Originally published at: Annapurna Interactive's entire staff quits
…
10 Likes
I was thinking they did, but it’s Blumhouse that does.
2 Likes
Especially with the current state of the game’s industry job market (abattoir with a chance of headcount reduction, approximately); the talks must have really broken down to get 25 people to simultaneously go into take-this-job-and-shove-it mode.
Is there any background on what raised the stakes so much(eg. the spinoff plan was pitched as an alternative to just getting shut down, so failure of that plan was effectively existential anyway); or is truly amazing interaction with customers and partners an Ellison family tradition?
8 Likes
The resignations came in the wake of a dispute between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and Annapurna studio head Megan Ellison. As Bloomberg report, negotiations were taking place to “spin off the video-game division as an independent entity.” After failing to reach an agreement, Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, resulting in the resignation of Gary and “other executives.” Further resignations followed, with a reported two dozen other staff leaving the company
variety was also reporting
Last month, Hector Sanchez, one of the original co-founders of Annapurna Interactive, rejoined Annapurna as president of interactive and new media. He had previously been at Epic Games for five years, most recently as head of the Unreal Engine games business
it sounds like the real leaders of the company were not ellison and the rehired sanchez, even though they were on paper. and they just learned what that meant
5 Likes
“the company will honor existing contracts”
Yeah, I’m sure they’ll take all the revenue, as per the signed contracts, but I don’t expect the studios involved will get the resources they need in return, if the publisher effectively doesn’t exist. Anyone releasing a game right now is probably going to be pretty screwed, as Ellison et al. desperately try to re-staff Annapurna. (Which might be even more difficult than usual, as prospective employees are going to be wary of a situation which was so bad that everyone else quit.)
It sounds like the spinoff plan was an alternative to being under direct control of the film division, which apparently no one wanted, to an extreme degree (for whatever reasons).
The last time I saw something like this happen, where all the employees walked out, was with a game studio I worked for, where we were pretty sure we had no future there (or at least not one where we weren’t constantly fighting with the parent company to get the resources we needed to keep going), and someone else was setting up a studio and wanted to poach us, so we walked out of the offices and right into another job. I have no idea if that’s what happened here, but I hope so, for the employees sake, because yeah, it’s rough out there right now.
11 Likes
Both Ellison kids are chips off the ol’ entitled block - oft quoted whinging about how hard they’ve had it, whether it’s Annapurna, or Skydance
2 Likes
This is upsetting - Stray was my favorite game a couple of years ago.
5 Likes
It’s a shame; Annapurna has put out some great stuff. Outer Wilds is amazing, as is Stray. I do love the idea of video games from A24, I can only imagine what kind of weirdness we’d get.
6 Likes
it is worth noting that Annapurna was the publisher, and not the developer for their entire catalog to date. This isn’t great for developers that use them but it isn’t an automatic (pun intended) game over.
It is not a good sign for the one game that Annapurna Interactive is (was?) developing, Blade Runner something or other.
6 Likes
well, they are game developers. a sudden shift of company focus to film, especially after such a successful string of games, wouldn’t please anyone i think
a lot of publishers have internal staff who help polish, bug fix, complete features and the like. ( even sometimes help flesh out the design of a game. ) no idea if that was how annapurna worked or not. but since all of their titles from disparate studios were so well put together, it seems likely
1 Like
This was a game publishing team, though - they wouldn’t have anything much to do with the film side of things - I imagine they weren’t happy with who was going to be managing them or how they were going to do it.
1 Like
This makes me sad. Annapurna was one of the few publishers that seemed to really take risks on new IP and weird, unique stuff.
Kind of like when I see the A24 logo in front of a movie, I know I’ll be in for an interesting time when that Annapurna logo comes up.
I hope those employees land on their feet and do something awesome.
4 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
