-games-and-the-future/
"Seemed" being the operative word from that sentence. Some part of me is just saddened that creating art is reduced to a comparison with forming a championship baseball team.
HALLO VENTURE CAPITALISTS I AM NOW ACCEPTING YOUR MONEYS FOR MY EXCITING NEW MOBILE START-UP. More seriously I think a lot of those old skool guys who cut their teeth back in the C-64 / Amiga / Atari / early IBM days of the late 80's / early 90s could do well in mobile / iOs. They had experience in how to achieve great games with a team of well under 10 people. Brian Reynolds, Richard Garriott, Julian Gollop and I am sure a bunch of others are all into it now, getting back to their entrepreneurial bedroom coding roots. Something good must come from at least one of them! For my money Gollop is quite likely to produce something interesting, followed by Brian Reynolds then Garriott. Although if Gariott manages to capture the pre Ultima 8 magic again, watch out it will be damn special.
That's pretty much it. I didn't have any interaction with Reynolds personally, but there was an all-designers e-mail list that he and a lot of other designers would send e-mails to. Usually the conversations were lengthy e-mail chains complaining about PMs, and I remember during one particularly heated one, Reynolds sent out an e-mail implying that most of what he did at Zynga was design stuff he knew was crap but fit Zynga's model, and then grit his teeth and accept the fat paycheck. I think we all knew it was just a matter of time until he left at that point.
That is actually much better than it has ever been and surprised the market, the shares jumped a fair way. Meanwhile off in "non-GAAP" fantasy land they made a profit. Nasdaq really needs some damn IFRS up in its market, yo.
Yep. Lots of talk about it on my Facebook feed today. I would expect the NY and Texas offices that they just "merged" to be shut down after not too long. They're making a concerted effort to bring everyone out to California under the direct control of the mothership. From what I hear from a friend who worked in the Baltimore office, just like in the Boston office very few people accepted Zynga's "offer" to reapply for positions in the SF office. I don't think they're learning that you can't expect people to try to cross a burning bridge.
Similar thing happened with Gazillion, they tried to relocate everyone to San Mateo, most people didn't take the offer. And that was a good thing, since they had more layoffs a few months later.
Obviously a bunch of friends of mine who still worked there are without jobs now. Here's hoping they land on their feet, and that the rest of the people I know get the hell out of there soon. This is only going to keep happening until Pincus is ousted.
So there's kind of an ugly (yet interesting) debate/chortlefest going on about this news on Gamasutra's article. At such a developer-focused site I'm surprised to see so many people calling Zynga "exploitative" and evil. One asshat in particular not only takes the laid off employees to task for supporting Zynga, but extends that blame to their families. Yeah, that three year old should have known better, right? I guess the discussion really highlights that traditional (and probably indie) developers really don't like the social games market and what it has (supposedly) done to the larger gaming market.
Man, that comment thread is ugly, and the Ramin "I predicted this on my blog years ago!" guy who started all the shit-flinging is a serious asshole.
I've found that the phrase "I predicted this years ago" is one of the best red flags for identifying assholes on the internet.
In the case of Zynga I'm not sure that's a fair takeaway. Zynga is well documented as a questionable company when it comes to how they handle/exploit employees.
I was one of the 520 people laid off by Zynga. I'm not the guy doing the AMA, but a lot of his responses applied to the Boston office as well.
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-zyngas-lay-offs-2013-6 So, apparently the people at OMGPOP were pretty happy about the news.
Gamasutra's got this commentary crowd that often annoys the hell outta me. Weird analysts/experts who don't have any actual expertise, and tend to advertise themselves and their companies rather than actually give advice. Hipsters who will happily denigrate the mainstream industry they have never actually worked in. People with weird chips on their shoulders and odd grudges against all sorts of people and things. For the most part, it's a wasteland. I do wonder if it's moderated at all, and if that might be part of the issue.
"As wary employees drew near, they were greeted by the familiar face of the office HR woman. She stood beside a blonde Zynga executive from California who looked like he'd been ripped off the cover of Men's Health." Ten bucks says the unnamed executive was Todd Arnold.
As I pointed out in my paper back from 2006, "Comment Moderating is a necessary evil", you can find it under my profile, people who comments are Douchebag and deserve to be treated like one. /joke
