Post by Steve Farrelly @ 04:55pm 13/10/10 | 9 Comments
"With the recent completion of Singularity, Raven Software is realigning its workforce to better reflect the studio's upcoming slate," the publisher said in a statement, raising an industry-wide issue with publishers throwing down job cuts post-project completion.
To play devil's advocate though, there's a fine-line to think about here as it's arguable the studio itself hasn't ultimately delivered anything ground-breaking in their time at Activision, who do pay their bills.
They also suffered a similar layoff situation at the completion of Wolverine and the last Wolfenstein - both games did not do well either critically or commercially.
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Posted 12:24pm 14/10/10
Unless I was on a contract for that project and paid accordingly.
Posted 11:54am 14/10/10
lol
Posted 12:23pm 14/10/10
That; and I have 6 active construction, 7 active Cadastral and 3 active detail projects at the moment. So if they fired me after finishing just 1 project, they would have quite a bit of work to dump on a new guy that doesn't know anything about them.
I'm going on holidays for ~3.5 weeks in November and I've already started getting one of the other Surveyors up to speed on the Construction projects. Being just dumped into a job mid-project sucks. Details will be finished and Cadastrals will be up to the stage where they are tied up by lawers and property officers for months...
Posted 01:01pm 14/10/10
I found this news to be really disappointing. I love the work that Raven do, they have made some great games over the last decade.
Although as you said they have not done any ground-breaking games in a few years, they have always delivered solid games. The most recent one, Singularity, i had fun playing and liked the concept. I think really Activision can be the ones to blame for the lack of sales with that one. They pulled a bunch of people from the studio off the game early to get them started on Call of Duty content, and then didnt market Singularity much at all. It did fairly well in reviews, but no one knew about the game.
They are a talented studio its just unfortunate that this has happened.
Posted 02:11pm 14/10/10
Ok, Chris said you can stay :)
Posted 02:31pm 14/10/10
Posted 02:34pm 14/10/10
It was either that or re-aligning the upcoming slate to better reflect the studio's workforce.
Activision was reputation bound to choose the s***tiest option available.
Posted 02:34pm 14/10/10
In fact I hope they've fired the people who do the locked-door-but-this-nearby-exploding-crate-reveals-a-hidden-entry "puzzle" which every single Raven game seems to feature.
Posted 02:48pm 14/10/10
The only notable exceptions (to me at least) are the Hexens and Heretics and SoF 2 - oh and Jedi Knight starring Jedi Don Burke.
It's a shame that layoffs have come off the back of one of their rare games that actually _was_ half decent (Singularity), and it sucks for the individuals who lost their jobs, but I really don't think many of us would miss Raven as a game developer if they disappeared completely tomorrow.
The last Wolfenstein was such a turd and they damn near killed Quake with #4