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Confirmed: Layoffs Hit Stardock After Elemental's "Disastrous Launch" [Updated]
by Brian Leahy, Sep 03, 2010 7:25pm PDT[Update 10:30pm] Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has confirmed the layoffs in a forum post, attributing the cuts to Elemental's updated revenue projections following its launch.
"Elemental's revenue was anticipated to provide the revenue both for our main games team's next project as well as a second team," writes Wardell. "Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen so we've had to start laying people off."
"No one involved on the core components of Elemental is affected," he continues. "It would be great if we can bring as many of these people back over time if the studio can afford it."
Brad notes that this is the first time the company has had to lay anyone off since 1998 after migrating from the OS/2 market to Windows.
[Original Story] Shacknews has received an anonymous tip claiming that several employees of Stardock, developers of the recently released Elemental: War of Magic were let go today in a round of layoffs.
Those let go included developers, designers, and salespeople working on Elemental. The tipster, supposedly one of those laid off, claims that the layoffs were due to Elemental's "disastrous launch". Though post-launch layoffs are common in this industry, it sounds like these cuts were due to the game's launch and reception.
Stardock CEO Bard Wardell, posting while on his post-launch sabbatical, discusses the "completeness of Stardock's fail on Elementa's launch" and alluded to "massive consequences for Stardock's game studio."
The employees were reportedly notified by Stardock management, as Brad is away from the office. Shacknews has contacted Stardock to ascertain the validity of these statements.
Our write-up on the game can be found here.
Comments
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argh.... so the top guy admits he made a massive mistake... and his STAFF pays for it? gahhh... i guess this is why nobody else admits to massive failure... cuz massive failure should mean massive consequences - FOR YOU.... not the peeps below.... and generally, the dudes at the top don't want the pain.
gahgahgah... that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
and how in the world is he going to keep his promise of making the game better by getting rid of the execution people?
if the blame lies at the top, why visit the punishment on the bottom?
one would have hoped that brad learned a lesson so he doesn't make the same mistakes over again. but i guess that doesn't preclude him from making altogether different mistakes.
jin
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http://forums.elementalgame.com/395485
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Hahaha. What a douche. Perhaps you should END your vacation, y'know, when you acknowledge it was your mistakes that caused this.
END YOUR VACATION, go back, tell these people why you're making them pay for your mistakes in person. Don't hide upstate while you have flunkies do the dirty work for you like some mob boss who lost a coke shipment to crate inspectors.
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They make niche games...they publish games that increasingly are less and less published by the bigger guys...yeah I have issues with some of this going on...but in all honesty if Stardock goes belly-up thats a huge impact on the number of people making those sorts of games.
I mean look at flight sims...those are a niche market and few companies make those...so yeah if one of the big devs making combat flight sims went away it'd be horrible. And whole genres do sometimes just die off for all intents and purposes (see space combat sims)...so I just can't work up a lot of vitriol and hate over this when I think doing that might be cutting off our nose to spite our face.
That having been said, this is a slight dick move...but I just can't get all raged over it (I know this is the internet and I'm supposed to rage and make accusations of hitlerity...but it seems dumb).
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In both cases, you end up without a job, but being laid off is far less severe than being fired. a lot of bile in this thread from people who apparently don't grasp the distinction.
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What a fucking scum bag. It aggravates him that he isn't the one losing his job because HE fucked up and released a game HE programmed when he shouldn't have? This guy is a train wreck of suck. I sincerely hope all remaining Impulse programmers JUMP SHIP IMMEDIATELY.
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Please do not just scrap the whole development... please sell it over to Steam or Valve and let them fix what is broken... it has potential to be a worthy title for people who like these sorts of games.
:(
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Its not like the movie industry where people fail upwards and companies can absorb disaster movies.
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http://forums.elementalgame.com/395168/page/1/#2755807
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http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/03/blindness-caused-elemental-release-fail/
Before you judge what's happening. These are the consequences for the brutal launch. Now they will spend the next year and a half fixing and updating the game, ala Twilight of the Arnor. Massive content updates, huge AI improvements, all that good stuff. This game is about to get awesomer.
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Joystiq has been informed by a source that this is only the first round of layoffs at Stardock and that the final count will be about 20 people. We've also been told the "games team itself is/was only 15 people big," so the layoffs will affect others at the company and outside contract workers. Survivors of the cuts will allegedly include the game's producer, art lead, and two lead developers. The source claims, "All of the posts [Wardell] has made in our public forums about how the games team is funded by our commercial software development and that Elemental was not rushed out the door for monetary reasons is a lie. These people are getting laid off due to poor sales and Stardock's inability to pay back the capital investors that funded Elemental's development."
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/09/04/elemental-launch-results-in-stardock-layoffs/
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http://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/article_sdos2.html
Unfortunately, by mid 1996, the OS/2 SOHO market had already shrunk by quite a bit and most of the OS/2 products at retail died... In mid 1998, the unthinkable happened for me, I switched from OS/2 Warp 4 to Windows NT... It took me many months to “Catch up†to where many professionals had already been. I also learned Windows NT wasn’t a “bloated pig†or “buggy†as we had thought it was (Win9x certainly is crap though still).
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I understand this well, as I've personally found a number of bugs as an end user. And I tend to catch a lot of mistakes that I make by having someone else out of the context of the work check the end result. So yeah, I agree that Brad should've recused himself from official playtesting, and let an "out of context" team do the testing.
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