A Promiscuous Industry

Having been reminded tonight of Christopher Bruce aka "Back Alley Brawler" and the Paragon Layoff "Saga", I got to doing some digging with my favorite tools, social networking sites + Google.

In this case, LinkedIn is the partner in crime of Google in dancing on the ethical line between public and private information.

Theoretically, all this information is available on a person's resume, should they choose to post it online - though I'm not sure that it would make a person comfortable to know that random Joes from half the globe away can follow them along like a celebrity on a reality TV show on their career paths... and then discuss it on blogs and forums, etc.

Wanna know the confirmed "death" toll of October 7, 2010 at Paragon Studios?

Christopher Bruce - Senior Animator/VFX
Paul Gunn - World Designer
Don Pham - Environment Artist
David Yoon - Dev QA
Michael Chock - Senior Software Engineer
Graham West - Senior Programmer (? - this one is a "maybe")

I can't trace the other missing three as yet. They may have been dead wood not worth speaking about, or they are very private individuals.

I managed to trace the above six by the slew of LinkedIn recommendations they have been writing about each other, plus a few other apparently-still-hired-by-Paragon-or-not-yet-updated-resume people. All dated somewhen between Oct 7-Oct 11, speaking in the past tense about how so-and-so was a pleasure to work with. Some fancy googling of keywords in their profiles, crosschecking with the LinkedIn profile for Paragon Studios and confirming that they've updated their resumes as no longer working at Paragon Studios nails them as the ones. We'll see if the resumes of the others change after some time.

I also did find out that people have been revolving in and out of Paragon Studios much earlier, with nary a sound or an announcement. Such as:

Carolina Tello - Concept Artist / Senior Concept Artist (August 2010)
Ken Morse - Art Director (June 2010)
Bruce Harlick - Lead Designer (January 2010)

In studying all the profiles of people working at Paragon Studios, one thing struck me. A ton of them work a couple years in a place, and bounce from famous studio to studio. There are quite a number of people who have traversed between Paragon Studios/NCsoft and LucasArts, the one coming after the other.

And that is the reason for my heavy use of quotation marks with regards to all the dramatic words earlier. Turnover happens. Folks seems to stay in one place 2-4 years on average, 5-6+ year stints are outliers.

Sometimes the folks whom you don't want to see leave the most decide that it's time to move on. Positive or negative push or pull can factor into that decision.

Sometimes they are laid off (with some kind of compensation) because the budget can no longer support it. (Personally, based on the rapidly plunging US dollar... I just googled it, omg, it's dropped to 1 usd = 1.29 sgd... their economy is in dire shape.)

And sometimes they suck (but you can't say that, so it's "we wish them all the best in their future endeavours" instead) or they got the wrong end of the politicking stick (leaving more and more crap in the company until it collapses).

But we'll never know unless the company does crash and burn, and I wouldn't wish that fate on any game company. *moment of silence for Realtime Worlds* Just certain game developers. *coughGarriottEmmertcough*

Back on topic though, I recall David "Zeb" Cook aka LordRecluse being around for City of Villains and then poofing without a sound or trace after it was launched. I'm sure there were, are, and would be other people revolving in and out. I don't think this is a new thing for Paragon Studios (or Cryptic when they were Cryptic) or NCsoft.

It just became news because there was some anonymous leak. MMORPG.com - the infamous tabloid of the MMO feed world - was crass enough to spin it as news. Then Eliot Lefebvre jumped on it as a news and CoH correspondent for Massively, and put it on a big central stomping ground for MMO players.

One more thing makes it news. Back Alley Brawler's celebrity status. It just so happens that the community is very fond of BaB because he was such a dedicated developer with a fantastic sense of humour, (RUN FASTER! - and yes, I was there, rawr) who wasn't afraid to spend time with the game's players and share his opinions over geeky topics like comics and other games. And yes, it is a loss to the closeness of the CoH community that we won't have his zany comments decorating the forums anymore.

Yet I can't help but think that a tiny team of 15 people would be bound to function quite differently from a company of 50-60 odd employees. It may be that there are tradeoffs to either situation.(And you have to ask, how did they get down to fifteen people? Surely layoffs must have happened then? Way more drastically than this one too.)

So yeah, turnover happens. The only constant is change. And there's no need to panic just yet.