Former Employees Rally Against Wildstar Dev for Horrible Management

Two weeks ago, you may recall I reported on a series of layoffs happening within Carbine Studio, the developer within NC Soft who was responsible for the production and launch of the space shooter MMORGP Wildstar.  A grand total of sixty employees were let go, which was sad but not unprecedented.  While such a large number of employees was certainly noteworthy, it’s very common for studios to have a layoff or two after their game is launched.

Because of this, a lot of employees in the gaming world use websites such as Glassdoor.com to both find new jobs and rate old ones—as a warning for any potential employees who might be interested in taking their old jobs.  But here’s what’s interesting: following the layoffs, a series of new reviews for Carbine Studio have popped up on glass door, submitted anonymously by both current and former employees… and the reviews are universally poor.

The #1 critique was the poor management, which people called “Astonishing Inept”, “Terrible and prone to making bad decisions”, “expected unreasonable results”, and when they discovered the poor reviews on Glassdoor, they actually tried to talk Glassdoor into taking those reviews down instead of, say, fixing the actual problems people were complaining about.  

Other issues sited with the company was its low wages, the employees were too cliquish, they were unable to live up to promises, and that it’s quite the boys club.  Many of the posts from current employees note that “all the talent” was fired from the company, leaving behind only some core staff and the management.

Interesting notes, to be sure.  It reminds me of Team Bondi, in some respects—there was a bit of a kerfuffle with that studio around 2011 over the way they abused their staff during the production of L.A Noire.   They were shut down soon after the release of their game thanks to that mess...

Hopefully, Carbine Studios can change its ways before it suffers a similar fate.