SWTOR wasn't really treated as a true "Bioware" project for the longest time.

First, a little history. The original Bioware studio in Edmonton was the one responsible for the "modern" Bioware titles - Neverwinter, Jade Empire, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect. SWTOR was primarily built by a separate studio in Austin with a separate org chart. The only thing that really tied SWTOR's early development to Bioware was the name on the studio and the general style of game it was. The contributions of Bioware Edmonton to SWTOR were primarily limited to the original staff sent to start the Austin studio and the on-rails space shooter mode in SWTOR. During this era, Bioware and SWTOR were basically associated in name only. There was minimal marketing or promotion for SWTOR from Bioware as a brand.

A few years later, EA corporate started an initiative called "One Bioware" which essentially brought Edmonton, Austin, and the newly formed Montreal studios under the same studio leadership to work on "Bioware" projects. SWTOR is still a "legacy" project - it's getting long in the tooth, it isn't growing, and the technology is old. It wasn't the hot new thing to promote, and the team building it felt the neglect from above. SWTOR actually had a Rennaisance period, with Knights of the Fallen Empire bringing in a huge number of additional subscribers and player growth, but that was mostly ignored by Bioware at large. Dragon Age Inquisition got all the fanfare, then a bunch of people were pulled from SWTOR to support Andromeda and Anthem.

A perfect example is the Bioware 25th anniversary book, 300+ pages of history about all the games and such that Bioware built over their run. Ten pages of the 300+ were dedicated to SWTOR, despite SWTOR having been live for 9 years by that point and SWTOR being the financial engine keeping the entire org afloat. It's strongly emblematic of how it made the dev team feel and how much Bioware as an organization cared about the game.

After 2020, EA was looking to decrease costs. Broadsword had already proven themselves by taking on some of EA's other legacy MMO projects (Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online) and doing well with them. Broadsword made the offer to take on SWTOR, along with hiring as many of the SWTOR dev team as they could take. Many of the veteran team members, weary of the treatment at Bioware, decided to take it. It's hard to blame them - Bioware as an organization never really seemed to understand or appreciate the SWTOR contributions beyond the revenue it generated. Bioware didn't give much acknowledgement to the game or the team, internal or external.

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Some might say Tracy Industries is overdue some new leadership - you’ve been very involved recently - is Mr Gordon Tracy being lined up to take the top spot?

Good morning Financial Gazette,

(Now there’s a publication I never saw myself answering questions for, how things change…)

First question - who “might” say that? It’s a pretty damning statement of our current leadership and I’d say resoundingly baseless, given TI is one of the most successful companies on the planet, financially and otherwise.

Our current board are all experienced, longstanding senior figures in the world of TI. Our CEO possesses a breadth of experience and knowledge I could not imagine ever matching, along with a proven track record of ensuring the success of Tracy Industries continues. He’s well liked by our staff, very well liked by our investors and shareholders, and I happen to count myself amongst those numbers. Our business is in excellent hands.

Yes, I’m involved in Tracy Industries - the last name is a bit of a giveaway, don’t ya think? I don’t think it’s that surprising that my brothers and I would all want to play our part in the family business.

We’ve recently increased our budget for corporate philanthropy and our green R&I, and that’s where I come in. My college background is marine science and engineering, I’ve previously served with the World Aquanaut Security Patrol, and as the appointed family hippy and lover of all things planet Earth, this is my kind of party.

It’s been great to be able to spend more time getting involved with the various successful projects we have running (and in the pipeline), and to help initiate and steer these with my own knowledge. I’m immensely grateful to our CEO for his faith in me, and for sharing my view that Tracy Industries should continue to set the corporate and commercial goalposts for environmental stewardship. He really does believe in the importance of corporate responsibility and using our position to help better the planet we all share, and the fact that he’s a thoroughly excellent human being who deeply cares for others makes him the very best person to sit in the big chair at the top of Tracy Industries.

I have no desire to sit anywhere other than within our social responsibility department; leading the R&I team contained within, continuing to drive Tracy Industries’ world leading commitment to sustainable, socially and environmentally positive innovation, and working to secure a greener and fairer future for us all - and of course, supporting our CEO in his vision for Tracy Industries.

So to answer your question - Mr Gordon Tracy certainly hopes not.

Let's put on our business hats for a moment to understand what's actually going on here. What you're missing is who is doing the buying and who is doing the selling. The buyer and the seller are not the same people! The company is changing ownership. The old owners are no longer in the picture. It is the new owners who decide the direction, orders. and choices for the company.

The sellers here are actually all of the current shareholders (partial owners) of Electronic Arts. Once the buyout goes through, every share of EA gets exchanged for $210 cash provided by the buyers. Shareholders cannot opt out of this exchange, the deal is binding. One the deal goes through, the former shareholders are no longer financially associated with EA at all. They become outside observers. This includes the majority of the old board and the C-suite of executives. Remember what happened to Bobby Kotick after Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard? He stuck around for a period to help with the transition and then exited stage left. We should expect the same of executives like Andrew Wilson after the deal goes through.

The buyers are a consortium (i.e. a group) of private investors including the Saudi Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake Technology Management (an investment firm), and Affinity Partners (a Private Equity fund). This group is pooling around $35 billion of their own money plus taking out additional loans of $20 billion to buy all of the outstanding shares of EA stock at $210 per share from each and every shareholder. After this buyout goes through, they will own every share of EA stock, making them the sole owners of the entire company.

However, rather than the individual investors taking the loan out themselves, they instead have the newly reformed Electronic Arts corporation take the loan out to pay for itself. This helps spread the risk out a bit - if the new EA goes bankrupt, the buyers (PIF, Silver Lake, Affinity, etc.) will have lost the $35 billion they put in to buy EA but they won't have to pay for the additional $20 billion in debt - the company will take that debt with it to the grave. However, this also comes with the liability - the interest on the loan must be paid or some form of "restructuring" will ensue and the lenders are the first ones in line to get paid out.

The new owners believe that they can make EA a stronger and better performing company long term - a company that will be able to make them money while also continuing to pay off its much larger debts. These buyers are confident enough in the long term results to bet $35 billion of their own money and willing to add an additional $20 billion in debt to the new company while they're doing it. Only time will tell if that bet will pay off.

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Sure. It's a bit confusing, but it makes sense if you look at it. Pocket Monsters and all of the related IP (Pokemon, Ash Ketchum, the various regions, each individual pokemon's likeness, etc.) are owned by The Pokemon Company.

The Pokemon Company is owned by three companies: Nintendo, GameFreak, and Creatures Inc.

These three companies (Nintendo, GameFreak, Creatures) all work together on developing Pokemon-related media.

Nintendo publishes the games and handles the logistics - certification, distribution, manufacturing, localization, and so on.

GameFreak is the primary game developer for the mainline games.

Creatures handles the Pokemon Trading Card Game, Pokemon-branded toys, and the Pokemon CG Studio, which is dedicated to modeling and animation in 3D for Pokemon. Creatures primarily serves as a support studio for other game devs, primarily supplying the 3D models and animation for the Pokemon games. They provide the models and animation for the mainline games, as well as spinoff titles like Pokemon Go, Detective Pikachu, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus.

We should note that The Pokemon Company is still its own separate company with its own org structure and employees. The Pokemon Company handles all of the officially branded retail Pokemon stores in Japan, as well as licensing of Pokemon for other products like toys and merch. It also handles all of the animated series, all feature films, and the Pokemon manga. Technically, The Pokemon Company's owners (Nintendo, GameFreak, Creatures) must license the Pokemon IP from The Pokemon Company but it's mostly like asking yourself for permission. Legally it is distinct and owns the IP so any other legally distinct entity must obtain a license to use it. This is primarily for accounting and legal purposes.

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The short answer is because shit rolls downhill. For a longer and more nuanced answer, there's multiple factors to consider.

The main issue is that the company is trying to cut costs immediately. This is usually for two major reasons:

Reassure investors to keep them from dumping the stock and driving down the company's value

Save as much money as they can from their current stockpile for other projects still in development.

If the company goes under because it can't make payroll company-wide, everybody is doomed regardless. A gecko will sacrifice its tail in order to escape with its life. A crab will tear its own claw off to survive. A company will always cut staff to keep itself afloat.

The next factor is that each major experience level up a dev attains tends to be a geometric difference in productivity. [A large task that would take a junior dev two months to complete might take a mid-level dev one month and a senior dev only a week or two]. This is why senior devs are entrusted with the bigger and more critical tasks. Further, the typical quality of work that a senior dev produces is much higher than what you'd get from a mid-level or a junior. I'm a senior dev and I cost the team a large amount of money to keep, but paying for just me is still significantly cheaper than paying a pair of mid-level designers or three/four juniors.

The next factor is that most big layoffs come after a project has shipped. This is because a given project is at its maximum headcount right before it ships - you need all hands on deck during full production, building and validating all of the content in the game. There needs to be other projects in development to pay for those people after the game launches. If the game launches well, a significant portion of the team can stay on to do post-launch content and the others can join in-progress projects at the studio or at other studios owned by the publisher. In the case of a bad launch the post-launch content gets cancelled because there just aren't enough players to make building the post-launch content financially viable and the people who were supposed to build it have no new project to pay for their salaries.

There's also the factor of how projects have different needs at different times. You always need a core team to get a project off the ground - engineering who can put together the foundations of the game, design that can prototype and build core gameplay, art that can establish a new visual standard for a new game. But you likely don't need an army of designers to build content for a game that doesn't have any core gameplay yet, gameplay engineers to flesh out systems that haven't been designed yet, artists to model and skin characters that haven't been concepted yet, or QA to test content that hasn't been built yet. You need those folks when you're in production and all of the groundwork has been laid.

These are the nominal reasons why job cuts always start from the bottom - the juniors and mid-levels have the least to do when a game gets cancelled or a bad launch happens and the cost to keep them all adds up significantly. The fact that it also shields decisionmakers and middle managers is, of course, also in there. This is also why I never offer or expect loyalty to or from an employer, especially a large publicly-traded one. They will never sacrifice their own survival (or even advantage) to keep me, so I should never expect more than a business relationship from them that could end at any time.

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Recently, Katsuhiro Harada of Tekken fame posted a [lengthy tweet] where he talked about what happened to the Soul Calibur franchise, the team, and the less-visible effects of companies growth and change over time. Harada is a good guy and I very much appreciate his candor and willingness to talk to the public. His English tweets can be a little difficult to parse though, so I thought I would offer my interpretation of what he said, based on my own understanding of game dev, the industry overall, corporate politics, and economic trends.

The [initial comment] Harada responded to was "Soul Calibur needs a director as loyal as Harada. You can see this via the game mechanics that came and went in the Soul Calibur games". Harada responded by pointing out that there are many games with great mechanics that didn't survive the test of time. Game mechanics aren't really what make or break a franchise like Soul Calibur or Tekken. A lot of great games and franchises were unable to make the transition from earning their keep one coin at a time in arcades to providing sufficient value to players to buy a high-priced game for home use.

Soul Calibur did not have this problem - Harada saw firsthand that they made a strong transition from arcade revenue to home consoles. Soul Calibur had a strong leader named Yotoriyama (who also worked before with Harada on Tekken, and Harada on Soul Calibur). The Soul and Tekken teams established a strong rivalry in the early days of the polygon game era. While the Tekken team were known as an argumentative bunch of renegades, the Soul team was highly regarded as elite, the best of the best at the time.

In Harada's opinion, it is actually strong leadership and clarity of vision that maintain a franchise. Many franchises have died because key leaders have left for whatever reason. Yotoriyama was exactly the kind of director that the original tweet was talking about - the team was focused, driven, and producing great results. Tekken was the top earner in the arcades, but the Soul Calibur was outperforming Tekken on the home consoles. Unfortunately, the corporate landscape changed as the company grew and is what eventually and inadvertently killed Soul Calibur.

As companies grow, the focus of the top leadership shifts from "make great games" to "manage the organization efficiently". This basically means that endgame game developer career paths eventually evolve away from "making great game content and features" into organization management positions. Greater emphasis was placed at the corporate level on broadening one's skillset instead of mastery in a particular field. This also meant staying on a particular franchise for a long time was bad for each individual's career. As member after member of the Project Soul team either left to broaden their skillset or was promoted out of developer roles into management, the core vision and direction of Project Soul weakened. Harada faced a similar situation with the Tekken team - he was promoted to being head of the Global Business Department, but it had little to do with game development. All of his reports were marketing people and not game devs.

Harada decided to go against orders and lead the Tekken team anyway, despite the orders from above, in large part because he believes that the fans of any game can only depend on a dev team that has the necessary drive and vision to deliver. Harada's decision to go rogue was only really possible because the Tekken team was already full of renegades who weren't willing to listen to the corporate management. This was the largest difference between the Soul and the Tekken teams. The Tekken team remained driven and focused on their core vision because they were unwilling to take orders from the corporate level, while the Soul team slowly had their drive and vision whittled away one team member at a time. Harada ended by saying he believes that there are still some who have the will to resurrect Project Soul, but they need uniting in order to make it happen.

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Usually not directly, no. Investors usually keep themselves at a distance from the company because they usually have other things to do with their time. They don't work for the company and many of them lack the ability to affect much on their own. It's how the system works.

Investors own shares of the company. Each share grants its owner one vote. The more shares someone owns, the more votes they command. If they don't own a lot of shares, they don't have a lot of votes... but if enough of investors with enough shares band together, they can collectively make a bigger difference when it reaches voting time. This is why owning 51% or more of a company gives that owner a "controlling" stake - anyone who owns 51% or more of the shares can outvote all the remaining shareholders by herself.

It isn't really feasible to hold investor votes for every single company decision though, so the investors elect a board of directors every year to keep an eye on the company's day-to-day decisions for them. The board, representing the investors, appoints the top decision-makers of the company like the CEO - the Chief Executive Officer, who Executes the will of the investors. It is these executives appointed by the board who make the decisions about running the company, including things like hiring and firing.

Thus a single investor who owns a handful of shares of stock in my employer lacks any real power over me and can't really fire me. But if enough investors with enough shares demand the CEO fire me, the CEO may care about their opinion enough to do it.

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First, for those who haven't been following the Activision-Blizzard news these past two weeks, I've got two older posts that summarize what has happened. Here they are:

[The lawsuit and my immediate thoughts]

[The corporate response and the walkout]

All caught up? Good.

Now the news recap: In the time since the second post, we've had a few developments in the situation. Blizzard president J Allan Brack has resigned (note: he was not fired for allowing a hostile work environment on his watch as President, but rather resigned "to pursue new opportunities" - a standard procedure for saving face for both the executive and the company) and has been replaced by Executive Vice Presidents Mike Ybarra (VP of Platform and Tech) and Jen Oneal (Former studio head of Vicarious Visions which was absorbed into Blizzard). In slightly quieter news, Jesse Meschuk, Executive VP of Human Resources at Blizzard, has also silently left the company. The organization is being very tight-lipped about Meschuk’s exit and any changes to the HR department (like Meschuk’s replacement) at the company.

Is this a step in the right direction?

I think it’s honestly too early to say anything definitively. There’s some cautious optimism about having a woman in the executive suite and no one has come forward with anything negative to say about Jen Oneal as a boss or a coworker. Mike Ybarra is a somewhat similar case with one single exception - he is (was?) friends with Ben Kilgore, Blizzard’s former Chief Technology Officer who resigned last year (presumably because of sexual harassment allegations). To my knowledge, there’s nothing else negative about Ybarra from former coworkers or employees who reported to him.

Jesse Meschuk leaving is probably a good thing. Human Resources at Blizzard has been a pretty big mess for several years - I’ve heard an internal joke that new employees at Blizzard often have the interview, offer, and first day paperwork all handled by different HR people because the HR department has such high turnover. There was a recent article on Axios talking about how many Blizzard employees didn’t trust the HR department to look out for them. I really hope that the organization can get those HR issues sorted.

Beyond this, however, are the broader implications of Oneal and Ybarra being promoted to Blizzard’s top spot because of their specialties. Oneal is a studio head and excels at leading game development teams. Ybarra is a platform and technology specialist - his expertise is in the back end support technology for things like Battle.net and network infrastructure. Their pairing seems like the executives above Blizzard at Activision-Blizzard (Kotick and crew) are aiming to separate Blizzard’s game development teams from Blizzard’s platform and back end teams. This makes sense from a corporate efficiency perspective, but it does not look super great for Blizzard as a self-reliant corporate entity anymore. One can make plenty of corporate arguments as to whether Blizzard needs to be self-reliant in this way, but that’s something that probably requires more context than my typical blog reader can feasibly muster.

P.S. None of the four worker demands from the walkout have been acknowledged or addressed yet by Activision-Blizzard corporate.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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