Closing or selling VR-developing studios make sense (jumping on that made no sense in the first place for a small niche game studio). I thought that making mobile crap is low even for CCP, but I’m not really surprised that they are ready to sink to Clash of Clans level.
When I first heard the news, I wasn’t surprised that CCP Falcon survived the layoffs. I guess if Kim Jong Un goes ballistic (literally), there will be only cockroaches, bacteria and CCP Falcon. I wasn’t surprised either that his statement was misleading at best, while EVE programmers weren’t laid off, community staff were. That was somewhat surprising (not him misleading, but less community staff), as CCP seemed to drink all of the “community involvement” kool-aid. I always told that in an MMO, especially in a sandbox MMO the players should be making the stories and not the staff, but who listens to me? Oh look, after years of failing, CCP did the only logical move. I guess after a year of losing players and money, they might even consider not having favorites among the players. But I won’t hold my breath.
What gave me the “how the hell it happened” moment is learning that the previously large CCP Community staff was cut down to two people and one of them is Falcon. How? Forget what a horrible mismanager Falcon was. Forget how he was creating toxicity and harassment in places where the infamous CCP playerbase forgot to. Forget how he supported criminals, lied to the press and to the players, how he was cheerleading for a $150K cashgrab from the customers for a third party. Forget everything about him and just answer one question:
How can a company disband a team / department and not fire the leader? If the whole team was a disaster, if they didn’t even earn their paycheck, it’s clearly the team leader’s fault. How can he survive the layoffs?! Have anyone heard of such nonsense?! Can anyone make a reasonable explanation why a failed dept head (if the dept is dissolved, its head failed) gets another chance beside something at least really immoral stuff going on?
Help a confused goblin!
.
PS: Did I mention that you need exactly one kill to win a PUBG match?
While winning a top 0.5% ranked game isn’t nothing (and nothing like winning a 1200 rated lolgame), luck had a part in it (guy shoots me to 10% HP when drops dead from a headshot from mr-soon-to-be-#2). What matters is the sustained performance and I have no reason to complain:
Top 100 is clearly within reach, when I get it, comes a long and detailed guide how to be among the best of PUBG players.
dude thanks for the cream puff:
#1: he is directly tied to the fan/player base (your beer comment here) but this is just an excuse.
The actual number 1 reason he survived:
He does his job then he spends hours (off the clock) working on lore, working with the fan fiction team, working with the art team, basically they are paying for 40 hours and getting well over 80.
Still he has been dealt a massive blow that should limit his in game impact. The curious part here is this is a 3 year cycle for CCP.
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Why he stayed? It’s simple. You presume that the team failed and Falcon failed. That’s why the layoff.
But if CCP does not consider it fail, but thought that they was doing good works, just because of the restructure (it may be not only company restructure but maybe philosophy too) they won’t need them and/or they were the hardest to justify for the stakeholders, then it makes sense that you keep the best of them. And of course he was made leader because he was one of the best of.
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@cathfaern: EVE wasn’t closed. No change was announced about EVE that would indicate that community team did good, but CCP tries to go different way now (this can be told the VR team).
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Will be interested to see your PUBG guide. Although the main problem is being unable to spot enemies well and then actually shooting them before they shoot me. Surviving until the top 10 is the easy part.
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I dont play PUBG but wouldn’t the squad games be where the real players play? I know you personally never would play squad game.
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@Gevlon:
Sure, but it also was not announced that the community team failed and that’s the reason of the lay-off. Your think that they did horrible work but that’s not necessarily the CCP’s view too. Or maybe it was said to them that ok, you have to kick X people. You can develop games with only a few people in the community staff, but you can’t without developers. To be honest given how big EVE is (not so much) 30 people in the community team sounds way too much. I’m not sure WoW has that much and they have way more player. So they kicked the ones they could. Nothing imply in the announcement that CCP was not satisfied with the community staff.
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@Raziel Walker: if you survive every game into top 10, you are already top 100 (as evidenced by my old medicine collection)
@Anti: I lost my “real player” detector
@Cathfaern: A successful product doesn’t get a “you get to kick X people” notice. Failing and under development products get that. The CCP model is using EVE as cash cow to spend the money on their next attempt of getting big (which always fails). If EVE gets such a notice, then CCP is in bigger trouble than I’ve imagined.
Every other case is filed under “community team has failed.” That includes the possibility when the task for them was impossible to begin with. Being too big could mean team cut and not total closure.
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The real question is why they got hired in the first place. It’s not like an extreme amount has changed in the past years. And then it’s probably first come first serve. So the people that where hired last are the ones to get layed off first. Although you believe that Falcon failed towards the community he might (prob not 🙂 ) be a god internally and doing amazing stuff we don’t know about. Communication clearly isn’t his strong point. You don’t hear from him that much anymore unless there are bugs or something.
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@cathfaern I am not sure what exactly you consider the community team, but the number of WoW game master is huge. I can’t find the article I recall, but at least found another source: https://www.thegamereviews.com/article-1515-world-of-warcraft-by-the-numbers.html: 2056 listed when they had around 11-12 million subs. If the ratio kept the same (they probably improved their issue processing), that would mean almost a thousands today.
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@Gevlon
Could be they just made an internal performance evaluation and realized that, even though they don’t see fault in the work that the community management division does, they simply don’t need that much of said work. So they trimmed the low rung.
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@Gevlon
Kind of like a person who used to have a lot of mistresses choosing to downsize to a single wife
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@Maxim: that would explain downsizing. Not terminating a whole team while not touching another teams.
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It’s really simple. He survived by being among the ‘upper echelon’ clique and he knew beforehand how to suck up to the right people to maintain his job.
Managers get fired when they are proper managers/leaders and take accountability for their team. What happens usually in corporate though, is that ‘managers’ are quick to throw their team to the wolves just so they can maintain the image of a good and useful employee, and thus all the perks of their position. It’s what I call ‘leeching middle management’, and I’ve seen a lot of it. Thankfully I’m in a team of 1 person, so I never had to suffer that kind of ‘leadership’ (nor would I, I’d quit in a heartbeat).
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@Jean-Mira: my understanding is that this “community team” is equal to “blue-posters” at Blizzard. The support team (GM-s @ Blizzard) is a separate team. If not, then there are huge problems in EVE (or will be soon) because two person for every customer interaction is not enough for games much smaller than EVE (or EVE is much smaller than it seems).
@Maxim Preobrazhenskiy: That also would be the team leader’s fault. He should be able to see and report to the upper management that there are too much people for too few work.
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You won! With one kill! Every survivor is a potential winner! If you’re surviving, you’re winning. If you die, you get right back into a match. you’re never stuck in a losing battle.
If you had one kill in a WoT match, where would you be?
THAT is why PUBG is so popular.
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The simplest of the theorycraftings: he knows/ have proof of “things” his superiors wouldn’t want to have “leaked out”.
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Curious about your thoughts on Fortnite: Battle Royal, if you’ve looked into. It certainly looks like its trending to over take PUBG as the defacto battle royal game.
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Jumping on VR for relatively small company was right decision in it’s time. Nobody knew how VR will work and creating “killer app” or having game for new fast growing platform could lead to really big profits. But it didn’t work. And there was no way to know that in advance.
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@vv: a new technology will either fail, or will work for a big company who has the money and marketing power to make it work. A small company will surely fail.
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Companies like PopCap (Bejeweled, Plants vs. Zombies, etc) and Rovio (Angry Birds) were small too. They made hits for totally new platforms at their time (downloadable casual games and smartphones) and made a lot of money. Big companies didn’t try to make anything complex for VR. So CCP had a good chance.
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