For the past few months, I’ve been on my long promised sabbatical.
2009 and 2010 were horrible horrible years personally. While my company had good financial years, they were both professionally disappointing.
In the Summer of 2010 things really came to a head with the launch of the first title in the Elemental universe (War of Magic). It was a disaster. And it became obvious that no particular sector of the company was getting sufficient attention.
Sometimes, you just need a big shock to get change done. So we sold off Impulse to Gamestop, brought in industry veterans to take over running the software unit and the games unit and beefed up the management teams across the board.
Selling off the most profitable part of our organization may seem crazy until you realize that its profitability was allowing us to mask our underlying lack of focus.
I was slowly killing myself (and my senior staff who did the same thing) by taking on Boxer’s philosophy – I’ll work harder.
I’ve been starting to get back into the fold by checking out some of the cool software projects we’ve got going and fixing up War of Magic a bit before diving into Fallen Enchantress, Sins: Rebellion, Object Desktop 2012, etc. But I feel a lot better knowing that all these projects have people dedicated to them rather than competing for the limited hours a week I was able to give them before.
