Archive for November, 2008

1. Cyan Worlds lays off 50 staff, reduced to skeleton crew

   November 12, 2008

   Cyan Worlds has made nearly all of its staff redundant, with 50 people laid off. Cyan World’s primary client, Gamecock, was recently acquired by SouthPeak Interactive. CEO Tony Fryman is quoted as saying that he was uncertain that the company would be able to renew their testing contract with SouthPeak. 50 jobs added to the Job [...]

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   Posted in: Game Over Zone

   Tagged with: cyan worlds, job loss tracker, layoffs, redundancies

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2. Brash Entertainment struggles, lays of 20 staff

   November 7, 2008

   Brash Entertainment has made 20 employees redundant. The company raised $400 million to make games based on movies, but its first titles – Alvin and the Chipmunks, Jumper, Space Chimps – all flopped. Twenty staff have been laid off, and Variety believes this may be the tip of the iceberg. Added to the Job Loss [...]

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   Posted in: Game Over Zone

   Tagged with: brash entertainment, job loss tracker, layoffs, redundancies

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3. Fallout 3 ships 4.7 million units

   November 6, 2008

   This blog is frequently a cheerleader for the new model of gaming: browser-based, distributed on the web, living in the cloud, monetized by advertising, subscriptions and micro-payments. But sometimes it’s worth shouting about the old school of games, particularly when they are being phenomenally successful.

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   Posted in: Sales

   Tagged with: bethesda, boxed games, fallout, m&a

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4. Review of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

   November 6, 2008

   The Black Swan – The Impact of the Highly Improbable Could there be a better time to read The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s enjoyable discourse on probability and humanity’s blindness to it? It’s a book that teaches you how to avoid – or even better, to profit from – once-in-a-generation events. Like the credit [...]

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   Posted in: Resources

   Tagged with: books, probability, reviews, starred, taleb

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5. THQ restructures, cuts 250 jobs

   November 5, 2008

   THQ has today announced a restructuring plan that will lead to the loss of 250 jobs. The bulk of the redundancies will occur in product development. Added to the GameOverZone.

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   Posted in: Game Over Zone

   Tagged with: job loss tracker, redundancies, restructuring, thq

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6. Wild Tangent cuts 20 staff, Alex St John steps down as CEO

   November 3, 2008

   Wild Tangent is shutting its internal development studio, with the loss of 2o jobs. CEO and Founder Alex St John is also stepping aside. Mike Peronto will become CEO leaving St John as chairman and evangelist for the online games service. Added to the Job Loss Tracker.

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   Posted in: Game Over Zone

   Tagged with: job loss tracker, redundancies, wild tangent

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7. Facebook spends more on electricity than on bandwidth

   November 3, 2008

   A TechCrunch article on Friday talks about Facebook’s need to seek new capital, together with an estimated breakdown of costs. Bandwidth: $500,000 per month Electricity: $1 million per month Storage: $4 million + per month, simply in new servers. I know that Facebook isn’t the most bandwidth intensive business, but that its electricity bill is [...]

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   Posted in: Sandbox

   Tagged with: costs, electricity, facebook, hardware, starred

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