So rather than take a direct approach and deliver the industry news that few would comprehend or care about, I decided to bring back the insightful Ever Wonder feature, to talk about the background of these layoffs and provide insight to why this is occuring.
Layoffs are inevitable. Even more so when there’s a substantial industry merger like Activision and Vivendi.
Mergers create a redundancy in positions and given the massive amount of staff that were to be incorporated under the new corporate umbrella, certain cuts had to happen, labor wise.
And it was unfortunate that most of the Sierra developers coming from the Vivendi side had to take the hit. Sierra is a company nowadays that pretty much has weight in name only. The real control lies with a chain of commands that respond to Vivendi, and now Activision. However, Sierra boasts a bevy of development studios under its wing that include Massive Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, High Moon Studios, and Swordfish Studios.
When the merger took place in late 2007, Activision was to undergo investigation of Sierra IP’s and the ones that don’t meet their standards as quoted, “won’t likely be retained.” When everything was finalized in July 2008, this statement was enforced to full effect.
Sierra’s developers and partnerships with independents were taken down one by one. This was seen in a Activision Blizzard games portfolio that revealed several IP’s were either not going to be published under the new Acti-Blizz corporation or were canned outright. Titles such as Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters were speculated to be in jeparody.
And now the Vancouver Sun has reported that nearly 100 Radical Entertainment employees have been laid off and Gamasutra cites from independent sources that 60 High Moon employees staffers were also laid off.
“Activision Blizzard is committed to making the best games possible and has elected at this time to reduce the number of titles that Radical is developing from four games to two.”
“Therefore, we will be proportionately reducing the size of our studio.”
– Radical Human Resources VP Leah Rubin
At work currently at Radical is the open-world action game titled Prototype and Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant, neither of which were cancelled. Radical was also responsible for Scarface: The World is Yours and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. One can speculate that a Scarface sequel was canned in its development.
High Moon recently completed work on The Bourne Conspiracy and it was believed to be working on a Bourne sequel before Activision gave back the rights to its original owner.
Though this really is not a shocker in any instance for the gaming industry, it’s just an example of the brutality of the business side that works in Sierra’s disfavor. We wish those recently laid off all the best in their future endeavors, there are several gaming companies out there hiring that could use your talent, so keep your head up high.
That concludes this edition of Ever Wonder.
