Author Topic: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.  (Read 8976 times)

Offline Breach

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #30 on: February 18, 2014, 02:44:45 pm »
Terribly sorry to hear this, best of luck to the staff on reduced hours or let go completely. I'm sure you'll find a job in short order given the skills you've all displayed while working at Arcen.

Offline Pepisolo

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #31 on: February 18, 2014, 03:04:27 pm »
Even though this is sad news, it at least seems like Arcen as a company are still in a decent position going forward.  It is clear that you tried your damnedest to keep the team together, but the lack of sales really forced your arm. It's a shame that Bionic Dues didn't get the attention it deserved. I thought it would do a lot better.

It won't quite be the same not seeing Tigersfan's name around the boards. I hope all who have lost their jobs can speedily get back into doing work they enjoy.  Good luck all.

Quote
Maybe one about free will for Skyward Collapse?

Yeah, wasn't it something like "Why....why did they have to have free will?" That might be good on a t-shirt with a suitably chaotic comic strip picture.
« Last Edit: February 18, 2014, 03:09:11 pm by Pepisolo »

Offline GrimerX

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #32 on: February 18, 2014, 11:36:24 pm »

3. In terms of how this affects our staff, our fulltime staff is shrinking from 7 to 4.  Josh (tigersfan) is no longer with us as of today, and anything that you would normally send to him, please send to me instead.  Two other members of the staff are also affected (Erik and Cath), but this will not affect our ability to produce games.  As income hopefully rises in the future, we hope to be able to potentially shift back up to a fulltime staff of 5, with everyone being production-oriented in their job role.

...

Thanks for your understanding and for your support during this difficult transition time for us.  Please continue to offer us your feedback and suggestions on the game as if nothing has changed, however, as from a practical standpoint of how we need to finish this game, nothing has (aside from the fact that we now have an extra month of time).

I've been out a few days so just saw this -- just wanted to give my respect to those that had to leave.  As Misery also mentioned, it wasn't the news I wanted to see.  I understand often these hard decisions work out for the better in the long run but it's painful nonetheless.

Best wishes to everyone.

Take care,

-Ian

Offline Tridus

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #33 on: February 19, 2014, 06:21:35 am »
So, for those who don't recognize the name (which is probably most of you), this is Josh, formerly tigersfan. I made a new account so that we could keep all the posts that say "From staff" as staff posts.

Anyway, I just want to thank everyone. This is truly the best online community I've ever been a part of I feel like I've made some genuine friends here, both on staff and from the community at large. I don't plan to go away, but I might post less than I used to. :)

For the record, I know Chris knows this, but there are no hard feeling on my part for what happened. I understand why it had to. I'm not sure where I'm going yet, but, I have some leads, and some good friends getting the word out, and I expect to be back on my feet soon. There are even a few game companies that are local to me, so I might even get to stay in the industry, we'll see. :)

Best of luck!

Offline Misery

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #34 on: February 19, 2014, 06:55:57 am »
So, for those who don't recognize the name (which is probably most of you), this is Josh, formerly tigersfan. I made a new account so that we could keep all the posts that say "From staff" as staff posts.

Anyway, I just want to thank everyone. This is truly the best online community I've ever been a part of I feel like I've made some genuine friends here, both on staff and from the community at large. I don't plan to go away, but I might post less than I used to. :)

For the record, I know Chris knows this, but there are no hard feeling on my part for what happened. I understand why it had to. I'm not sure where I'm going yet, but, I have some leads, and some good friends getting the word out, and I expect to be back on my feet soon. There are even a few game companies that are local to me, so I might even get to stay in the industry, we'll see. :)


Heh, I'd figured you werent going to be completely leaving here.... the whole dev group has always seemed like a pretty close-knit group, at least to me, which is great to see in a developer.  As opposed to, say, Activision, where Kotick just hires trolls with whips to keep his minions... er, employees... programming for 90 hours a week.   Couldnt imagine any hard feelings among THIS group at all.

Good luck to you, here's hoping you can land another position in the industry ASAP.

Offline FroBodine

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #35 on: February 19, 2014, 09:45:22 am »
Ahhh!  You scared me!  I worked at Activision, it was called Mediagenic at the time, when Bobby Kotick took over.  He laid off about 90% of the company, including me.  I think that bomb dropped soon after we finished the Battletech game Crescent Hawk's Revenge.  100 points to anyone if you remember that excellent game.

Best of luck to all affected by Arcen's changes.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2014, 09:46:59 am by FroBodine »

Offline Misery

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #36 on: February 19, 2014, 10:49:05 am »
I worked at Activision, it was called Mediagenic at the time, when Bobby Kotick took over.  He laid off about 90% of the company, including me.


Ah, so the legends are true, then...

Offline FroBodine

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #37 on: February 19, 2014, 11:40:57 am »
Yes. It is fact, not legend.  I was home on leave with our newborn daughter.  They called me in to work so I could get laid off.  That was a bad day.  They also promised us severance pay, of which we never got a dime. 


Offline zespri

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #38 on: February 23, 2014, 01:38:29 pm »
That said, with a staff of 4, looking at last year's income and ignoring the not-luridly-to-repeat windfalls, we would have made a profit in the lower middle five figures, which would have been a nice chunk to send to savings or investments. The windfalls themselves would have been just that -- windfalls added to reserves -- as opposed to further bridge money. As it stands, having a staff of 4 is stable and should be sustainable unless we take an unprecedented drop in income this year (which could happen, but has not in the last 5 years), and so shifting to that was kind of my only sane choice at this point. Since my back was already to the wall in the short term.
Apologies, I know nothing about running a business, so while my question may sound naive, it's genuine curiosity. Is not having 7 people versus 4 means you also do more stuff in less time? I understand about cutting expenses, but it's not like the three people was sitting around doing nothing, right? They also were contributing to the (potential) income, right? (It's ok if you don't have time to explain that to me, I'll understand. Just curious)

Offline Riabi

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #39 on: February 23, 2014, 10:11:12 pm »
That said, with a staff of 4, looking at last year's income and ignoring the not-luridly-to-repeat windfalls, we would have made a profit in the lower middle five figures, which would have been a nice chunk to send to savings or investments. The windfalls themselves would have been just that -- windfalls added to reserves -- as opposed to further bridge money. As it stands, having a staff of 4 is stable and should be sustainable unless we take an unprecedented drop in income this year (which could happen, but has not in the last 5 years), and so shifting to that was kind of my only sane choice at this point. Since my back was already to the wall in the short term.
Apologies, I know nothing about running a business, so while my question may sound naive, it's genuine curiosity. Is not having 7 people versus 4 means you also do more stuff in less time? I understand about cutting expenses, but it's not like the three people was sitting around doing nothing, right? They also were contributing to the (potential) income, right? (It's ok if you don't have time to explain that to me, I'll understand. Just curious)

We were doing stuff, sure, but you used the magic phrase... "potential income". The business can't pay with money that isn't there. The income needed to be actual, not potential.

Offline x4000

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Re: The news on schedule and staffing, 2/17/2014.
« Reply #40 on: February 24, 2014, 09:08:33 am »
That said, with a staff of 4, looking at last year's income and ignoring the not-luridly-to-repeat windfalls, we would have made a profit in the lower middle five figures, which would have been a nice chunk to send to savings or investments. The windfalls themselves would have been just that -- windfalls added to reserves -- as opposed to further bridge money. As it stands, having a staff of 4 is stable and should be sustainable unless we take an unprecedented drop in income this year (which could happen, but has not in the last 5 years), and so shifting to that was kind of my only sane choice at this point. Since my back was already to the wall in the short term.
Apologies, I know nothing about running a business, so while my question may sound naive, it's genuine curiosity. Is not having 7 people versus 4 means you also do more stuff in less time? I understand about cutting expenses, but it's not like the three people was sitting around doing nothing, right? They also were contributing to the (potential) income, right? (It's ok if you don't have time to explain that to me, I'll understand. Just curious)

Right.  The other thing to remember is that money is not something the company gets in the short term for doing work.  Say we spend 6 months making a game with 7 people.  We then release it, and it makes some money.  That game then goes on and on and on making money, at a lower volume but still there, for years afterward.  As bad as Tidalis has done for us, it looks like it grossed something like $21k in sales last year, three years after coming out.  That nets out to something like only $15k to us, and part of that was inflated by it being a part of some very sizable all-Arcen bundles.  But still.

The way that we make money, and when, is really disconnected from when we do the work.  That's one reason it is so easy to overspend on trying to make money, either before or after a game comes out.  It's also why a reduction in staff doesn't really hurt the bottom line immediately.  We could all just stop working right now, and still make at least half of last year's income just by me negotiating discount promotions over the year.

The trouble is income growth, and sustainable income.  Each game, depending on the game, has a falloff in income generated. Shattered Haven's fell off almost immediately.  Skyward Collapse's fell off in a way that was surprisingly quick.  Bionic we have yet to see.  Valley and AI War have been steady earners, but we overspent on making the Valley games, which is the only reason they were not a huge success in our book.  Tidalis, interestingly, has been very very slow, but also kind of steady.

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So you then also come to things like Erik's work in particular.  His work was trying to increase sales in a variety of ways, including by really pushing social media, etc.  We had a lot of success in some areas, but not in others.  It was a time of experimentation and learning for us, essentially.  So with his reduced role, he'll be able to focus on the high-value stuff and ignore the stuff that didn't pan out.  But we had to go through that learning process over the last few years to really hone our process and also know what was high value.

When it comes to other staff, there are things that Arcen has simply become more efficient at in general, which at least somewhat offsets our losses in staffing.  We're always getting more efficient with every project, and that's a big help for us.

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The big problem with keeping a staff of 7 was that we'd have to increase our baseline earnings by something like 30%.  I just got back the final figures on 2013, and we actually did increase our earnings 43% last year over any year prior.  THAT said, that was including several one-off bundles that are not remotely guaranteed to repeat.  If you take those out, our earnings gains were more in the 12% range.  So that made things super uncertain.

There's also something to be said for not having to rush around.  When we have to release on bad dates, or without advance press, or without my having time to do advance videos and such, or without us having time to do as much polish as we'd like (cough Skyward), then we shoot ourselves in the foot.  I think that those negatives kind of outweigh the speed of getting somewhere faster, in the end.  Sure, with a larger production staff we can get somewhere 50% faster, but if we're not getting there as well because we're constantly rushing... then we're actually kind of throwing money away.

Which really sucks, because if the money was there where we could keep the staff AND not have to rush, we could really do so much.  As you basically are asking, yes we would totally be able to do more.  But that's not really the choice that was before me, if that makes any sense.  It's really this huge complicated mess of factors, and it took me many many months to come to a decision on what ultimately was going to be something we could sustain and make work well.  And even then, I didn't make any final decisions until finances absolutely forced my hand, because I was still holding out hope that we could make it work with the larger staff.
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