Layoffs at Aliens: Colonial Marines co-developer TimeGate
An unconfirmed number of people have been laid off by TimeGate Studios, creator of the FPS series Section 8 and, most recently, co-developer of Gearbox's ill-fated Aliens: Colonial Marines. Officially it's part of TimeGate's preparations for "the transition to next-generation consoles and new business models," but rumour says the layoffs come shortly after a publishing deal fell through.
An unconfirmed number of people have been laid off by TimeGate Studios, creator of the FPS series Section 8 and, most recently, co-developer of Gearbox's ill-fated Aliens: Colonial Marines. Officially it's part of TimeGate's preparations for "the transition to next-generation consoles and new business models," but rumour says the layoffs come shortly after a publishing deal fell through.
"We had to make the difficult decision to let go of some great game developers. This is never easy, and we're doing all we can to assist those developers affected," TimeGate president Adel Chaveleh told Polygon yesterday. "TimeGate is preparing, as is the entire industry, for the transition to next-generation consoles and new business models. As part of this reinvention, all projects and strategic initiatives continue to move forward at the studio."
Unofficially, unnamed sources told Polygon that around 25 people were laid off, and the move was connected to a publishing deal falling through earlier in the month.
Layoffs after a game is shipped is standard practice for the games industry, so if TimeGate couldn't secure a new project to shunt excess staff onto, well, sadly this happened.
As well as the two Section 8 games and the campaign side of Colonial Marines, TimeGate is known for the Kohan RTS series and the two F.E.A.R. expansion packs, Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate.
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Layoffs at Aliens: Colonial Marines co-developer TimeGate.
An unconfirmed number of people have been laid off by TimeGate Studios, creator of the FPS series Section 8 and, most recently, co-developer of Gearbox's ill-fated Aliens: Colonial Marines. Officially it's part of TimeGate's preparations for "the transition to next-generation consoles and new business models," but rumour says the layoffs come shortly after a publishing deal fell through.-
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I'm always interested in hearing about closures because it allows me to complain more about bad practices in video game and contrast publisher attitudes vs those of Valve or Double Fine. (Since most people don't know, Double Fine has never laid off a team for financial reasons).
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The games industry does not work like the movie industry. Are people in the movie industry mislead to think they will continue to have full time jobs instead of being contract workers?
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you don't have a clue what you are talking about then. For one, video game folks do not have Unions to protect them and watch for their interests. For another, there isn't one centralized place where video game devs live and can easily pick up and move to another job when the current one ends. Most devs are scattered across the country/world. Timegate was in Houston, most of those guys had houses and have kids, and there are not many developers in Houston, so they are pretty screwed.
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You're right. You don't understand these stories.
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I'm noticing a trend in the last year or two. Publishers have been very risk averse for projects that independent studios have been working on. Eurocom, Obsidian, and quite a few others have shut their doors or laid off people because of cancelled projects. My understanding is that they are shifting to a type of deal that allows them to cancel a project later in it's development than they have in the past. Its a defensive move by the publisher to keep themselves afloat in these uncertain times but I really feel for the studio that doesn't have much cash in the bank and has to let people go.
You know, people say they are thirsty for new ip (what they really want are a mix of new game ideas and the evolution of current game mechanics) and have been looking towards the next gen as a cure for the malaise the console market has been in (top tier games like cod and AC are the exceptions and not the rule) and I'm not sure that we'll see that unless it comes from independent development studios that self publish on the new digital stores.
These are crazy days and I don't think we've seen the worst of it.-
at least Bethesda is still willing to take a risk and when its done right it pays off, dishonored was excellent and has sold well. Maybe that will be a lesson for other publishers to see.
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Other publishers have been effectively ignoring Bethesda for years because Bethesda publishers pure Single Player games. They consider them a complete outlier.
If you're curious about it, read QAs by Evil Publisher Guy who talks about Skyrim. They don't consider Bethesda in the same market as they (EA) are.-
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I'm curious about Bethesda's profits. The estimate was $450 million purely from launch, but since they're private we do not know.
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Are we talking Bethesda-the-developer (Bethesda Game Studios) or Bethesda-the-publisher (Bethesda Softworks)?
Because Bethesda-the-publisher puts out a lot more than just Bethesda-the-developer's games, including multiplayer fare like BRINK (although the focus is still on SP games)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bethesda_Softworks_games
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The AAA industry is going to crash in a few years, it's not going to be a surprise.
What started when the 360/ps3 was released was publishers consolidated or went away. By the end of this cycle we're going to have 1-3 major publishers still making big games, but that doesn't support an industry, which is why I consider it a crash.
Independents "top tier" studios need to stop competing with big budget titles, because they simply can't in terms of costs.
I think what Double Fine has been doing is smart and probably a place where a lot of developers will be going in the future, good, mid sized games not trying to compete with Activision's monolithic 20-100 million dollar projects.-
If by crash you mean make billions of dollars then yes, that probably will happen.
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Big studios are crashing left and right already. Look at THQ, one major bungle with that tablet thing pretty much cost them their entire studio. Publishers can't afford Dead Space 3 and Aliens Colonial Marines level disasters anymore. Devs certainly can't.
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THQ's collapse was far more complex than just uDraw HD; there was also the wasted money on Homefront's way-too-grandiose marketing campaign, as well as Darksiders 2, Red Faction:... whatever the one after Guerilla was, and of course, relying on licensed property games for way too long. THQ tried to pivot into a core games publisher to get away from the licensed trash, and it was a series of self-foot-shootings.
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Dead Space 3 just seems to be less-good than the previous titles. I've seen little evidence of a disaster or anything even remotely like A:CM.
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I don't think he meant to say that Dead Space 3 was a bad game, it just didn't perform as well in sales as EA expected it to. I don't know how bad the sales were.
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Big studios going bankrupt and the AAA games industry crashing are two different things.
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If it was a contractor model like film and TV then people would know their employment is term based. My issue is hiring people when you know there is a good chance you'l have layoffs at the end of the project.
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Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me hundreds of times...-
What is the point of this post?
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That people should stop taking jobs that promise long-term employment when developers are constantly getting dumped like contractors.
The fault is on both sides, but publishers will continue doing this because there is (as far as I can tell) no shortage of people willing to work long hours for shitty pay just to say "I made a game". -
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And my point is that if everyone was up front about it it wouldn't be an issue.
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If everyone was up front about it there wouldn't be many people working in the game industry, at least not at the pay rates I usually see.
It reminds me of that recent-ish Louis Theroux documentary on the porn industry where he asked the receptionist/administrative assistant at the porn company (the woman who dealt with everything including answering questions from the girls and telling them where they need to go to get nailed that day) if she ever felt the need to brace the women for what they were getting into. She said something to the effect of "no, because if I did then 3/4 of them would probably quit and then I'd be out of a job" (she then went on to admit that she has a certain amount of dislike for them in general because she's working 80 hours a week and they just have to lay on their back for half an hour but that's beside the point)
If the game industry was up front about what was involved and likely to happen then a whole bunch of people would probably bail and the ones left would be the ones OK with this lifestyle or the terminally naive young people who don't have other career options or flat don't care. Whether or not this would be a good thing long term who knows.-
So, the actual result is that we get constant turnover where we lose knowledge and people. I know a lot of people that have left games in the 13 years I've been doing them that will never return. It's sad too, because many of them were really good at their jobs.
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I've been one of the people saying that the game industry needs to operate more like Hollywood, what with the people working on a project knowing up front that they are only guaranteed employment for the X months it takes to finish the product.
Of course, in Hollywood if you're a CGI firm that knows you're only going to have this project for four months, and you don't know for sure you'll have a project for the other eight months of the year, then you charge appropriately. This is why the $100M+ budget for a movie with any special effects is not really uncommon.
But they can charge that because movies are so ridiculously popular that even failed movies bring in millions of dollars on opening weekend, the medium lends itself to multiple shots at profit (box office release, home video release, sales to a cable network airing release, sales to a broadcast network airing release, Netflix streaming, possible re-release in theaters or on video), and Hollywood Accounting. Hollywood in general is fine with a movie costing a lot of money because to some extent Hollywood is really just a futures market that uses actors and directors instead of pig bellies or whatever.
The game industry is not like this. There's no secondary release channel, the audience is expanding but is not and may never be as prevalent as movies, various technical and business concerns forcibly separate them (cost of a game versus cost of a ticket, time to play a game versus time to watch a movie), and the game industry doesn't have Hollywood Accounting. If a bigshot in Hollywood loans Kevin Smith $12M to make a movie and the move only makes $14M at the box office, no big deal, give him another $12M for his next film maybe it will do better (of course if you give Kevin Smith $100M to make the next big blockbuster and the movie only brings in $7M then he's pretty much done). If you're an investor in a video game and your $1M investment only pulls in $500K of profit, heads will roll.
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At this point isn't it just obvious that you should expect layoffs after a project and that if they don't happen it's just a nice surprise? It seems like that to this outsider based on the volume of news posts that deal with layoffs.
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For those who are unaware (which may not include you but I'm responding to you for convenience), the deal is this - a game studio can only stay open and keep people employed so long as it has the money to do so. Generally this takes two forms:
1. Advance money coming in from a publisher for some game they're working on
2. Royalties for a game that they've published
The thing is, #1 goes against #2. As in, let's say that the advance money is $1M, that's what you get from the publisher to make the game. That $1M is what you're using to pay your employees' salary (and generally you get it in chunks at "milestones", so you don't get it all at once). And let's say that your royalty per unit sold is $10 (all of these numbers are right out of my butt, btw, I'm sure the real numbers are much different). Well, the way it works is that you don't get to see that royalty per unit until the sum total of those royalties cover your advance from the publisher (thus the term, it's an advance against royalties).
So in my hypothetical example, your game needs to sell 100,000 copies before it's made back the $1M advance. If your game sells 200,000 copies then it's brought in $2M in royalties for your company, but you're only getting $1M of that (since you got the other $1M in advance).
So what do you do while you're waiting for your game to sell as many copies as needed before you start getting royalties? You work on another game. You were using the advance from Game #1 to pay your employees when you were making Game #1 so while you wait for Game #1 to be profitable you need to be working on Game #2.
And the dirty little secret is: most games never make back their advance money for the developer. Selling hundreds of thousands of copies of a game only happens a small percentage of the time. As a result, the way to stay afloat as a developer most of the time is to always be working on a game.
So why do companies have layoffs when a game ships? Simple - those are companies that don't have a Game #2 lined up. So right now Gearbox is working on Basterds in Arms and Borderlands 2 DLC (in case you haven't guessed, this is one of the reasons developers love DLC, it keeps money coming in the door and keeps people employed) but TimeGate here didn't have a Game #2 lined up.
If you have really successful games that make a lot of money then you can save up some money and have some flexibility. This is how Valve can keep from shipping a HL game for years and years - even if they didn't have Steam money they have enough that they can take risks like Portal, L4D and CS:GO.
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Also, game studios are spread out all over the place--it's not like the film industry where you're like "oh, my project at Paramount ended, but my next project is at Warner Bros--man that 30 extra seconds of commute is gonna suck."
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Films are concentrated in Hollywood, but they are still made everywhere. Same thing with games. The Bay area probably has the highest concentration of game companies in North America, but games are still made everywhere.
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Even though films are made everywhere, it's waaaaay less common to find professionals in the film industry--excluding actors--who don't "permanently" reside in or near L.A.
My point is that it's more disruptive to a game industry employee when they get laid off because odds are pretty good that to get another gig they'll need to move out of the city (and possibly even state) they currently live in--unless they're in Southern or Northern California.
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I don't remember when Steve Gaynor left TimeGate to go to 2K Marin, or if he was there when they started work on Aliens, but after reading some of the stories of development of Aliens, I would've left as well.
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also developer of kohan: immortal sovereign, for which they have my eternal gratitude :(
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Way to go GearBox! More people out of work thanks to you half ass a game you were so excited for..... Only this company can sell garbage to everyone and get away with it, while other companies with great games get shuttered.... What's the next game you're going to pickup, do half ass work on it and sell it to everyone?
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apparently randy pitchford has offered to take voluntary redundancy from gearbox.. http://i.imgur.com/Z6CS9uz.gif
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