Well, I did start writing a post about this at the time (a week or so ago now), but it turned into a windy rant about bad industry practices; then I ran out of time to finish it up and it seems to have been eaten by WordPress since then. Since it would probably be very depressing to type it all again, I can sum it up in some very simple points:

1. Letting your staff work an extra month when you know you don’t have the money to pay them is totally, flat out, unacceptable. At least VIS had the courtesy to tell us at the start of the month so we didn’t work any days for free.
2. The way the Edinburgh staff were treated was shocking – being flat out lied to so that they’d migrate the equipment and incur travel expenses that had no itention of being reimbursed is just shoddy management.
3. Letting your company run down all its money and go bankrupt, then when it goes into liquidation immediately starting up a phoenix company with none of the debt and scavenging all the assets for cheap is, frankly, tantamount to fraud in my book. How you expect to hire back developers onto such a team after seeing the way the previous company went is beyond me. Unless of course its all just a temporary thing so the maximum amount of blood can be sweated out of the assets before abandoning everyone to their own fates (again).
4. Damn – thats 3 out of the 4 big Scottish players out of business in less than 14 months; leaving Rockstar North and Real Time Worlds as the only large employers.

I must admit to being a little selfish in this matter – as I mostly want other Scottish games companies to survive so I can poach their good staff when I get the opportunity. But with the liquidations going on, more and more talent is migrating south of the border (where there’s a drought of good people), and there’s little to tempt them back up. And then, there is a hurdle to any new developer wanting to set up shop in Scotland – the fact that talent would have to be relocated in to get it going.

Its small wonder so many good people are leaving the industry – they’re being offered no stability, no decent prospects, and companies which want to offer them opportunities and build are being priced out of the market.

Anyway – my condolences to those people out of work because of this, although from those I talked to on Wednesday while there, I think it might be better off redundant than continuing to work there!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Industry Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.