Why were 20 Firaxis employees fired?
- Thread starter arstal
- Start date
I'm pretty sure there's another "secret" project going on at Firaxis, which is why I said three projects. I could have sworn I've read things before that speculated that Firaxis was indeed working on a tactical X-Com game or something sci-fi. Regardless, I'm really just sharing how it normally works at a lot of studios out tehre. Here's a mini breakdown of typical phases of game development:
1. Pitch phase begins, which can be considered pre-pre-production. Design document is written up, run by the publisher / parent company. Feedback is received, tweaks are made until there's a green light.
2. Pre-production starts, small core team forms. The foundations are being built, lots of planning and some very bare bones content creation starts. Publisher delivery schedule begins to get laid out and approved. Assets identified, laid out in team schedule. Budgets approved / modified, additional members begin to be brought in from other teams as they ramp off.
3. Production begins. This is when the team grows and peaks throughout the course of development. Content get hammered out per schedule. Publisher evaluates asset drops / builds, verticle slice usually delivered at some point in the first few months representing a more polished state of the game that the publisher can expect to resemble the finished product. Just about everyone is working in sync as well as possible creating their content, and making it fit with the overall design. This phase can last anywhere from 6 months to several years.
4. Post-Production rampdown begins. Team begins to disperse, most content is feature complete. QA gets more involved, polish in the form of bug fixing, balancing, art tweaks, engine tweaks, etc. is applied by the few remaining in each category of profession. Final product design emerges (or at least one can hope). Manual is delivered along with box art, any other promotional assets needed by retailers or whoever else. Eventually the team dwindles to sometimes even as few as five or ten core people (excluding QA), primarily during the cert / localization stages just before submission. Final submission made, if approved game goes off to be printed.
5. Post-launch support varies per the contract and studio. Since we're talking about Civilization I'd imagine that most support would come out of a very small team that would simutaneously be working on another project such as a planned Civ V expansion. Very rarely do studios or publishers fund for a team that literally dedicates itself entirely to an already shipped game.
Again thought, I really do not think this is a warning sign at all. I think it's just business. The economy is bad regardless which doesn't help, but additionally Firaxis was already pushing the thresholds of the boundaries of being a "small studio". I think that considering the stage they're at with a major retail game about to go live, and a facebook game finishing up in the Fall, that this is not an unexpected event.
Also, this was a pretty basic summary, there's obviously a lot more involved in the full production schedule. It's excessively more complex than most people realize.
I'm guessing by Fall 2010 the staff at Firaxis will be split up like this:
-Core Team #1 (Civ V): Ramped off Civ V, many moving onto Civilization V expansion #1. A few individuals still provide support to the Civ V core game, although many updates will end up shipping with the expansion.
-Core Team #2 (CivNet): Small team remains to provide support to CivNet since web games tend to require frequent patching and content creation to succeed. The rest will move to Core Team #1 and #3.
-Core Team #3 (Secret): Continues making "secret project", receives staff from #1 and #2 essentially taking over the role of team #1 as the largest core team in the company until production rampoff begins.
1. Pitch phase begins, which can be considered pre-pre-production. Design document is written up, run by the publisher / parent company. Feedback is received, tweaks are made until there's a green light.
2. Pre-production starts, small core team forms. The foundations are being built, lots of planning and some very bare bones content creation starts. Publisher delivery schedule begins to get laid out and approved. Assets identified, laid out in team schedule. Budgets approved / modified, additional members begin to be brought in from other teams as they ramp off.
3. Production begins. This is when the team grows and peaks throughout the course of development. Content get hammered out per schedule. Publisher evaluates asset drops / builds, verticle slice usually delivered at some point in the first few months representing a more polished state of the game that the publisher can expect to resemble the finished product. Just about everyone is working in sync as well as possible creating their content, and making it fit with the overall design. This phase can last anywhere from 6 months to several years.
4. Post-Production rampdown begins. Team begins to disperse, most content is feature complete. QA gets more involved, polish in the form of bug fixing, balancing, art tweaks, engine tweaks, etc. is applied by the few remaining in each category of profession. Final product design emerges (or at least one can hope). Manual is delivered along with box art, any other promotional assets needed by retailers or whoever else. Eventually the team dwindles to sometimes even as few as five or ten core people (excluding QA), primarily during the cert / localization stages just before submission. Final submission made, if approved game goes off to be printed.
5. Post-launch support varies per the contract and studio. Since we're talking about Civilization I'd imagine that most support would come out of a very small team that would simutaneously be working on another project such as a planned Civ V expansion. Very rarely do studios or publishers fund for a team that literally dedicates itself entirely to an already shipped game.
Again thought, I really do not think this is a warning sign at all. I think it's just business. The economy is bad regardless which doesn't help, but additionally Firaxis was already pushing the thresholds of the boundaries of being a "small studio". I think that considering the stage they're at with a major retail game about to go live, and a facebook game finishing up in the Fall, that this is not an unexpected event.
Also, this was a pretty basic summary, there's obviously a lot more involved in the full production schedule. It's excessively more complex than most people realize.
I'm guessing by Fall 2010 the staff at Firaxis will be split up like this:
-Core Team #1 (Civ V): Ramped off Civ V, many moving onto Civilization V expansion #1. A few individuals still provide support to the Civ V core game, although many updates will end up shipping with the expansion.
-Core Team #2 (CivNet): Small team remains to provide support to CivNet since web games tend to require frequent patching and content creation to succeed. The rest will move to Core Team #1 and #3.
-Core Team #3 (Secret): Continues making "secret project", receives staff from #1 and #2 essentially taking over the role of team #1 as the largest core team in the company until production rampoff begins.
lemmy101
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Hello I've had some experience with staff redundancies in the games industry, and to trivialise it as 'oh its just the economy, just a bit of downsizing not really a warning sign' seems massively naive or massively heartless, I can't decide which but I hope the former.
What I say below is purely conjecture, but based on numerous personal experiences so is probably closer to the truth than it is far away.
First of all, Firaxis are owned by Take Two. THEY will be the ones who said 'you got to let X people go', Firaxis probably had little to no say in the matter.
It wasn't that Firaxis shook their money bank and it was empty. Take Two made a decision of where cuts had to be made. Did they tell Rock Star to axe staff? Nope.
They made the call and Firaxis made staff redundant. A few weak links would have been the first picked, for sure... But probably a lot of good staff who, although great at their job there was a cheaper and/or better person there to do their job. Probably a lot of dear friends of the remaining staff too. See the thing about the games industry is a lot of people move across the country to get a job at a studio. As such sometimes 90% to 100% of your life, social life, sometimes even love life is entwined deeply in the game studio you work at.
Much more so than in any most other sectors.
Out of those 20 staff that got laid off, you can guarantee that many of them will have been best friends of other staff that remained, perhaps even girlfriends/boyfriends, almost definitely flat/house-mates. Also due to the spread out nature of game dev studios, the chances those who are made redundant ever return are small, as they'll probably need to relocate far away for a new job. They could well have just dissapeared from the lives of those there.
This equals huge morale crushing depression that floods over the studio. Both studios I worked at where this happened never recovered from it. When morale plummets everything plummets. Suddenly best friends are moving across the country, house-mates moving out. It's <snip> baaaaaaaad. It tears at many aspects of a lot of people at the studio's lives and has a dramatic effect on everything, even the output from the studio, which makes it all the more difficult to appease the publishers and keep the studio going.
So yeah, it's very sad and I hope Firaxis recover and get back as many of those staff as possible and hope Civ 5 is a huge success. But to trivialise it as just a number of staff is to totally misunderstand how much of an impact this has.
What I say below is purely conjecture, but based on numerous personal experiences so is probably closer to the truth than it is far away.
First of all, Firaxis are owned by Take Two. THEY will be the ones who said 'you got to let X people go', Firaxis probably had little to no say in the matter.
It wasn't that Firaxis shook their money bank and it was empty. Take Two made a decision of where cuts had to be made. Did they tell Rock Star to axe staff? Nope.
They made the call and Firaxis made staff redundant. A few weak links would have been the first picked, for sure... But probably a lot of good staff who, although great at their job there was a cheaper and/or better person there to do their job. Probably a lot of dear friends of the remaining staff too. See the thing about the games industry is a lot of people move across the country to get a job at a studio. As such sometimes 90% to 100% of your life, social life, sometimes even love life is entwined deeply in the game studio you work at.
Much more so than in any most other sectors.
Out of those 20 staff that got laid off, you can guarantee that many of them will have been best friends of other staff that remained, perhaps even girlfriends/boyfriends, almost definitely flat/house-mates. Also due to the spread out nature of game dev studios, the chances those who are made redundant ever return are small, as they'll probably need to relocate far away for a new job. They could well have just dissapeared from the lives of those there.
This equals huge morale crushing depression that floods over the studio. Both studios I worked at where this happened never recovered from it. When morale plummets everything plummets. Suddenly best friends are moving across the country, house-mates moving out. It's <snip> baaaaaaaad. It tears at many aspects of a lot of people at the studio's lives and has a dramatic effect on everything, even the output from the studio, which makes it all the more difficult to appease the publishers and keep the studio going.
So yeah, it's very sad and I hope Firaxis recover and get back as many of those staff as possible and hope Civ 5 is a huge success. But to trivialise it as just a number of staff is to totally misunderstand how much of an impact this has.
I wouldn't consider myself naive or heartless at all, I've got a background in dev as well and have been both sides of layoffs in the past. I know what it feel like when you see friends go while you stay employed, and on the other side when you yourself are amongst those let go. It's not fun, but the reality is business is business. A business has to do what it has to do to survive, even as a subsidary of a parent company. Perhaps my persceptive is different than yours as I worked in production, and saw things from a different level than most core team members would.
I disagree. A parent company has the right yes, they can walk in and fire everyone should they so choose. A development studio however still has to manage the studio, and is involved in the allocation of manpower, hiring and firing, etc. 2K does not process the new recruits, nor do they tell Firaxis that they need X amount of animators and Y amount of programmers to do business correctly. It is my belief that Firaxis still runs very much like an independent studio.
With all that said, I firmly believe that the odds are just as good if not better that Firaxis saw a problem with their staff situation, and made the call to eliminate a small portion of their staff. Unless there is evidence to suggest otherwise, I'm not going to place the blame on 2K. Again, I do not see the layoffs as a warning sign whatsoever. I see it as restructuring, and I'd imagine that they will begin rehiring when there is more of a demand again in the company for additional manpower.
You can hate the spin all you want about streamlining the development process, but if you study business you'd understand that if you do not react to the needs of the company things can turn very grim very fast. For example, if an owner of a game development studio that has idle manpower chooses to just ignore the problem then it can easily turn a situation that once could be remedied by a minor layoff into one where the company ultimately fails leading to the unemployment of everyone.
To compound the situation, when there is a parent company to deal with, the need for quick reaction is even greater because the parent company sure as heck aren't going to accept paying for idle manpower. It doesn't matter how much the executive team loves their employees or how much experience those facing the axe have, there are times when there is no choice but to make cuts. The best you can do is make the right cuts, and hope that you can rehire those lost in the near future. It would essentially be career suicide to not react to a staffing problem if there were no other immediate solutions available aside from trimming staff.
Yes, the game development sector is extremely interconnected. Anyone that has worked in dev though knows that this is just part of the industry. Game development is known for being relatively unstable whether you're in the US or abroad. Big or small, owned or independent, layoffs happen. This goes for any industry, and again business is business. It's cold, but the alternative of gambling by not reacting to a staff problem in the company a lot of times can and has resulted in total loss of employment for everyone. It's really about picking the lesser of the two evils.
Morale drops no doubt after a layoff, however you do have to keep in mind that Firaxis is still 110 strong, and there will be many in the company attempting to counter the morale drop by rallying people back together. It's like any other grieving process. In business, productivity losses after a layoff usually subside after a few months. Remember, we're talking 20 people out of 130, and the layoffs hit many different departments. It's not like one entire department was killed off, or half the company is now missing. Yes it is extremely sad for those affected, and I sincerely wish them the best.
Just remember that industry veterans know that this sort of stuff comes with the territory. Those that don't like it tend to get out. Those that accept it simply move on, stick it out with the next company, and hope for the best.
lemmy101
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FWIW in both cases I survived the cull, but in both cases I wished I hadn't. ;D Yeah perhaps this isn't the end of the world, time will tell, I certainly don't want to be seen as doom-saying, I just get a little bit edgy when people seem to be trivialising it (which I've seen various times on this forum since the announcement) is all and wanted to get my experiences there so people can apply more to it than 20 faceless numbers being zapped out of a faceless company.
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This is scary. We better all just hope Civ 5 does AMAZINGLY well and sells a shed-ton of copies.If Firaxis were to go then one of the last defenders of PC gaming will be gone and it may well be the start of the end.
Makes them deciding to sell on Steam (and people getting all angry and saying they won't buy it) all the more poignant.
ok, lets be honest Steam (like it or hate it)is more likely to earn 2k more money than it losses. The average consumer will probably barely notice it other than it taking a bit longer to get it running on the install. Even on this forum where it is easy to say that we are the most informed consumers when it comes to Civ 5 around 20% said that they would definitely or probably not buy Civ 5 because of Steam. Even if those people stick to this commitment (which past game boycotts of LD2 and MW2 show rarely happen) those losses will easily be picked up by increased exposure on the Steam Marketplace and through (though I must say I personally dislike this direction) DLC.
Whether joining with Steam will make a better Civ game is still up for debate, will it make it more profitable, I think it will.
lemmy101
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Oh yeah, I'm as much a DLC sceptic as the next man. But would I prefer a Civ 5 with some unwanted elements necessary to facilitate its existance, rather than not have it at all? I've tasted 'not at all' with so many other dead franchises, I don't want Civilization to be another one of those dead relics. I'll support them keeping the PC truck going by any means necessary.
DLC away, my brothers.
DLC away, my brothers.
I've heard it too some time ago (X-Com project) and then it went dead. My uneducated guess in the matter would be that project 3 died and the laid off was nessesary since they didnt have a plan B for Team 3.
CIV V, which is almost risk free (the success seems already granted) shouldnt be affected by this. They'll wait till the CIV games fill up the bank account.
Moreover, I dont think any key guy (named guy) have been affected, not that the 20 arnt important, but it tells me that they're arent any "major" event going out there and strickly, like Mystic said, a business decision that seem to be happening ever so often.
Aramel
Warlord
As far as I know this XCOM game is still coming out. Or did you guys mean something else?
It's like people have never heard of great companies like Valve.
Dale
Mohawk Games Developer
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One thing I noted in the Kotaku article is they mentioned Jesse Smith being let go a month ago. Dennis - Civ5 producer. Some guy announced on Facebook group - Civ Network producer. Jesse Smith - 3rd project producer.
You're probably correct.
It's possible, that'd be another reason for cuts. Pretty much any time a project is cancelled the development studio has to scramble to figure out if they can retain the staff, or if they have to let them go.
Btw Dale, you never responded to my PM.
CanuckSoldier
Emperor
I agree it is normal to lay the extra staff you hired for just the one project. They did this after Civ4 was complete as well. But this does seem rather early compared to that. And it is true that with Steam they could work on a large 0 day patch that can do even more than solve bugs it can even add minor features.....like Pitboss and PBEM which they have delayed. So IMHO there should be work for at least the Civ5 employees on this list, and I'm not at all sure that this will not effect the quality of some parts of the game...and of course I'm concerned about the MP code as Steamworks is a new API for Firaxis and MP always seems to be layered on afterwards like icing...so if any part of Civ is still being developed late it would likely be MP.......
CS
CS
So it sounds like people are saying that this is normal, but early. That sounds like good news. Either they are a head of schedule, or their schedule intentionally included a larger QA phase, that does not require the revaluation of certain resources, presumably like art.
So this is good news for Civ V
.
So this is good news for Civ V
.
Welcome to the big bad world of business.
Our bank had an office in Amsterdamn. We lost a client and 180 staff were gone the next day. Such is life in business.
As a customer all I really care about is the product. Is the product worth my hard earned €?
Our bank had an office in Amsterdamn. We lost a client and 180 staff were gone the next day. Such is life in business.
As a customer all I really care about is the product. Is the product worth my hard earned €?
Schuesseled
Deity
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Well obviously these 20 employees were Anti-Steam, Steam wanted to have them killed, but due to legal reasons they down-graded the punishment to merely getting them fired. Damn Laws.
Shiggs713
Immortal
yea, pretty much business as usual. Nothing to see here.
