Kranky Kraut

Details on SOE’s acquisition of Sigil are slowly emerging. It doesn’t look pretty but it could be worse. From Smed’s posting on the official forums and his interview with GameSpot:

• Staff will be downsized from about 100 employees to 50
• The remaining developement team will be approximately the size of EQ2’s developement team
• Dave Gilbertson will be responsible for operative management, as far as I know he has been for a while anyway
• No major gameplay revamps are planned
• McQuack will become an external “Creative Advisor”, whatever that means
• There will be official forums
• In the long term, the Carlsbad studio wil be subsumed into SOE San Diego, some devs will be moved to other projects

Some interesting points from the official press release:

• Vanguard sold almost 200k units
• “In May 2006, SOE acquired the title’s rights” - interesting. This is in direct contrast to what McQuack told the community back then.

From various sources:

• The crafting team was cut in half (see here)
• The class developers are gone, except for Talisker (see here in the comments section)
• The diplomacy team loses at least one (see here)
• GM Keejay didn’t make the cut (see here)
• Todd Masten and four others will move to a different position within SOE (see here)
• The Community Representative is gone (see here)
• Two more Associate Game Designers gone (see here and here)

No one knows who else had to go, most developers were never in contact with the community and I assume some of those who were, understandably, just don’t bother to post.

From Todd Masten’s posting at the FOHrums:

I hope those truly responsible for the deep rooted failings of the company lay in bed tonight and relive the events that transpired today in their heads, over and over. For not ONE of you is without your job come tomorrow morning.

Great. So those who were responsible for fucking up Sigil and Vanguard still have their jobs while the little guys got shit-canned. If there is one lesson to be learned, it’s that in the corporate world, your contribution is rarely rewarded. No matter how much you bust your ass, in the end you’re just an expendable ressource and you will eventually be treated as such.

This sucks. It sucks for the people who got fired, it sucks for the employees who still remain but lost friends and colleagues, it sucks for the game and it sucks for the customers. But it was probably unavoidable, thanks to the idiots who mismanaged Sigil.

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