All employees of Annapurna Interactive (Stray, Outer Wilds) resign en masse
All employees of Annapurna Interactive (Stray, Outer Wilds) resign en masse
Annapurna Interactive's 24 employees and president have resigned following a disagreement with the company's owner.
Apparently, these employees, in addition to the president, wanted to somehow separate from the parent company and have the video game publishing arm of Annapurna, which was still part of the company, operate independently. Ellison rejected this proposal outright, leading to the mass resignation of all Annapurna Interactive employees.
Workers said, "Yeah we don't want you to be our boss." And Ellison was like no. And they said, "This wasn't a discussion bye."
Gotta love it.
151Oh hey, the owner of the publisher is an Ellison! What a fun fact! Megan Ellison is Larry Ellison's daughter. For those not in the know, Larry Ellison is the owner of Oracle. He and his company are profoundly interesting in the way a tornado's effect on a wooden shack full of sheep is interesting. This section of a talk from a former Oracle employee does a great job of explaining why we should not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. It's hilarious and I highly recommend checking it out.
All of this is to say that his children might be a bit like him. Children aren't doomed to be like their parents, but they certainly can be like their parents.
EDIT: that talk is only of passing relevancy, but it's really funny and I can't pass up a chance to share it with people who may not have seen it.
72Remember, if it wasn't for Larry Ellison, LibreOffice wouldn't exist. I remember reading about those shenanigans while they were happening and desperately hoping a fork would appear soon. I wasn't disappointed.
10lol Bryan Cantrill isn't just some random "former Oracle employee".
1Very true! I was just in a rush and didn't want to explain who he was.
For others, Bryan Cantrill (the guy in the video) is an incredibly gifted engineer who worked for Sun Microsystems before they got bought out by Oracle. He was deeply involved in Solaris (Sun's really cool operating system that included pioneering shit like ZFS), and was then involved with Illumos, which was a fork of Solaris. He worked for a company called Joyent that made a super fucking cool thing called SmartOS, and now he's the CTO for a company called Oxide Computer.
This is a hideously bad summary of his accomplishments. People who want to know more should read his Wikipedia article or watch the talk I posted. He's a great presenter, so his talks are always pretty entertaining.
EDIT: The shit they're doing at Oxide is absolutely nuts. They're making what is effectively a datacenter contained within one 48u rack, and they're writing all their own firmware and BIOS and shit for it. It's crazy cool.
1
Thank you for this. I just stumbled here from all, and I know nothing about gaming or any other context, except for news stories about blizzard, for example. When I read the name, my first thought was wondering if they’re cool with a woman as a boss (I’m not trying to be shitty, just with the blizzard fiasco, that’s where my mind went). I’m really glad I’m not leaving this story with that assumption in place
3Thanks for this. I enjoyed the discussion. I still managed Solaris up until a couple years ago. I could still login if I cared to, but others manage the mothballed environment now. I was super mad how Oracle killed them. Still mad as I think on it.
4Didn’t he once publicly say that he’s bigger than Jesus?
2When he bought that Hawaiian island he sent out an email to literally all employees bragging about it. From then on I had an email rule sending anything from him to trash
2
Worth noting, it is a publisher, not a developer. They fund and publish games from a litany of studios and probably own a lot of the IPs, and this leaves their partner studios in a precarious position, but as of yet, no studio has shuttered because of this.
54What a big-balled move.
26We’re committed to not only our existing slate of games but also expanding our presence in the interactive space as we continue to look for opportunities to take a more integrated approach to linear and interactive storytelling across film and TV, gaming, and theatre.
Annapurna's no slouch when it comes to TV/Film publishing, but if I had to speculate, I'd say there was probably some friction between the film and game sides of things as far as goals and culture go. It's possible that the film side management was being a little too controlling of Interactive with all the Alan Wake and Control IP plans, leading to the request to split.
Annapurna Interactive has published some real bangers, especially when it comes to truly small team indie devs. If they do reform as a new company, hopefully they can pick up that legacy and bring more stuff to market.
Anyway, that's all to say.... go play Outer Wilds.
21I'm jealous of people who haven't played Outer Wilds yet because they can still experience it for the first time.
14Played it for the first time three months ago. It was a blast!
1
Well there goes the chance for a Stray 2. Despite all the criticism, I really liked that game.
11Why? The devs can just go with another publisher. Or does Annapurna own the IP?
5Darn it, we'll never know if the cat gets reunited! It was a fun and unique, if too short, game.
4If you notice carefully towards the end, the cat sniffed the air and went right. It sniffing means he got the location of his pals. So the community position on this is that he found his friends. 🥰
5