LA Noire developer goes titsup Australia’s international gaming success story, Team Bondi, the developer behind LA Noire, has been placed into administration. The development studio has been hit by some controversy in recent months, with rumours that it had sold its IP to rival development house, KMM Studios, last month and an unceremonious parting of ways …
The gaming press was filled with horror stories about Team Bondi, about the crunch that went on for years and the constant turnover of staff due to the oppressive atmosphere, the inflexibility, arrogance and bad management of a few key people.
The irony is if the staff had been happy there wouldn't have been the turnover and without the turnover and subsequent knowledge lost there wouldn't have been the constant need to crunch. That's the reason the game took so damned long and why the company burned through cash, distributors and ended up giving the lion's share of profits to Rockstar. All because of bad management by a few prima donnas.
The moral therefore for any prospective games company is keep your staff happy. Ultimately it means releasing on time and more money.
Everything I read about that suggests it was management making an arse of things that lead to the bankruptcy of the developer. Except here, the spending must have been even more out of control. For Team Bondi to go tits up, the debts the game accumulated in development must have been incredible, especially considering the game sold well.
"I'm sure someone somewhere made a lot of money on LA Noire. I'm also sure it wasn't the guys who put in the hours to create it"
Replace LA Noire with any given software project and you'll not be far from the truth, sadly.
OTOH if I was bankrolling a bunch of people doing _any_ kind of work and it looked like they weren't going to deliver the goods I'd also reserve the right to get involved.
I wonder how much it costs to employ a whole game studio - my guess is lots and lots. If the end results doesn't sell then all that money is wasted so it's a high risk environment.
It is usually the top level people at companies that are jerks anyway.
Take the software package that originally went by the name of Q named of course after
Q from STNG. The software package was abke to predict when your network will go down before it does go down. It is sold at $6k and $27k or more depending on various conditions of your network.
Well since then the software company was sold and renamed and the lead programmer was some mr sassy pants who did a food run and we gave him list of food and gave him money and he left and then came back 2 hours later with no food and no money. He claimed the cashier had bad vibes and he did not want to get those bad vibes by taking the money or food from her hands.
LOL I hope the worst in life for that programmer.
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