Hecker gets let go, goes Indie

Kotaku and Gamasutra picked up on the news Chris broke that EA laid him off. He's now going to work on an indie game called 'SpyParty', a prototype of which was shown at the 2009 GDC EGW. I'm pretty sure this version was born out of an even earlier prototype done as part of the 2005 Indie Game Jam 3 and shown at the 2005 GDC EGW, in a barrage of 'people interacting' jam prototypes.

Anyhow, SpyParty's got a fantastic core idea, and Chris is f***ing smart and driven, so I'm excited to see the game when it eventually ships.

Random reads from around the Intertubes

A few posts that caught my eye:

• Game retailers stocking fewer games, fewer copies of those they do buy. Further proof we're not recession-proof, recession-resistant, etc. (It will be interesting whether this compounds what we're already seeing with pubishers; cancelling risky projects, non-sequels, etc).
• Pachter would disagree, as he maintains that we are recession-proof. He blames bad planning and over-investment in R&D on new IP and the like, rather than bread'n'butter sequels. (EA did spend over $1.1B on R&D last fiscal year, which is pretty high even for them. Expect that to drop next year).
• Ubisoft is using this time to grow and invest. Smart if you have the cash on hand to carry you through. I think the "next gen consoles coming in 2011-12" is likely a bit off the mark though.
• Q4 VC investments down to lowest level since Q1'05. Also not surprising. (As an aside, I've been letting VGVC.NET attrophy for a while, but it might be a good time to do some editorial around this).
• Continuing the bad news, here's a post commenting on the downturn, layoffs, etc. An interesting snippet I disagree with: "a lot of firms, games industry or not, are using the credit crunch as an excuse to trim their more optimistic hires away". I think the difference with the games business in particular is that so many studios are running on a pretty thin bank balance, living hand-to-mouth between milestone payments. When credit dries up, cash is king, and if you don't have any, making payroll might get tricky.
• Good, but lengthy editorial on the whole "are games art?" thing and on games place in our culture. The money quote:"

There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t.

• Its the sincerest form of flattery: EA, and other companies, asking for their IP to be whitelisted in Little Big Planet (Sony's been removing anything that even smells of IP infringement, not waiting for DMCA takedown notices.
• Good interview with Jon Blow about Braid, his next project, and other stuff. Jon's smart. Go read!

More thoughts on the Flight Sim tragedy

I've exchanged a few calls & mails with friends at Microsoft following the layoffs they announced. It's one thing to read the numbers. It's another thing to talk to a friend that's suddenly worried about the mortgage, feeding the kids, etc. Saddening.

Regarding the teams and products affected though, Flight Sim in particular is a shocker. The claim is that MS is still 'committed to the product', but having laid off the Aces studio, and their ever-distancing from the Windows gaming effort, it's really hard to beleive. The weight of it hasn't sunk in until now as I read some of the blog posts about the implications.

As Steve points out, Flight Simulator was (until this week anyway), Microsoft's oldest product in continual development. It was a piece of gaming's history. The original IBM PC version was developed by subLogic and published by MS for the IBM PC back in 1982. It existed on other platoforms (I got started on the C-64 version) as early as 1980. Is there another game franchise with a 29-year legacy? There's a good history here.

Additionally, Flight Sim isn't just a game, it's a platform. It supports an entire co

ttage industry of third party add-on vendors ranging from military missions to air traffic AI to hot air balloon sims to a space shuttle simulator. Not to mention the hardware add-ons for people that want to do really elaborate rigs.

Anyhow. It's sad. 

What next for this space? there's an obvious vaccuum for one of the few competing products in the space to try to fill. Still a shame for MS to lose all that legacy though. Maybe they should sell the source and assets to another company? Maybe open source the whole thing?

Might be worth noting that when MSN Games cancelled Bridge, enough noise from a small but rabid group of fans, some of it directly to Bill, brought it back (though in a different form). Not sure that would work for FS though.

Hope something good is resurrected out of the ashes here.

Armageddon continues, some rays of light seen, etc

Man, it's getting a little scary to open up a browser over my morning coffee, lest some of the blood drip off the screen any into my americano.

Raph had a post up about the VW Management Industry Forecast which was recently published. In it, there's a great quote from Meez' Sean Ryan on his company's goals for 2009:

"Get profitable while Armageddon rolls over the industry"

Apparently, we are seeing what that armageddon looks like.

• Lots of news about MS's announced cuts (5000 jobs, 1400 of which are from E&D, including the team running the GamerScore blog and Flight Sim team.)
• Sony's going to make cuts, including games division, but no specifics.
• EA lays off 150-200 at Black Box, and others at Mythic & Tiburon.
• Eidos closes a studio in Manchester.
• Sega trimmed a few folk.

Of course we aren't immune either, having announced some fab closures and associated headcount (not games-industry exactly, but it's tech related).

Meanwhile, Ubi announced some good news, with Shaun White doing well (I'm playing a ton of it. fun), Far Cry 2 coming on as a slow burner (yay Clint!) and Prince of Persia showing signs of the same, having moved 2.2M units (yay Ben!). They are hinting at growing which is brave to say the least, but the right thing to do if you have cash in the bank and think you can use this to get ahead of competition.

Oh, and Square lays of about several hundred players, perma-banning them from the FF MMO for exploiting a bug (hello? Isn't this half of what gaming is? Excise the bug, not your customers! Jeez!)

The first wave of bad news

Lots of axe-weilding around the games industry, and in the tech industry in general. A few recent examples:

EA lays off 6% of workforce

THQ plans reduction of 250 heads

Brash hit by layoffs, cancels titles (not surprised, given their initial titles' poor reviews, which seem to stem from an attitude of "hollywood license + low quality game = ok", as others pointed out when they originally announced. Guess you can burn through $400M pretty quickly these days. Fools and their money, etc.)

Wild Tangent closes internal studio, cuts staff

Avalanche lays off 77

Google will give you plenty more examples. 

Unfortunately, i think this is just the battening down of the hatches. The real trouble comes if people tighten their belts a notch or two this Christmas, which I expect will absolutely happen. After that we'll likely see another wave of layoffs.

So much for 'recession proof', which was crazy to think anyway.

Shitty times. And I think it's going to get far worse. The layoffs in other industries have a ripple effect on people's spending; budget clamp downs in all industries are going to cut advertising budgets, which are a big part of the casual games business, etc.