[jasonwatkinspdx]

Gaming abounds with stories like this.

A friend of mine went to work for a small game studio in Oklahoma that'd gotten some acclaim for their quake mod pack. They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor.

Some time down the road, the owner of the studio didn't want to share the wealth.

As a result the top programmers, designers, etc, grouped up and negotiated a deal to become a 2nd party dev studio with a competing publisher. Nearly the entire company left with them. They couldn't take the IP with them so they rebranded their new game franchise as Call of Duty.

That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

[TuringNYC]

>> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

What prevented them from offering bad deals that are common today? Some examples I've seen:

- give lots of equity, but vesting over long timelines

- give no refreshers, if people leave, they lost lots of unvested

- stay private for a long time...equity is almost unsellable and theoretical only

- give lots of equity, but lag on salary and save big

- give lots of equity, but leave people with huge unfunded tax liabilities if they want to leave company

- give "lots" of equity which is worthless if people actually saw the cap table

I dont feel any of the above are good practices, but they are common practices for equity theatre

[randombits0]

When I had a job with similar “incentives”, my comment to coworkers was that it wasn’t quite a carrot-on-a-stick, it was the promise of a picture of a carrot-on-a-stick.

[drewm1980]

Thank you for the term "Equity Theatre"!

[joyfylbanana]

> That studio owner literally made a billion dollar mistake by not simply being fair early on to the team. Never, ever, treat a team that has achieved rare success as replaceable cogs. If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

That wisdom applies to that specific industry. In gaming, the people you hire are the asset. However the same doesn't apply to all industries. Sometimes people are more and sometimes less replaceable. If you are running a fast food chain and manage to piss all your employees, yes, it is likely a problem, but if you hire new people and fix your behaviour it is likely that the business will continue to run as usual.

[golergka]

If that's true (your statement, not mine), this just means that compensation fast fast-food employees get is completely fair.

[relbeek2]

Not at all. It just means that there is a larger pool of employees qualified to work in fast food.

Sometimes people are simply forced to take jobs that are not adequately compensated.

[dawnbreez]

"The workers are easily replaced" and "Their compensation is fair" are two different statements.

[golergka]

It's exactly the same statement. Fair cost of something IS the opportunity cost of buying the same thing from someone else.

[JohnFen]

Well, it depends on your definition of "fair". You're going by the market definition -- but the market definition of "fair" is often quite unfair by other definitions.

[MichaelZuo]

Considering that markets exist whenever 2 or more individuals gather, without regard to any other factors… it’s pretty much a fundamental force like gravity. In fact even ant colonies experience market forces so it’s practically impossible for it to not exist.

Does it matter if a lot of folks have different definitions of gravity?

[dawnbreez]

If I had a gun to the head of everyone in town, and everyone in town mysteriously agrees to sell their labor for free, does that mean that cost of labor is fair?

There are circumstances outside of the price which affect the fairness of the price.

[rvanlaar]

What an interesting story. It made me look up how medal of honor started.

Could you clarify a few things? I don't think the story adds up.

Wikipedia has the followin information. Medal of Honor was made by DreamWorks interactive. [..] Filmmaker Steven Spielberg Spielberg founded DreamWorks Interactive in 1995. [1] And: Danger Close Games (formerly DreamWorks Interactive LLC and EA Los Angeles) was an American video game developer based in Los Angeles. [2]

This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medal_of_Honor_(1999_video_gam...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Close_Games

Edit: It seems you were talking about the acclaimed: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault.

Made by: 2015, inc[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Games

Edit 2: Spelling

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yes, I'm talking about 2015.

The first two Playstation only MoH games were not exactly failures, but they were little more than Goldeneye clones with WW2 themes.

The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper.

The team that bailed founded Infinity Ward, which was the origin of Call of Duty, or at least the first like 8 games in the franchise.

So yes, my story does in fact check out. Which is because I lived it. My friend tried to get me to join the team for 2 years because he knew they were onto something, but I'd fled a childhood in Kansas to build a life on the west coast and wasn't looking to move back to Tulsa of all places. That proved to be a bad career decision but I'm ok with it as a life decision.

Can you have some self awareness of how annoying it is for you to adopt this skeptical fact checker tone when you have so little familiarity with the events and people involved you don't even really understand what to google for and which wikipedia articles to read?

Edit: I'm annoyed because if you tell someone their story doesn't check out, calling me a lair in this case as the story is direct personal experience, you probably need more of a basis for that claim than googling a wikipedia article about a story you'd never heard of 5 minutes ago.

[ClassyJacket]

They asked very politely for you to clarify some details after they tried themselves but were unable to verify it by looking it up. Your hostility is unwarranted and rude. People are not psychic, it was quite reasonable for them to ask.

[conjectures]

Actually I sympathise with this response. Getting tired myself of people larping as fact checkers and professional skeptics.

Not enough detail in someone's response? Here are some ideas:

1. Ask moar polite. Not, "I don't think the story adds up."

2. Assume the story is yet true and go to prove it to your satisfaction. Post the links and thank op for the interesting nerd snipe.

3. Enter the proposition into your mental database with some lower level of confidence and move on.

[clcaev]

Moreover, people often forget that the poster probably took some time out of their life to chronicle something. Starting by acknowledging personal experience and their effort documenting it goes along way towards building a collaborative discussion.

[rkangel]

I think there's hostility on both sides here. "Could you clarify a few things?" is one thing, but "I don't think the story adds up" is a direct accusation of lying.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Maybe it's an unfair assumption on my part, but the post starts out exactly in the format of deliberately written /r/IAmVerySmart satires. But it's not. Just because you're using polite vocabulary does not mean bare toothed sentiment doesn't read through.

[cxr]

The problem is that the anecdote, as originally told, was told poorly. This:

> They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor

... makes it sound as if the studio started the franchise—which is not helped by the fact that it says "Medal of Honor" (which is apparently a thing), not "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault" (which is apparently the thing they actually meant). Anyone interested who tries to follow up based on these breadcrumbs is going to run into an issue. That is anyone—it doesn't take someone with a predisposition to being an asshole to end up here; even someone who read the initial comment and though, "wow, that's cool; I'm interested in learning more", and then proceeded to try to learn more would have gotten tripped up this way. (It's only by starting at the opposite end—with Call of Duty—and working backwards to its origin story that you're going to be able to resolve this.)

To make out as if someone is being automatically uncharitable and then airing emotion-driven grievances about it is, perversely, the most uncharitable thing (and, for the reasons just mentioned, perhaps only uncharitable thing) to have actually happened here.

[stackbutterflow]

It's easier to start from the end by googling "Call of Duty founders" than starting from Medal of Honor and hoping there aren't too many branches with only one leading to Call of Duty (which is the case here).

"Call of Duty founders" -> first link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward -> 3rd sentence: All of the 22 original team members of Infinity Ward came from the team that had worked on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault

[pmontra]

The tragedy of the written word between people that don't know each other. One could say "Could you clarify a few things?" in anger or "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. In writing the intention of the writer is in the mind of the reader.

[kritiko]

>One could say ... "I don't think the story adds up" smiling and with a friendly tone. While you can call bullshit in a friendly way, it's almost certainly better to assume that you are wrong if you think the other party is equally or more credible than you.

[eloisant]

That's why you have to be extra careful when writing, especially in discussions with strangers.

[hunter-gatherer]

It is indeed peculiar that even though humans have communicated over written word for so long, so many are seemingly unaware of this fact.

[rvanlaar]

Thanks for the responses, much appreciated.

[arinlen]

> They asked very politely for you to clarify some details after they tried themselves but were unable to verify it by looking it up.

Not really. GP straight up accused the OP of lying, under a thick but transparent layer of euphemisms. Coming at someone out of nowhere with accusations that "your story doesn't add up", specially after failing to do their homework, is the opposite of politeness.

[pdntspa]

This isn't wikipedia; claims on these forums do not need to be substantiated with fact. I agree with the sibling comments that there is too much fact-checking here and it is rude AF

Storytelling does not require that one cites their sources. Especially when that source is, "I lived it"

[jdbiggs]

The response could have been:

Wow cool! Can you tell us more about the story? Edit: Spelling

Instead it's a wikipedia dump.

[d1sxeyes]

You may have found it annoying, but I think it's good to have a healthy level of skepticism on the internet about stories whose source is 'a friend of mine'.

I agree OP could have been a bit less confrontational, but...

> The first PC game is really the start of what we think of as the Medal of Honor franchise proper.

> They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP [...] They couldn't take the IP with them

That may be your opinion, it certainly isn't mine, having played both the Playstation games and none of the PC games. I very clearly remember the splash screen for Dreamworks on starting up the first Medal of Honor game. I'm still not sure how the third game in a franchise could be considered 'novel IP', especially as it seems they were approached by Dreamworks[1], so it's not surprising they couldn't take it anywhere else.

Without the explanation above, I would have dismissed your comment as nonsense out of hand without bothering to engage.

However, OP questioned, you clarified, and I learned something. Choosing your own definition of when the franchise started made it very difficult to accept your comment as it stood initially though.

Perhaps you could also have some self-awareness of how often people post about 'my friend who told me this anecdote about this big thing' with red flags in their story, and how much it's important not to believe everything you read?

1: Wikipedia mentions this on the 2015 page with a reference to https://www.tulsapeople.com/tulsa-people/july-2009/powering-..., but unfortunately I'm not able to open that link to verify its contents. https://venturebeat.com/games/the-making-and-unmaking-of-inf... seems to indicate as well that Dreamworks approached 2015, https://www.ign.com/articles/2009/11/06/ign-presents-the-his... suggests EA 'employed' 2015 which sounds about right (Dreamworks Interactive was sold to EA)

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The PC games done by 2015 nee Infinity Ward were basically them getting to do whatever they wanted, vs being handed a prepared design bible as was common for 2nd party dev in that era. That team absolutely deserves credit for what people commonly call MoH. Great you loved the PSX games. You're rather alone in considering them the same thing in all but brand.

[throwaway24424]

You didn't really provide that much detail, how are you expecting someone to understand what to Google?

If your suggestion is for people to not question, or be curious at all then I think you're in the wrong place...?

[derangedHorse]

I don't think they were annoyed by the follow-up, they were annoyed by being softly accused of an inaccurate story and not being given the benefit of the doubt. Removing the "I don't think the story adds up." and changing the period of "This doesn't sound like 'a small game studio in Oklahoma'." to a question mark would've have helped make it less accusatory.

In my opinion the original story was a bit misleading though, reading as if the small game company's novel IP was the original Medal of Honor, so I do think the follow-up was warranted: "They took that momentum and started on their own novel IP as a quake licensee. They made a ahem mildly successful game named Medal of Honor."

I also think the response to the questioning was a lot more hostile than it needed to be but ultimately that there was rudeness on both sides

[andrewmcwatters]

HN is the only place on the web that I know of where someone will tell you--someone who has experience in X, Y or Z--that you are wrong, or "sealion" you, or better yet, attempt to correct you with their armchair experience.

Then, you'll be reprimanded for pointing it out, asking you to "not do that here."

I wish moderation would curtail this obnoxious behavior, because I see HN as a place where experts can detail their experience, and over the years I see more and more amateur butt in or sealioning behavior take place, and people I know have left over it.

[bigie35]

Lately HN feels more like a bunch of lawyers quibbling over semantics... It gets really old, really fast.

Whatever happened to assume positive intent?

[yamtaddle]

Intense levels of plausibly-deniable passive aggression, and absolutely god-awful intent being treated as something better to the detriment of discourse thanks to the "assume positive intent" rule, are what I consider some of the core defining features of the HN experience.

I dunno if it does any good, but these days when I smell ill intent beneath the surface of a "just asking questions" post I just flag the bastards rather than trying to help them by answering. Responding is simply feeding trolls, and HN threads are full of that sort of thing. Argumentative jerks who are just trying to argue, while staying just civil enough that they don't get slapped down (not too quickly, anyway).

My kingdom for sigs and blocklists.

[ido]

The problem is that your figurative sense of smell may not be correct. It really is quite easy to mistake an honest question or assertion as passive aggression or sarcasm in text form.

[yamtaddle]

Maybe, but I can assure you from back when I tried to engage in good faith it's pretty damn accurate. It doesn't hurt that HN's a target-rich environment for such a detector, of course.

[arinlen]

> Lately HN feels more like a bunch of lawyers quibbling over semantics...

There is no semantics challenge in a random coming at someone out of the blue with accusations of being a liar. The only lawyering involved is determining if it would represent libel or slander.

[prepend]

> Whatever happened to assume positive intent?

I think positive intent is different from truth.

To make good decisions, I need to drill down to the truth of the situation. People can be super honest and be wrong or conflate ideas.

So for me, I work on being politely skeptical and assume it’s false until substantiated.

[HFguy]

"...calling me a lair..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZKwCVKneg

Sorry, found the typo funny. Not trying to antagonize anyone this morning.

[meroes]

So they didn’t start MOH, thanks for clarifying and I now can understand your post better.

[astura]

If you go to the souce on the Wikipedia page, it tells a slightly different story than what the OP said -

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

>Yet 2015 would never get the chance to make another Medal of Honor. EA decided to take all development for the franchise in-house. Morale was low amongst the team and they were looking to start up on its own.

>We had bonded as a team, but decided we wanted to work with new management. Many members of the team were actually going to leave to find new jobs, regardless of potential royalties coming in from Medal of Honor.

>After leaving 2015 we were working with a major publisher. For legal reasons I will say things didn’t go as planned with it. We were left in a situation of unpaid milestones that were delivered and no finances to operate on,” says Thomas.

>The company was potentially going to disband. In a last ditch effort our then president, Grant Collier sent out a signal to all the major publishers in the industry letting them know that the majority of the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault team was available. Within days of closing the doors on the studio, Activision responded immediately with an offer.”

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yeah, I'm giving a simplified version, and also avoiding disclosing some details that might blow back on my friend. It was considerably more nasty than that article portrays via the quotes.

[astura]

Except you basically said "they quit solely because of money" and the article basically says "it wasn't at all about the money."

Those are very different things. One isn't a "simplified" version of the other.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The money was definitely the root issue. I can't say more without sharing things that could blow back on a friend. Either you believe me or you don't.

[RuggedPineapple]

Black Isle is another great example. Interplay was going under and selling off any IP of value to get some cash out of the end of the road. The staff, seeing the writing on the wall, quit more or less en masse and started Obsidian together. The name is even a bit of a pun- Obsidian, a black volcanic glass, is what you might expect a Black Isle to be made from.

[KptMarchewa]

Funny thing is that the owners did the same thing a second time, going back to the EA, forming Respawn Environment.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

yeeeeeeuuuup :P

[reaperducer]

If they've shipped, they can find more money people any time they want.

Quotation of the month. Devs should have this knitted into a pillow in their cubicles.

[barrysteve]

I agree with your message though there's a scarier story in there. What if those people never left to make Call of Duty?

Under the boss they would have made more Medal of Honor, and maybe the next MoH's were not billion-dollar products.

Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Indeed.

It's very similar with tech startups. Once you've been around the washing machine loop a couple times you realize just how much of this stuff is arbitrary and luck dependent. Unicorns born upon butterfly's wings. Having a certain background lets you buy more chances at the luck part. It's not fair. It is.

Personally my read on this is we should have some humility about how unpredictable this all is.

[Double_a_92]

> Maybe had they gotten equity, we would never have a billion dollar CoD series!

The good timeline xD

[throwawy0932832]

I suppose that explains why they felt so eerily similar and shared same engine.

[jollybean]

Yeah this story has a problem.

An entire company 'quits' and just 're-does the thing' is almost assuredly theft of know-now and IP, but more than that theft of the operating modality.

It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

Any time you walk into a company you'll see what looks like 'things working' on some level, usually that took incredible trials and travails.

It's a bit like 'decent code' - it takes iterations, after which, it's 'obvious in hindsight'.

Every coder knows it's 'figuring it out' that's hard, whereas doing it a second time is easy.

Employees who tool 100% salary to start, without higher risk equity, and then wanted to 'trade after the fact' shouldn't be miffed - they just shouldn't have taken the job if what they wanted was equity.

It could entirely be the case of cockroach management giving horrible terms to everyone including underpayment etc. but these stories are often one-sided.

I'm working with a company right now that I've discovered has a seemingly 'simple' product. It took this young girl 4 years of struggle (and failure before) that, to get this thing where it is and establish all the sales relationships. I'm sure I could duplicate it quickly with minimal resources (I wouldn't do that to her), but it has dawned on me how much effort it takes to move things forward.

Here is the story, and it doesn't really speak to some kind of greedy action by 2015, the original game devs. More subtle than that. More like the original team, which was assembled by EA, liked working together, and were lured away by another studio as a team.

[1] https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/publishing/the-medal-of-...

FYI the founders of 'Call of Duty' were eventually fired on bad terms again.

I would reserve judgment on these situations.

Especially in entertainment and creative things, there are a lot of personality issues.

[fisf]

> It takes in incredible amount of work, risk, investment etc. to 'get something up and going' - with all of the parts working.

So.. it's fair if the people who did all the hard work ask for some form of participation? If all it takes to duplicate a product is money and the people with know-how, than the capital is a rather marginal contribution?

And I am deliberately talking about know-how, and not IP here. You cannot apply copyright to the knowledge of your employees.

[jollybean]

It's fair for employees to ask, it's fair to be told know.

"You cannot apply copyright to the knowledge of your employees. "

? Absolutely you can, legally.

But the issues is just as much moral one.

The owners put it together and paid for the employees to make all sorts of mistakes etc..

It would be shameful if they did that.

All of that said I don't think that's the case.

[dawnbreez]

I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game.

The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.

[jollybean]

The lesson for 'management' is get better contracts and don't invest and develop people who will walk out with your stuff.

Item 'A' is a bit more reasonable, people not getting paid is bad.

But item 'B' is not. Sorry, you don't just get to ask for a better deal after the fact, because it finally worked out and now in 20/20 hindsight you want a cut.

[dawnbreez]

But why not? Why shouldn't there be a process for renegotiating a contract? Especially in cases like this, where the employees are still producing things for the management--I would understand if you were renegotiating JUST on an existing product, because renegotiating on a deal that's already over makes the deal drag on unnecessarily, but these people were probably working on a new game while talking about renegotiating their contract. They weren't just talking about their compensation for the game they'd already finished; they were talking about compensation for every game they'd make in the future with that publisher.