I've been in the social games industry for a couple of years now. Zynga may have gotten more attention for some of its negative tactics, but Lolapps takes the cake for shady social gaming.
They consistently provided grossly inflated (by an order of magnitude) numbers for their user counts and revenue. I honestly would not be surprised if they had lied to 6Waves in order get a merger in the first place.
They were almost banned from Facebook for selling user data to third parties.
Recently, they were contracted to help publish a game developed by an indie. As publishers, they got to see a game that hadn't yet been released. They stalled the indie shop in publishing the game while rushing to create a blatant clone. They then ditched the indie shop and released their own clone.
Perhaps not surprising, but I think those are drastic mischaracterizations of the company. I was there for the merger and the almost-Facebook-ban From anything I saw, numbers weren't cooked.
The Facebook ban was due to one of many small ad tests (<<1% of users each IIRC) we did with third parties, and had already stopped. Turns out one of them was later banned from Facebook, as was anyone who did business with them, regardless of how small or how short. IIRC we weren't even working with them when we got the punishment. But once accused, this kind of thing tends to stick with public perception.
Can't speak to the indie dev thing as I wasn't there at the time and haven't followed it. I will say that the studio that shut down wasn't the same studio as this controversy, but another in the "6L" umbrella.
The fact remains that the people there were some of the best I've worked with, and no one I knew wanted to screw anyone over or copy games. If anything, we had to scale back our vision at times. They were mostly engineers/artists/etc just incredibly happy to be getting paid to make original games after trying to 'break in' to the industry for so long. And the many people who played our games & our competitors' - even other game designers - thought that ours were pushing the boundaries of the industry forward.
Do you have a reference for the 150M number? Disclaimer: This would've been over a year ago, and I don't remember specifics. I was an engineer, so my main focus was elsewhere.
1) We had a TON of users across many apps and not just our games (many thousands of apps when you include our user-generated ones).
2) These types of numbers were often "sum(MAU-app1 + MAU-app2 + ... + MAU-appN)". This point was always communicated clearly, but may not have been in the press, or could be a source of confusion? Even if communicated clearly, this may still seem like bloating the numbers: but my understanding is it more accurately represents the amount of impressions one would expect (from say a cross-promo with other games, or ad sales) than if you were to de-dupe them by Facebook ID. In other words, say you have 2 games with 10M MAU each, and 2M users play both: it's preferable to make decisions based on 20M as opposed to 18.
3) All apps' MAU/DAU numbers are public anyway, so there's not much to hide.
Thanks for complementing Ravenwood, btw. I really appreciate that. (I was a pre-alpha engineer)
It's quite stressful when even half the people you know get laid off.
I worked at a startup that began expanding very quickly in early 2008 (i.e., the worst possible time in recent history). When the economy collapsed that summer and they couldn't raise capital, they had to do layoffs.
That in itself isn't really interesting, but the way they carried out the layoffs was... suboptimal. At some point on a Tuesday, they had the HR manager walking around the cubicle areas, tapping people on the shoulder and calling them in for a meeting. After that, they would return to their desk, pack up their stuff, and leave the building forever.
No one really knew what was going on and those of us who hadn't been tapped by this "Angel of Death" were confused and afraid that we would be next on the list. It wasn't until after the herd was culled that management told the rest of us what happened.
I'm no HR expert, but there must have been a better way to do that.
Did management explain that this was surely the only round of lay-offs, and did people manage to stifle their laughter, or keep from rolling their eyes so hard as to snap their optic nerve?
I bet installing a nursery for colicky babies in the now-empty cubicles would have less of an impact on productivity.
I don't quite recall what they told the rest of us, but another 20% of the remaining employees submitted their resignation within a few weeks. Those who stuck it out were given the option to receive payment as stock and take a pay cut.
I think they may have considered your colicky-baby-nursery idea as a way to make up for office space costs, but they eventually settled on renting 33% of the floorspace to another company.
The first startup I worked for called a company meeting and pretty much said everybody was laid off except those who were told beforehand that they weren't. The kicker is, I was a contractor (at that point) and wasn't allowed in the company meetings. I came in the following monday and worked half a day in an empty office before one of the HR people asked me what I was doing.
That actually sounds nice when compared to one company I worked for. They laid off our entire development team via an email. Adding injury to insult, nobody has received their final paycheck.
Thats more common than you think unfortunately - Ive seen that exact scenario happen a couple times. That or calling everyone into a room and telling them they have been laid off.
"How it feels when EVERYONE you know gets laid off"
Perhaps due to my imperfect English, from the title I thought that everyone he knows was laid off, instead of the developers at a former employer he no longer works for.
Everyone I know at Lolapps - the company that moved me out to SF in the first place - and then some. Roughly 100 out of ~114 people. And probably 80% of my friends in the SF bay area. You're right that I did use hyperbole, but it wasn't to deceive, it was to avoid an awkwardly over-specific title.
LOL well you don't know me so perhaps I should expect that you don't believe me. It's pretty obvious it's not /literally/ everyone I know - my parents, for instance, happily retain their jobs on the other side of the country :) I think the intent is pretty clear from the content of the article, but I'm sorry if you felt mislead
In terms of basic development best practices the game industry is easily a decade or two behind the software development industry as a whole. Death marches are commonplace. QA is often neglected. "Write the code, then fix the bugs" is a typical development style. It'll be interesting to see how long it will take to change, or if it does.
I wasn't sure what you meant with the term death march, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I am still not sure what you mean exactly, but I am sure it is not a fitting metaphor.
That explains it. Maybe I am overly sensitive to this, because I am German, but I still think it is not appropriate to compare your own suffering of working hard for a couple of weeks, to that of those who were forced to march into their death during the Holocaust (or other times). That it is a common term does not excuse anything.
That's the way language works. I don't think the term trivializes real death marches any more than saying "I was sent to the gulag" when one means being sent off to do office drudgery diminishes the seriousness of real gulags, or saying "open-plan offices should die" diminishes the seriousness of murder or death, or using a term such as "viral video" diminishes the seriousness of the prevalence of viral infection such as HIV or the problems of cholera in the 3rd world.
You are right. I don't really feel offended anymore. It's just, that this type of thing goes against my upbringing. To give you an idea, if you used this metaphor in Germany it would be way worse than saying "We had to work like niggers".
It's interesting to me to compare those, and claim that "if you used this metaphor [of a 'death march'] in Germany it would be way worse than saying 'We had to work like niggers' [in America]".
(Note: I am neither American nor German, and all my problems are definitely of the first-world variety. I hope to be thoughtful, but I am sure to be ignorant.)
In the one case, millions of people (say 5% of the country?) were terrorized, then kidnapped from their homes, then treated astonishingly badly, and then many of them were murdered. And it happened during a brief period of 5 years or so, 60 years ago. Short duration, but pretty recent.
In the other case, first of all, consider only the so-called Middle Passage. The total number of people involved is roughly comparable (over 10M), and mortality rate was perhaps a little lower, but roughly comparable (millions died). There then followed generations of maltreatment; appalling as the physical treatment is, the long-term cultural impact of generations of forced ignorance is arguably worse. (I think we can all agree that the oppressed people of Germany are doing much better now [65 years after 1945] than were, say, the Americans of African descent in 1930 [that's 65 years after 1865].) The only thing that seems less horrifying about the era of slavery is that it's a little more distant, at least the really brain-wreckingly horrifying parts.
So, in conclusion, it's not at all clear to this outsider why references to "death marches" are "way worse" than references to "niggers". Seems to me like they're pretty comparable.
What I meant was: "If you used this metaphor [of a 'death march'] in Germany it would be way worse than saying 'We had to work like niggers' [in Germany]." The latter would still be very offensive in Germany as well. I honest don't know if it would be "way worse" than saying it in the US, maybe it's about the same category.
I don't really think there is a point in putting up a comparison whose crimes were worse. It's more an emotional response when people get offended than a rational one, anyway. Maybe it's only worth pointing out that genocide is seen a more grave category of crime than other forms of homicide in international law.
A death march project takes months or even years, ruins the health of the workers and takes years off their lives, destroys their marriages and causes them to lose their children, leaves them believing they failed personally rather than being victims of poor leadership, and so forth. Outright literal death is uncommon but not unheard of.
I am not sure if I should respond to this, given that the submission is already long gone from the homepage and this discussion did already go out of hand, but ...
Like OP's title I used a hyperbole to make a point and that should be clear from the context in my opinion. I apologize in case you have fallen a victim to this phenomenon, I did not mean to trivialize this problem either. However, if what you are suggesting is that what you have been though is comparable to the victims of the Holocaust, you should get a reality check.
A friend of mine told me a story about EA and the "lifecycle of a game". People were laid off after the game shipped have become a common occurrence. He said: "it's seasonal".
I used to perceive that a game industry is a place where you only need to know C++ forever and thought for a while that "hey... that's not bad, just C++ instead of Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Maven, XML, XSDL, SOAP, REST, HTML, HTML5, CSS", but then I learned the long hours and suboptimal development practices.
We mostly used Lua as a scene/level description language and for stuff like UI as you can tweak the code and see the updates live without having to rebuild anything.
Plus it's really easy to implement the Lua - C++ interface and Lua is generally a nice, easy language to write in.
You embed the scripting language VM in to the game application and expose some API to it - which is then used to build the game content - things that require customization but aren't performance critical or technical, like triggers/events, ie. what happens when character X enters area Y, when user presses X, where it would be ridiculous to recompile the code just to modify it and you want non programmers to be able to do the customization in a "safe" language - sort of like javascript/DOM allows designers to do some programming while the grunt work and low level details/performance critical parts to the C++/native implementation.
I've also never been paid to make games, so hopefully someone who has can come along and correct me. I've found that Lua is a great fit because the cost of calling from native code to Lua and from Lua to native code is almost zero, because even running big routines of pure Lua is reasonably feasible, and because it's much more expressive than C++.
If you think the gaming industry is bad you should see how it is in the gambling business. Surprise reduncancies happen all the time, for example morning meetings with all scheduled employees where everyone is told to just go home.
When big legislation changes hit it's not uncommon for hundreds of people being fired overnight.
Quite the shock to have the whole studio laid off like that, but I dare say that sort of thing isn't unusual in the games industry at large.
I worked at a big publisher studio for quite some time. They laid off people nearly every year, yet it felt relatively 'safe' compared to the rest of the industry.
Oh....boy. Reminds me of the layoff at a social gaming company at which I used to work... Major layoff, and even though I wasn't affected, still felt sad and depressed to see so many people I worked closely with would be gone.
It's really tricky for the company... I don't think moral ever came back, and there had been continued attrition after the layoff. :(
I don't know the details of the $35M raising, but it's quite unclear on whether the attempt to estimate their cash on hand was remotely accurate. A $35M round might be tranched to hell and back and a company that isn't hitting promised targets may not get all its tranches (experience speaking :-) ).
This is a very good point, and one I didn't address in the post. In fact I may go back and add this.
From my understanding in talking with some of the ex-employees: it doesn't seem to have been the issue in this case. But it's a huge point to consider if you're looking for take-aways for your own startup.
They consistently provided grossly inflated (by an order of magnitude) numbers for their user counts and revenue. I honestly would not be surprised if they had lied to 6Waves in order get a merger in the first place.
They were almost banned from Facebook for selling user data to third parties.
Recently, they were contracted to help publish a game developed by an indie. As publishers, they got to see a game that hadn't yet been released. They stalled the indie shop in publishing the game while rushing to create a blatant clone. They then ditched the indie shop and released their own clone.