The Dust Settles

Well, for those not monitoring my cryptic Facebook status or aware of the recent events in the games industry: I still have a job, but life has been somewhat stressful for the last month.

Vivendi (the French company which owned Radical and many other game studios) and Activision have been discussing a merger for a while. When the merger went through in July, Activision exercised their powers, as new owners of the Vivendi studios, to review the games under development and align the studios to Activision's market strategy.

This is business-speak. What actually happened in more readable terms was that Activision cancelled two of the four games Radical was working on, and Radical was told the number of people that it was allowed to still employ to work on the games we've got.

This was not unexpected. New owners like to sack a quarter of the staff just to show they're there. And there's a well-known adage: "If it's not your money, it's not your company." This is typical if you're a worker at a company, bad if your company is owned or relies upon another company, and worse if you are now a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company, because, while Radical's money was really usually Vivendi's money, the situation now is that it isn't Radical's money and it isn't even Activision's money, it's the stock market's. And the stock market is very definite about what it likes. It likes more money, now. The motive for the merger, in my view, was that Activision wanted to get its hands on Blizzard, the Vivendi-owned company which makes the Warcraft and World Of Warcraft games. (For those who don't know games: Blizzard is essentially a 24-hour printing press which prints free money for whoever owns it.) Activision merged with Vivendi to get Blizzard, and everything else which came with the deal was either gravy - or disposable.

So, Radical sent many people home (on pay) for a few weeks while they sorted out plans, and last Thursday they called us all in and let us know who was staying and who was going. The gannets were out in force almost immediately the takeover had completed; for example, in an act of utter cheekiness - and I use such a mild word only because my mother reads these blogs, otherwise I'd use another words beginning with 'c' - Rockstar Games spray-painted their logo on the sidewalk in front of our building the week before the jobs were cut. Radical has actually processed the cuts very well, organizing all sorts of outplacement options, and Vancouver still needs plenty of games people, so fewer people are unhappy than you'd think.

Personally I was petrified, for one reason only. The day that it became clear cuts would happen, I had nightmares of being laid off one day and of Immigration officials arriving at our apartment the next, ordering us onto a plane at our expense. Fortunately it transpired that even if I lost my job at Radical, my work visa is actually good for living here until it expires (next February), and in that time I could apply for another job and get a replacement work permit. And in any case, I didn't lose my job - Panda liiiiiives.

But it was nerve-wracking.

So after 18 months of working on a game, it's been cancelled from under me - the first time that's happened to me in games, although not in programming. And now I'm on something else. It's all very exciting, and super-secret-squirrel. But it looks like I still have a career at Radical if I want one. And I do.

Phew.