| I first want to express my condolences to those people who no longer have jobs. It sucks when you lose your job not because of your performance, but because of poor management and budgetary concerns. I've been there, and it doesn't feel fair at all. The good news, though, is that with the growth in the industry, there's so many places looking for people with experience. The most important thing is not letting it get to you, and getting that resume out ASAP. And before you know it, your phone will start ringing.
That being said, I think when things like this happen, it really shows how immature and unprofessional the game industry as a whole still is. It's really surprising when you see how much money is invested into games and companies with poor management, concepts, vision, or any combination thereof. And all that snowballs into rushing releases to meet forced deadlines, and then, more often than not, if the game fails you and a lot of your friends are suddenly out of your jobs. About 80% of the people on the ship may know that it's sinking, but if the management and publisher doesn't acknowledge that or, worse, doesn't care, there really isn't much you can do outside of starting to look for a new job. I'm not saying all of this was necessarily true for Sigil, as I don't work there nor do I know anyone who does, but certainly the pattern is there, and I've seen this time and time again at several different companies (and I've heard many stories about many others).
Paraphrasing something from an interview with a Midway executive, execution of your game is only the third most important factor in your commercial success. The top two are having a strong concept from the start (which, even though it will go through a lot of changes throughout development, if the concept isn't strong at the start, it's not going to be strong at the end), and timing of your release. I didn't really follow the Vanguard development that closely, but it did seem, at time, that many systems were conceptually very tenuous, in the sense that it was very hard to see it being easily implemented in a functional manner. A lot of times, designers that might have great ideas for broad and vague concepts have a very difficult time actually writing a spec for it. It's easier to come up with ideas than it is to actually translate those ideas into something that truly works. For that reason, I really do think that a lot of the times, the best lead designers are creative types that come from a programming background, because not only do they have good ideas, but they actually understand how those ideas can be translated into something that is feasible to implement.
As for the second most important thing--timing of release--Vanguard went up right against the WoW expansion, which was perhaps the worst time to release the game. You don't release a game at the height of interest in your biggest competitor, but rather you wait a few months for the interest to die down, and then release (which is at least partially why initial numbers for LOTRO are looking pretty good).
I think it was pretty telling when Microsoft Game Studios dropped Vanguard, because MGS almost never drops anything if they see any sort of profit any time in the very distant future. They must have basically thought that there was no way the game was going to be financially successful unless they dramatically changed direction of the game, which may have required a much larger monetary investment than what they had originally thought.
And if the whole Brad not showing up much at all for 6+ months really is true, that's honestly just very sad. I don't think it's a great way to motivate your team if you basically give up on the title, yet mandate everyone works long hours. That's just wrong. And for the people slaving away, it's soul crushing. | 