07-01-2003, 08:33 PM
Yeah, those numbers pretty much tally with what I was thinking.
It seems a lot of companies treat employees as fungible (interchangeable) capital. (Actually, that's not true. From my work experiences, too many companies act as if the employees were liablilities - annoying expense centers they'd be better off without. But those are stories for another time.)
The trouble is that the creation of intellectual property doesn't work that way. If Vivendi fired the lot of them and then hired a fresh group of people - essentially building a new company - would you expect them to capture the magic that made for successful games?
Argh - I never thought I'd do this, but I'll quote Bill Roper from the CNN interview:
-- CH
pjnow,Jul 1 2003, 03:32 AM Wrote:Long and the short - goodwill, PR, customer relations are one thing, but you cannot make a reasonable business case for a small company like Blizz to invest big bucks in a patch for a game that works and has been on the market for 2 plus years. The game buying public are fickle, very tolerant of crap and have a short memory - there is no business driver for Blizz to devote any resources to 1.10.That is a typical answer from a business perspective. I think it's a bit myopic though.
It seems a lot of companies treat employees as fungible (interchangeable) capital. (Actually, that's not true. From my work experiences, too many companies act as if the employees were liablilities - annoying expense centers they'd be better off without. But those are stories for another time.)
The trouble is that the creation of intellectual property doesn't work that way. If Vivendi fired the lot of them and then hired a fresh group of people - essentially building a new company - would you expect them to capture the magic that made for successful games?
Argh - I never thought I'd do this, but I'll quote Bill Roper from the CNN interview:
Quote:Roper was humble when I asked him about analyst speculation that Monday's departures will result in a lower sale price for Vivendi Universal Games, saying that wasn't the intent of the Monday's action. Still, he said, if that does prove true, he hopes it will underline the importance of the development community.That ties in with the post I'd linked to in my previous message. Doing 1.10 might have been worth the cost if it kept the team together.
"Hopefully, what that will point out to the industry is the fact that the success of games isn't just the name on the box, the franchise or that sort of thing - it's the people who make the games," he said. "Just like you want Arnold Schwarzenegger to do your film, just like you want Steven King or J.K. Rowling to be writing your book, you want the best possible people making a game for you. ... People are important."
-- CH