Clint Hocking Leaves Amazon Game Studios

The New York Times recently did an expose on the working conditions inside the white-collar workspace of Amazon, discussing how people are marginalized, pushed to their brink, and forced to compromise everything from a personal life to personal hygiene to get the job done. Which sucks, because it shows unless you’re sitting at the executive board there’s pretty much no way to have a good time working at Amazon.

And normally, that’s not the kinda thing you’d see reported on a gaming website: but then, if you recall, it was a year ago when Amazon started scooping up talent from around the gaming world… and it was earlier this year when they announced they were opening a game development branch. So, it stands to reason, the same cutthroat back-breaking conditions only Masahiro Sakurai would be comfortable working in would also exist in their game development branch, right?

Honestly, we don’t know. But we do know one of the talented men Amazon had grabbed a year ago, Clint Hocking, Creative Director of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, has recently resigned from his post within Amazon for unspecified reasons. Now, Hocking is an old vet of the industry, having worked at Valve, Ubisoft, and even LucasArts before hopping onto the Amazon train—so he has the acclaim to get a job just about anywhere he wants, we don’t have to worry about him not being able to find work.

But we do have to wonder what this means for Amazon… and what it means ABOUT Amazon. It’s very unlikely he’ll ever be specific about what made him quit, or even hint at it (since that’s the kind of thing people sign NDA for) which is why I brought up the work conditions thing, which seems like a likely enough explanation. But the real answer may elude us forever...