So what does it all mean? Clearly Take-Two has suffered along with other publishers during the console transition, but things have been made significantly worse by the controversy generated by Rockstar Games. Are Rockstar employees caving in under the pressure? Industry sources, who wished to remain anonymous, have indicated to GameDaily BIZ that a number of Rockstar employees have either fled the company or have been outright dismissed.
We've obtained a list of people that left Rockstar within the last 6-12 months:
Jamie King (VP of Development)
Jennifer Gross (Director of Marketing)
Laura Paterson (Director of Marketing)
Navid Khonsari (Director of Development)
Jeff Castaneda (Director of PR)
Chris Carro (Sr. Pr Manager)
Corey Wade (Sr. Product Mgr)
Futaba Hayashi (Sr. Web Designer)
Todd Zuniga (PR Manager)
Ryan Rayhill (PR)
This list may not be entirely comprehensive either, but is it merely a coincidence that these people have left when there's been so much turmoil at Rockstar and Take-Two? Certainly, when Jamie King (a Rockstar co-founder), two different directors of marketing, and others all leave within the same period that the parent company's stock is in a freefall, it smells fishy. One of our sources even heard that Rockstar may have fired some employees because they were not pleased with certain review scores for Table Tennis, even though the Xbox 360 title has garnered an average of 83% on GameRankings.com. So there would seem to be some internal discord at Rockstar as well.
Whether or not there is really an employee exodus is hard to say since we're not privy to everything that goes on at the company. It could be viewed as employees jumping off a "sinking ship," but it's also possible that much of this stems from cost cutting measures in a tough year. Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who follows Take-Two's stock closely, believes it's the latter.
"Part of this is actually good, because if it shows you that they're getting more financial discipline by eliminating redundant positions... To me marketing should be more central and not pushed out to the individual studio. You want an overall marketing strategy to brand all Rockstar product... so maybe this is just better discipline," Pachter suggested.
"None of this sounds really bad, but if they're losing key developers then that matters," he continued. "My guess is this is cost cutting; I don't think these people left because they're unhappy. I think they left more likely than not because the company is saying, 'Hey, we don't need to pay all you guys to do all these redundant functions.' One of my biggest complaints about the company was that their costs were not in alignment with their revenues and therefore they were losing money. And I think that they spend too much money and I think it's entirely appropriate for them to lower the amount of spending, and one way to do so is to eliminate positions... I'm comfortable that directionally you want to see people leave and you want to see less crucial, critical people leave and anybody in marketing and PR sounds less critical to me. Take-Two needs to make sure that they keep the creative people that are responsible for their successes."
