Layoffs Begin At Daybreak Games 54
jjohn24680 writes There are several sources who are reporting layoffs at Daybreak Games (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) today. Notable layoffs include Linda "Brasse" Carlson (former Global Community Relations Lead) and Dave Georgeson (former Director of Development / Franchise Director for Everquest, EverQuest II, and EverQuest Next / Landmark). This post from Daybreak Games has some additional information as well.
Here go the MBA's (Score:5, Insightful)
MBA's + Bean Counting = Layoffs
Layoffs = accelerated attrition of your best talent
Loss of best talent = dying company = falling sales = unprofitable
Back to the beginning.
In this case, the death spiral will continue until a leader emerges that actually has a workable vision that fits within the resources left. Given the strained resources of the purchase and being "unprofitable" already, it's going to be interesting to see if they actually HAVE a plan for developing something that will work.
IMHO, it's a long shot... Now that the bean counters and MBA's are out chopping heads, things will get worse before they get better.
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FTFY
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That's a myth. It's almost always perpetuated by those making asinine claims. It's simple, you make an absurd claim and then when the reasonable people show up, you simply attack them for being "too extreme".
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As with most things, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle
Re:Here go the MBA's (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't question the short term plan, but the long term one. I can understand that there are times when the finances simply CANNOT be ignored and you have to do the layoff of some, to save the whole. I worked a company for 10 years that cycled from about 1,500 employees down to 500 and back to 1,800 only to get my pink slip on their second dip to below 500. I listened to the earnings conference calls, I knew *why* it had to be done from the dollars and cents, profit/loss and all that, but I can tell you it's BAD for the company. Sort of like Chemotherapy is BAD for your health, but you may have no choice.
You MUST have a plan to deal with the negative effects on moral and productivity BEFORE you start cutting staff or your little cost cutting measure will turn into a full scale brain drain and bring your company to ruin.
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Re:Here go the MBA's (Score:4, Insightful)
Current employees will want to update their CVs, but this may well keep this company in business long enough to employ more in the long-run.
Unlikely. MBAs persist in the foolish belief that programmers are fungible, short term. The former SOE has 100% software products. The MBA is going to lay off everybody who knows anything about those products, hire a bunch of Chinese engineers, and wonder why the next 4 projects fail.
Or possibly they've just decided that EverQuest should be a trading card game. Fronted by a cartoon.
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in such cases I always wonder why they bought the company in the first place and not the bunch of chinese engineers.
case in point with Microsoft buying Nokia - and as the next thing basically laying off everyone involved in physical product production, ui toolkit production and what was left of OS production and then throwing away the Nokia name and starting to sell the phones under Microsoft brand(essentially leaving nothing worthwhile of the previous company - and most patents were already spun off into t
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like, why the fuck bother with the takeover in the first place?
In the case of the ongoing collapse formerly known as SOE, they buy it for the trademarks and copyrights. Watch for bastardized bundles of patheticness bearing the EverQuest name showing up on mobile phones by this time next year.
In the case of Nokia, that was done for the purpose of utterly eliminating and destroying a Windows Phone competitor, in the certain knowledge that Windows can and does "succeed" when it has no surviving rivals. Because they've done it before.
It was Ballmer being Ballmer, doing t
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Are you sure about that? They are cutting senior staff positions. A Director of community relations is probably a smart choice given that they are going through a massive transition. Do they really care what the old message to the community is? Can they even afford to care what the community thinks, or court their input at such a delicate time? While fan participation and buy in is important, it is doubtful that they are in a position to do anything meaningful with it right now, or in the near future.
Re:Here go the MBA's (Score:5, Insightful)
Well there AC, in my 20+ years in the business of software development, I've been let go for financial reasons twice, watched others get canned about a dozen times and had to hand out pink slips myself twice. I've seen how the show is run at a number of places and observed a number of things about layoffs which are common to all of them.
First, and most obvious, layoffs are extremely hard on the staff that remains. Productivity and happiness all take a huge dive for everybody. The workplace feels oppressive and EVERYBODY starts thinking about leaving.
Second, even if you lay off the bottom performers, you are going to loose about the same across the top. So if you take 10% off the bottom, unless you do something drastic, you loose 10% off the top. I worked for a company that *routinely* (about once a year) laid off the lowest 10% performers, and it was a horrible place.
Think about these two things that I'm sure they don't mention to the MBA's while they are in school. An MBA is taught about profit and how to manage costs because that is what you can easily quantify. So, the MBA goes out and thinks that he needs to cut X dollars out of his labor cost to break even, so he tells his staff to prep a list of people to layoff that meets that cost savings goal. The low value employees are *usually* the targets, the underperforming and highest paid are too. Heaven help you if you fall into more than one of those categories.
MBA's do the dollars and cents stuff, and when layoffs are warranted due to dollars and cents it's a BAD situation. When it's driven by poor performance, especially poor enough performance that you just got sold off and to stem the bleeding the new owners start in with the hatchet, it's REALLY BAD.
So, like it or not, this worker bee knows what commonly happens and generally why the MBA's do what they do. I don't envy their position, nor do I want to be in their shoes, but I've seen enough young bucks with the ink still drying on their Master's diplomas to recognize the common mistakes they make over and over and the raft full of "experienced" MBA's who still haven't learned better.
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Actually no.. It was a now defunct Long distance carrier that got managed into the ground by a whole drawer full of dull knife executives that made millions....
agreed with bobbied (Score:3)
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If the company they purchased didn't have anything of value going on, why would they buy them?
All I'm saying is that once you start the cycle of layoffs, you simply MUST have a viable recovery plan that assumes your best and brightest will voluntarily follow those you involuntarily escorted out the door, you are in trouble. And I'm not talking about a "Let's work smarter AND harder" pep talk at the next all hands meeting, I'm talking about actually doing something that will work to make the company money
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The smart ones have been thinking "sinking ship" for awhile by now... Now they see the bilge water flowing up in the boat as the crew is throwing the cargo over the side...
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Layoffs = accelerated attrition of your best talent
Only assuming that the company does not have deadwood. In my experience: every single company over a certain size have people that are completely useless, only useful in very small area or got attitude/communication issues.
Layoffs are not always a bad thing. It all depends on how good management is recognizing a person's value to the core business. If they are terrible, it results in loss of knowledge, capability and destroyed morale. But if they know how to do layoffs right, it streamlines and revitalizes
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Still, if you do layoffs and accurately target your low performers (which few companies seem to be able to get totally right) then the top employees who have the skills and can get jobs are going to start walking out the door too. Who wants to work at a place that's all gloom and doom anyway, especially if you have skills that will take you someplace else?
So, yes, layoffs can be helpful, but it's like chemotherapy, the lessor of two evils. You do chemo because the problems it causes you are less severe t
How to lose money (Score:2)
Buy an under performing business unit and make no changes to it.
Perhaps they didn't feel like losing their money so they're cutting out the under performing staff?
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Sounds like the last place I worked.... Large contract abruptly ended with very little notice and the mass exodus of the best and brightest ensued even before the formal announcement of the contract getting pulled.
I got lucky in that I had already decided that it was time to jump ship because it was obvious the performance on the contract that kept 50% of the building employed was extremely sub par and my trying to keep the stuff around me on the ethical up and up was starting to ruffle feathers. I had a
How to lose money (Score:4, Informative)
The public face of your most prominent franchise is under performing staff?
Yeah, good luck with that. The fans see the writing on the wall and will bail. The top talent sees half the staff suddenly gone, and will bail. Unless the plan is to cancel a bunch of games, they've just obliterated any value in this acquisition.
"Layoffs..." (Score:3)
You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
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How someone with his track record is even still in the industry is mind boggling, almost as much as the fact that SOE not only survived till now, but someone wanted to buy them.
We live in strange times.
unfortunate name choice (Score:1)
considering Nottinghamshire Police's repeatedly-stalled and frankly corrupted-from-day-one investigation into current and historical systemic child abuse is named "Operation Daybreak". Which, by the way, has yet to produce a single prosecution after four years, twelve arrests, four police bailments, less than three hundred statements, 75 interviews under caution, and the PCC's refusal to disclose staffing or budget dedication to the ongoing operation. Instead what we have is in the case of at least two surv
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how about you read the fucking account instead of hiding behind AC and spewing out yet another tired metaphor?
Higby should have been one of the first (Score:2)
Because of that mismanagement, the game is still in an unfinished state two years after release, and core game elements have been revamped multiple times.
That and the issue that the PS2 devs can't seem to push out a single patch without breaking multiple other things -- and then leave it in a broken state for weeks and months at a time.
Sadly
I'm not surprised (Score:2)
I'm kind of surprised they sur
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They didn't really have to create anything new to compete. EQ is/was better in many ways to WoW, though not saying that WoW is bad in any way, but your statement is like saying when Guild Wars 2 came out that Blizzard had to release something else to compete with it. EQ is from an era that was vastly different than most MMOs today on a rather fundamental level so they kept a fairly stable playerbase, but without something to get new blood it was eventually doomed, it just took 16 years.
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I played EQ from about 99-04, in a lot of ways I really liked the toughness of the game since I came in from MUDs that were even more brutal so it seemed like an easier game lol, though when I started playing again recently just to reminisce I realized just how difficult it is compared to modern mmos. I also liked that if you really screwed up you could potentially screw yourself out of a whole day just due to like you said, corpse retrieval or whatever. It was part of the charm imo.
EQ did fix some things t
Give me back MXO (Score:2)
With any luck, Daybreak games will go into administration.
Hopefully some rich guy buys it for £1 and kindly releases the Matrix Online Server sourcecode, so us old farts can hyperjump and bullet-time again.