Friday, October 13, 2006

Big Fish Goes Great White

I mentioned Big Fish Games earlier this year because of the Mystery Case Files games, which were very fun. And it sounded like a cool story--little company, fun games, carving out its own niche.

Then I saw this yesterday:
Add Big Fish Games to the list of Seattle area technology companies cutting staff this month.

The 4-year-old distributor of casual games laid off an undisclosed number of employees Tuesday as part of restructuring that Chief Executive Paul Thelen classified as "an opportunity based initiative of our company." At the same time, he said that the company is healthy and hiring, with 20 open positions.

Seriously, WTF does "opportunity based initiative" really mean? Can any CEO today just come out and say "we fired some people?"

That's not why I'm making the post, though. What's really interesting are the comments attached at the end of the article--there are a ton of them, and there is some very, very bad blood about how this was handled (badly, by the looks of it). And the fury of the comments makes the whole thread very interesting, as well as the attempts by people who are clearly representatives of the company to defuse the whole thing. On a public blog.

It's quite a story, quite a pissing contest in public, and you can read it here.

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