By One would definitely give a few moments of thought to such a question after a recent announcement where the developers of the Tony Hawk series, Robodomo have announced canning 60 members of staff and dropping work on the franchise altogether.
Tony Hawk:Ride controller
It’s uncertain whether or not the owners of the franchise, Activision will still keep it going after Ride turned out to be a bit of a bomb and the soon to be launched Tony Hawk:Shred with a future rather uncertain due to some developing uncertainties. The biggest of these issues is the recently developed skateboard peripheral which doesn’t seem to have the intended success, mostly because functioning properly isn’t it’s strongest feature.
The bad news is that the next item, Tony Hawk:Shred will be sold along side the same sort of device and will employ it as a controller. This could be a turn off for fans of the Tony Hawk franchise and potential buyers.
The actual game itself could be a result of why developer Robodomo fired the part of the staff in charge of this game but speculations also tend to point towards something different. Consider this a bit of a conspiracy theory but some prepare to think that this is all a plot of the bigger gaming industry competitors buying, stressing out and then destroying it. History plays the part, EA Games did the same to developers like Bullfrog and Westwood Studios. Why wouldn’t this be the case?
Another bit of concerning news on the job front for the gaming industry, came just one day ago when another of Activision’s developers, Raven lost a team of 40 people. Raven was in charge of developing Singularity, the game that managed to get good reviews despite the rather wide array of flaws. This could mean that the conspiracy theorists are right or that Activision doesn’t tolerate lack of performance.
Looking at the other side of the story Robodomo president Josh Tsui had a statement to make and according to him the jobs are gone and firing hard working people is something hard to do. Despite the obvious setback in workforce the leadership of Robodomo seems to be optimistic on future ventures.
The situation of jobs in the gaming industry, perhaps those under the Activision umbrella are a bit dodgy but if you’re good enough and looking the big names are always looking.