8 ms·

Gaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. T

Gaming abounds with stories like this. A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor. Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth. As a result the top programmers, designers, etc, grouped up and negotiated a deal to become a 2nd party dev studio with a competing publisher. Nearly the entire company left with them. They couldn't take the IP with them so they rebranded their new game franchise as Call of Duty. That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

rvanlaar 4y ago
What an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started. Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up. Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2] This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games Edit 2: Spelling
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Yes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in fact check out. Which is because I lived it. My friend tried to get me to join the team for 2 years because he knew they were onto something, but I'd fled a childhood in Kansas to build a life on the west coast and wasn't looking to move back to Tulsa of all places. That proved to be a bad career decision but I'm ok with it as a life decision. Can you have some self awareness of how annoying it is for you to adopt this skeptical fact checker tone when you have so little familiarity with the events and people involved you don't even really understand what to google for and which wikipedia articles to read? Edit: I'm annoyed because if you tell someone their story doesn't check out, calling me a lair in this case as the story is direct personal experience, you probably need more of a basis for that claim than googling a wikipedia article about a story you'd never heard of 5 minutes ago.
  - HFguy 4y ago
    "...calling me a lair..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg Sorry, found the typo funny. Not trying to antagonize anyone this morning.
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    HN is the only place on the web that I know of where someone will tell you--someone who has experience in X, Y or Z--that you are wrong, or "sealion" you, or better yet, attempt to correct you with their armchair experience. Then, you'll be reprimanded for pointing it out, asking you to "not do that here." I wish moderation would curtail this obnoxious behavior, because I see HN as a place where experts can detail their experience, and over the years I see more and more amateur butt in or sealioning behavior take place, and people I know have left over it.
  - throwaway24424 4y ago
    You didn't really provide that much detail, how are you expecting someone to understand what to Google? If your suggestion is for people to not question, or be curious at all then I think you're in the wrong place...?
    - derangedHorse 4y ago
      I don't think they were annoyed by the follow-up, they were annoyed by being softly accused of an inaccurate story and not being given the benefit of the doubt. Removing the "I don't think the story adds up." and changing the period of "This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'." to a question mark would've have helped make it less accusatory. In my opinion the original story was a bit misleading though, reading as if the small game company's novel IP was the original Medal of Honor, so I do think the follow-up was warranted: "They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor." I also think the response to the questioning was a lot more hostile than it needed to be but ultimately that there was rudeness on both sides
  - ClassyJacket 4y ago
- astura 4y ago
  If you go to the souce on the Wikipedia page, it tells a slightly different story than what the OP said - https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-honor-killer-a-call-of-duty-story/ https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-... >Yet 2015 would never get the chance to make another Medal of Honor. EA decided to take all development for the franchise in-house. Morale was low amongst the team and they were looking to start up on its own. >We had bonded as a team, but decided we wanted to work with new management. Many members of the team were actually going to leave to find new jobs, regardless of potential royalties coming in from Medal of Honor. >After leaving 2015 we were working with a major publisher. For legal reasons I will say things didn’t go as planned with it. We were left in a situation of unpaid milestones that were delivered and no finances to operate on,” says Thomas. >The company was potentially going to disband. In a last ditch effort our then president, Grant Collier sent out a signal to all the major publishers in the industry letting them know that the majority of the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault team was available. Within days of closing the doors on the studio, Activision responded immediately with an offer.”
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm giving a simplified version, and also avoiding disclosing some details that might blow back on my friend. It was considerably more nasty than that article portrays via the quotes.
    - astura 4y ago
      Except you basically said "they quit solely because of money" and the article basically says "it wasn't at all about the money." Those are very different things. One isn't a "simplified" version of the other.
      - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
        The money was definitely the root issue. I can't say more without sharing things that could blow back on a friend. Either you believe me or you don't.
  - 4y ago
throwawy0932832 4y ago
I suppose that explains why they felt so eerily similar and shared same engine.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
Funny thing is that the owners did the same thing a second time, going back to the EA, forming Respawn Environment.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  yeeeeeeuuuup :P
barrysteve 4y ago
I agree with your message though there's a scarier story in there. What if those people never left to make Call of Duty? Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products. Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Indeed. It's very similar with tech startups. Once you've been around the washing machine loop a couple times you realize just how much of this stuff is arbitrary and luck dependent. Unicorns born upon butterfly's wings. Having a certain background lets you buy more chances at the luck part. It's not fair. It is. Personally my read on this is we should have some humility about how unpredictable this all is.
- Double_a_92 4y ago
  > Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series! The good timeline xD
reaperducer 4y ago
If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. Quotation of the month. Devs should have this knitted into a pillow in their cubicles.
jollybean 4y ago
Yeah this story has a problem. An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality. It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working. Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails. It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'. Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy. Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity. It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided. I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward. Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team. [1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-honor-killer-a-call-of-duty-story/ https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-... FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again. I would reserve judgment on these situations. Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.
- dawnbreez 4y ago
  I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game. The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.
RuggedPineapple 4y ago
Black Isle is another great example. Interplay was going under and selling off any IP of value to get some cash out of the end of the road. The staff, seeing the writing on the wall, quit more or less en masse and started Obsidian together. The name is even a bit of a pun- Obsidian, a black volcanic glass, is what you might expect a Black Isle to be made from.
joyfylbanana 4y ago
> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. That wisdom applies to that specific industry. In gaming, the people you hire are the asset. However the same doesn't apply to all industries. Sometimes people are more and sometimes less replaceable. If you are running a fast food chain and manage to piss all your employees, yes, it is likely a problem, but if you hire new people and fix your behaviour it is likely that the business will continue to run as usual.
- golergka 4y ago
  If that's true (your statement, not mine), this just means that compensation fast fast-food employees get is completely fair.
  - relbeek2 4y ago
    Not at all. It just means that there is a larger pool of employees qualified to work in fast food. Sometimes people are simply forced to take jobs that are not adequately compensated.
  - dawnbreez 4y ago
    "The workers are easily replaced" and "Their compensation is fair" are two different statements.
    - golergka 4y ago
      It's exactly the same statement. Fair cost of something IS the opportunity cost of buying the same thing from someone else.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Well, it depends on your definition of "fair". You're going by the market definition -- but the market definition of "fair" is often quite unfair by other definitions.
TuringNYC 4y ago
>> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen: - give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines - give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested - stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only - give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big - give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company - give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre
- randombits0 4y ago
  When I had a job with similar “incentives”, my comment to coworkers was that it wasn’t quite a carrot-on-a-stick, it was the promise of a picture of a carrot-on-a-stick.
- drewm1980 4y ago
  Thank you for the term "Equity Theatre"!

rvanlaar 4y ago

What an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started. Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up. Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2] This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games Edit 2: Spelling

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
Yes, I'm talking about 2015. The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes. The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper. The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise. So yes, my story does in fact check out. Which is because I lived it. My friend tried to get me to join the team for 2 years because he knew they were onto something, but I'd fled a childhood in Kansas to build a life on the west coast and wasn't looking to move back to Tulsa of all places. That proved to be a bad career decision but I'm ok with it as a life decision. Can you have some self awareness of how annoying it is for you to adopt this skeptical fact checker tone when you have so little familiarity with the events and people involved you don't even really understand what to google for and which wikipedia articles to read? Edit: I'm annoyed because if you tell someone their story doesn't check out, calling me a lair in this case as the story is direct personal experience, you probably need more of a basis for that claim than googling a wikipedia article about a story you'd never heard of 5 minutes ago.
- HFguy 4y ago
  "...calling me a lair..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg Sorry, found the typo funny. Not trying to antagonize anyone this morning.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  HN is the only place on the web that I know of where someone will tell you--someone who has experience in X, Y or Z--that you are wrong, or "sealion" you, or better yet, attempt to correct you with their armchair experience. Then, you'll be reprimanded for pointing it out, asking you to "not do that here." I wish moderation would curtail this obnoxious behavior, because I see HN as a place where experts can detail their experience, and over the years I see more and more amateur butt in or sealioning behavior take place, and people I know have left over it.
- throwaway24424 4y ago
  You didn't really provide that much detail, how are you expecting someone to understand what to Google? If your suggestion is for people to not question, or be curious at all then I think you're in the wrong place...?
  - derangedHorse 4y ago
    I don't think they were annoyed by the follow-up, they were annoyed by being softly accused of an inaccurate story and not being given the benefit of the doubt. Removing the "I don't think the story adds up." and changing the period of "This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'." to a question mark would've have helped make it less accusatory. In my opinion the original story was a bit misleading though, reading as if the small game company's novel IP was the original Medal of Honor, so I do think the follow-up was warranted: "They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor." I also think the response to the questioning was a lot more hostile than it needed to be but ultimately that there was rudeness on both sides
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
astura 4y ago
If you go to the souce on the Wikipedia page, it tells a slightly different story than what the OP said - https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-honor-killer-a-call-of-duty-story/ https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-... >Yet 2015 would never get the chance to make another Medal of Honor. EA decided to take all development for the franchise in-house. Morale was low amongst the team and they were looking to start up on its own. >We had bonded as a team, but decided we wanted to work with new management. Many members of the team were actually going to leave to find new jobs, regardless of potential royalties coming in from Medal of Honor. >After leaving 2015 we were working with a major publisher. For legal reasons I will say things didn’t go as planned with it. We were left in a situation of unpaid milestones that were delivered and no finances to operate on,” says Thomas. >The company was potentially going to disband. In a last ditch effort our then president, Grant Collier sent out a signal to all the major publishers in the industry letting them know that the majority of the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault team was available. Within days of closing the doors on the studio, Activision responded immediately with an offer.”
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm giving a simplified version, and also avoiding disclosing some details that might blow back on my friend. It was considerably more nasty than that article portrays via the quotes.
  - astura 4y ago
    Except you basically said "they quit solely because of money" and the article basically says "it wasn't at all about the money." Those are very different things. One isn't a "simplified" version of the other.
    - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      The money was definitely the root issue. I can't say more without sharing things that could blow back on a friend. Either you believe me or you don't.
- 4y ago

throwawy0932832 4y ago

I suppose that explains why they felt so eerily similar and shared same engine.

KptMarchewa 4y ago

Funny thing is that the owners did the same thing a second time, going back to the EA, forming Respawn Environment.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
yeeeeeeuuuup :P

barrysteve 4y ago

I agree with your message though there's a scarier story in there. What if those people never left to make Call of Duty? Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products. Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
Indeed. It's very similar with tech startups. Once you've been around the washing machine loop a couple times you realize just how much of this stuff is arbitrary and luck dependent. Unicorns born upon butterfly's wings. Having a certain background lets you buy more chances at the luck part. It's not fair. It is. Personally my read on this is we should have some humility about how unpredictable this all is.
Double_a_92 4y ago
> Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series! The good timeline xD

reaperducer 4y ago

If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. Quotation of the month. Devs should have this knitted into a pillow in their cubicles.

jollybean 4y ago

Yeah this story has a problem. An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality. It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working. Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails. It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'. Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy. Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity. It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided. I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward. Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team. [1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-honor-killer-a-call-of-duty-story/ https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-... FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again. I would reserve judgment on these situations. Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.

dawnbreez 4y ago
I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game. The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.

RuggedPineapple 4y ago

Black Isle is another great example. Interplay was going under and selling off any IP of value to get some cash out of the end of the road. The staff, seeing the writing on the wall, quit more or less en masse and started Obsidian together. The name is even a bit of a pun- Obsidian, a black volcanic glass, is what you might expect a Black Isle to be made from.

joyfylbanana 4y ago

> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. That wisdom applies to that specific industry. In gaming, the people you hire are the asset. However the same doesn't apply to all industries. Sometimes people are more and sometimes less replaceable. If you are running a fast food chain and manage to piss all your employees, yes, it is likely a problem, but if you hire new people and fix your behaviour it is likely that the business will continue to run as usual.

golergka 4y ago
If that's true (your statement, not mine), this just means that compensation fast fast-food employees get is completely fair.
- relbeek2 4y ago
  Not at all. It just means that there is a larger pool of employees qualified to work in fast food. Sometimes people are simply forced to take jobs that are not adequately compensated.
- dawnbreez 4y ago
  "The workers are easily replaced" and "Their compensation is fair" are two different statements.
  - golergka 4y ago
    It's exactly the same statement. Fair cost of something IS the opportunity cost of buying the same thing from someone else.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Well, it depends on your definition of "fair". You're going by the market definition -- but the market definition of "fair" is often quite unfair by other definitions.

TuringNYC 4y ago

>> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want. What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen: - give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines - give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested - stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only - give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big - give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company - give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre

randombits0 4y ago
When I had a job with similar “incentives”, my comment to coworkers was that it wasn’t quite a carrot-on-a-stick, it was the promise of a picture of a carrot-on-a-stick.
drewm1980 4y ago
Thank you for the term "Equity Theatre"!