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Capcom Vancouver lays off 7% of staff, but is apparently still hiring

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Damn, that sucks big time. Wish them all the best. Hopefully thry land on their feet quickly.
 

Guesong

Member
I dont think this has any incidence on DR3 at the moment according to people I know.

But who knows. Ill keep an ear out.
 
so far this year how many jobs have been lost in Vancouver? i remember everyone heading over to Canada because of the low costs..
 
Is this Twitter legit? It's not verified, so I'm wondering.

YqS2H.png


well, of course I'm beaten, this is GAF
 

Ridley327

Member
How did dead rising 2-2 frank edition do? Can't imagine that it did all that well.

I can't imagine it did all that great either, but the game is literally Dead Rising 2 with a new area and new cutscenes. Unless TJ Rotolo has some kind of crazy back-end deal to play Frank, I can't imagine it was an expensive game to make in the slightest.
 
Are the people they laid off doing the same jobs as the ones they're hiring for?
I only said it makes no sense because they say "we're still growing and aggressively seeking great talent." 7% is a decent number of people I find it strange that none of them could be considered "great talent" for their "growing" studio.
 

soultron

Banned
Depends what roles were cut, really.

Most forward corporate twitter I've heard of in years though, even a direct neogaf shoutout!

Makes sense since they're still aiming to acquire more talent.

I'm wondering if a project was killed in its early stages and some people attached were let go as a result. Who knows.

Still, hopeful for those who got hit. Hope you guys land upright!
 

duckroll

Member
I only said it makes no sense because they say "we're still growing and aggressively seeking great talent." 7% is a decent number of people I find it strange that none of them could be considered "great talent" for their "growing" studio.

That's because whoever wrote that is a dick.
 

Kusagari

Member
I've been wondering what's up with them.

No Dead Rising 3 still, especially with all the rumors the past couple months, isn't a good sign.
 
I only said it makes no sense because they say "we're still growing and aggressively seeking great talent." 7% is a decent number of people I find it strange that none of them could be considered "great talent" for their "growing" studio.

Eh, sometimes you might have too many people in a given role and need to add more to another role so you remove the redundant elements and add to your understaffed elements.
 

Zarx

Member
So you layoff 7% of your staff only to say that you're hiring? That makes no sense.

Something changed in the design/scope of the project, so they need a different skill set but the budget is already tight so you let go some of the staff to make room for the new people.

If Wikipedia is to be believed the studio has 170 employees, so 7% is ~12 people.

Edit: Beaten lol
 
Best career choice that I ever made was passing up a games industry job four years ago after I passed the hiring interview to stay at my non-games programming job. From what I see with all my game industry friends here in Seattle the best that you can hope for is a good job with a solid company where you have some job security but still work a metric ton of hours.

I'm not saying that it's not right for everyone, but I can totally say that I don't care enough about making games to personally make the sacrifices that I see pretty much everyone in the industry making. Add on to that the continual thread of firings at all but the best studios and it just doesn't add up.
 
Bigger budgets for bigger projects aren't always a good thing. Next gen will continue this trend. Next gen should focus on AI and gameplay. Let the industry catch up on properly managing/budgetting in the HD era.
 
I only said it makes no sense because they say "we're still growing and aggressively seeking great talent." 7% is a decent number of people I find it strange that none of them could be considered "great talent" for their "growing" studio.

Other companies have done this as well. Maybe they don't want the current people at current salaries, will ask people to back at another time at lower money. Excuse to fire people. Other stuffs. Could be alot of things.

I think a bad tweet that was though overall.
 

soultron

Banned
Eh, sometimes you might have too many people in a given role and need to add more to another role so you remove the redundant elements and add to your understaffed elements.

Sometimes if you're aiming to have something very specific in your game, you hire people who've worked on that sort of project in the past or you'd outsource that section of your game to another one of your studios that has more experience than you.

Say, for instance, they want a Street Fighter parody section in DR3. They might outsource that to a studio within the CAPCOM umbrella that has experience doing that. Or they might hire guys who worked on fighting game-related stuff in the past.

I know this is a ridiculous example, but I hope you catch my drift.

If it comes to that section getting cut, those people might get let go or reassigned internally.

Of course this is a very specific situation that is only one of many things that could've happened.
 
Most likely a department/group got dumped. Sad for them; theres a chance they just became disposable and it wasn't much fault of there own :(

That or there was something dodgy going on and they were doing something they shouldn't have within their contracts...


Basically - gaf don't know :(
But gaf always knows...

Still it remains running...woot!
 

Jac_Solar

Member
Wow, Capcom Vancouver has 170 people?! I wonder how many gaming developers/employees Capcom has in total.

And still no open asset/content bank ? Or do major companies have something like that?

An open ended engine with physics/most advanced audio/graphic features (Constantly getting updated cause of the way it was designed) that can easily transfer content between 2D/3D/Audio/general graphic software, along with an open asset 'bank' with basic/advanced models/worlds/content in general (Shared by other companies who made a game -- and in this case, other companies wouldn't simply rip off all the models/audio/content of a game and call it their own. :p), + tips, tricks or guides listed and easy to find by other developers or whatever, shaders, new graphic tricks, graphic libraries, procedural animation/texture/models libraries and so forth (Everything involved in a game production.) would make game development a lot easier, no?

If it was that simple to set up a world with animated NPC's, easy to add voiceovers/models/textures/lighting/animation/physics, easy to modify (If they set it up with shared and used assets, then they could start editing them to fit the world after they had properly set it up -- as opposed to the standard cycle of idea>fleshed out concept>drawing board>rough 3D>concept>decent 3D>concept>modelled 3D>concept>textured & modelled>concept>fully featured 3D world.) then it would be easier to transfer the ideas of the talented artists/developers to gameform.

Then, if smaller companies also got access to this bank, then they could make games much faster and easier.

But obviously it would probably be the most expensive project in gaming history to get such an engine up and running
 

Ridley327

Member
Wow, Capcom Vancouver has 170 people?! I wonder how many gaming developers/employees Capcom has in total.

And still no open asset/content bank ? Or do major companies have something like that?

An open ended engine with physics/most advanced audio/graphic features (Constantly getting updated cause of the way it was designed) that can easily transfer content between 2D/3D/Audio/general graphic software, along with an open asset 'bank' with basic/advanced models/worlds/content in general (Shared by other companies who made a game -- and in this case, other companies wouldn't simply rip off all the models/audio/content of a game and call it their own. :p), + tips, tricks or guides listed and easy to find by other developers or whatever, shaders, new graphic tricks, graphic libraries procedural animation/texture/models libraries and so forth (Everything involved in a game production.) would make game development a lot easier, no?

If it was that simple to set up a world with animated NPC's, easy to add voiceovers/models/textures/lighting/animation/physics, easy to modify (If they set it up with shared and used assets, then they could start editing them to fit the world after they had properly set it up -- as opposed to the standard cycle of idea>fleshed out concept>drawing board>rough 3D>decent 3D>modelled 3D>textured & modelled > fully featured 3D world.) then it would be easier to transfer the ideas of the talented artists/developers to gameform.

Then, if smaller companies also got access to this bank, then they could make games much faster and easier.

But obviously it would probably be the most expensive project in gaming history to get such an engine up and running

As you might know, Capcom's MT Framework engine is shared between all of their internal Japanese studios. The problem, as far as I understand it, is that there is no English documentation for the engine, so Capcom Vancouver can't really make use of it.
 

Jac_Solar

Member
As you might know, Capcom's MT Framework engine is shared between all of their internal Japanese studios. The problem, as far as I understand it, is that there is no English documentation for the engine, so Capcom Vancouver can't really make use of it.

I think I've heard something like that -- isn't EA also doing a similar thing with Frostbite 2?

In any case, have any of them employed a shared database of game content, tips, etc like I mentioned? Or is it strictly engine?

Video game development seems to be extremely convoluted and drawn out. I'd guess that it's somewhat caused by the company structure, and how the physical process of artist creating model > need textures, or voice, or a scene, or animations > could probably easily take up a whole days work, or a lot more. And since every person in a 150 person development team deals with something similar to that instance, then I think I would understand why some video games have a 2 year development + production process
 
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