This week’s episode is very long to make up for the crappiness of last week’s episode, and the crew have fun with the trolling of Target critics this past week.
The news this week includes:
This and Listener Feedback.
This week’s episode is full of pop culture references, again, as Inspector Gadget, Matthew Broderick, My Little Pony and The Garry Shandling Show all get some airtime. In addition, Paul discusses his frustration with The Sims Freeplay, and Jonah threatens that in the next episode, he’ll be naked and Paul will wear a silly hat.
The news includes:
All that and a Listener Feedback.
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Now that Activision has merged up with Blizzard all under Vivendi it’s time to consider what to do with all the additional overhead, management, internal studios and sheer amount of people working on projects within their organization. In other words, it’s time to trim the fat and get leaned out for the long haul.
This isn’t unexpected news, the only way to grow more effective as a large company is to remove some of the access baggage that can slow you down and let your competitors take control. This is a sad job which nobody takes pride in (most normal people anyway) but it could mean the difference between rising to the top and sinking like a brick.
“We are focused on improving efficiency across the combined organization and are concentrating on businesses where we have leadership positions that are aligned with Activision Publishing’s long-term corporate objectives,” Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith said in a statement. (gamespot)
It’s important to be aggressive as a large company, just like you would be as a startup company. There is a reason startup companies grow into powerful competitors that win, grow and eventually become (or be purcahsed by) larger companies.
As part of this move some staff will be migrated to new projects, persumably reporposed into other divisions or allowed to find new jobs somewhere else. This is called “realignment” by those in the management organization, and currently those up for realignment are:
These realignments along with other organizational changes will effect a few working game titles:
At this point we’re not sure which, if any, will continue to be developed under Activision and which will be sold off to other companies or retired. Surely, those money making titles will be sold off if Activision has no plans to finish them.
Again, it’s hard to consider this a bad decision. This is a decision of growth over having too many “Cooks in the kitchen” making soup. It’s better to have rock solid titles of epic proportions than a large pool of mediocre titles with minimal sales and bad reputations, and that’s why they spend a lot of time in the office working on this and having a type of office chair for long hours on a computer is really helpful in this area.
It’s not that the titles they’re questioning are necessarily bad, but are not the leading titles in their space and are should be either given a stronger team to work on them or retire them entirely. To build a stronger team with passion and direction it might be best to sell the franchise(s) to other organizations so they can do it right with time and attention to detail.
(Thanks, gamespot)
Hi Guys, Good Episode. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while as I have been busy with my newborn son William. I like that you have now expanded to include other game types other thank video games. To Paul’s infamous comment Story is Game Play’s Bitch… I HATE THIS… I really only like games that have stories or enable me to make a story… I hate games that are pointless grinding. I need progression otherwise I stop paying attention and generally stop playing. I still play game from the 90s because back then they had good stories. As for the Steam Machine’s suspend feature, I like the fact they recognize the risk and disable the feature, nothing would piss me off more than suspending the game and expecting it to start back up and finding that the session had expired/become corrupt. It would be great if they can fix it but I don’t think that would change my buying decision. As for the steam machine, I don’t mind the idea if the boxes are cheaper and outperform my gaming PC… otherwise they don’t really make much sense. If I want to play my PC games on my TV I would connect my PC to the TV. Otherwise… keep recording and I’ll keep listening.