Gas Powered Games lays off most staff

[soldant]

It looks like people haven't been entirely unreceptive to the idea of trying to save the company/project/laid-off employees with this Kickstarter

That does raise the question of "Should they be saved?"

Yes it's terrible for the employees, but GPG has proven to be fairly inept at management with this stunt, and so far they haven't really produced anything decent in recent times. I don't know if we should be saving a company which shows no indication of churning out a decent product just to save jobs which might be wasted anyway.

[internetonsetadd]

I think that's a question everyone gets to answer for themselves.

Last time I checked Glassdoor, I saw a common theme amongst the reviews of Obsidian, summarized well by this: "Obsidian's reliance on publisher funding dampens the potential of all their talented employees, and makes it feels like they are one cancelled project away from utter collapse." I suspect that's true for a lot of independent studios that rely so heavily on their relationships with publishers. MS halted AOEO development, which no doubt sucked for GPG. Whatever went down there, it was probably pretty damaging for a relatively small developer.

I'm not interested in going into punishment mode here, and I think any notion of whether or not GPG deserves to be saved falls under that domain. So I'm left with only egocentric concerns: do I want to play Wildman, and do I believe the studio can deliver the game as they've described it using the money they say they need, considering the layoffs and the murkiness with which Taylor launched a Kickstarter with a pertinent detail held back. Respectively, the answers are maybe and probably not.

If I wanted to get into the question of whether GPG should be saved, I might look at Taylor's history and GPG's perfect rating on Glassdoor and say yes, but I don't do games or Kickstarter for anything other than my own personal benefit. If the answer to my question about my wanting to play Wildman was definitely, I'd be more inclined to take a risk on it, but I'm not absolutely sold and I'm not sure they'll have the resources to convince me over the next 26 days, so it's probably moot.