Obsidian's Mistreatment of Chris Avellone

[Green Skeleton]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-codex-interview-chris-avellone-on-pillars-cut-content-game-development-hierarchies-and-more.121588/page-8#post-5590121

I didn’t get anything when I left Obsidian. There were no share payouts, no equity, and this was in addition to the other logistical problems around the departure – the sudden cancellation of my health insurance, problems with my 401K, errors in Obsidian’s accounting, and several existing independent contracts they refused to uphold.

Realizing my family issues and the debts therein, however, they did make an attempt to leverage that into a far more confining separation agreement that would remove my right to work on RPGs, and my silence on all issues that could pertain to Obsidian or any other company they were involved with or the CEO had a % in (Fig, Zero Radius, Dark Rock Industries, etc.).

http://archive.is/gHjgN

For a bunch of SJW devs, they sure treat their employees like crap

[Valkor]

He DIDN'T decided to "post it in a public forum right before a big release of theirs with practically only his view of the whole thing", it was the only fault of that rpg forum. CA just clarifies what he was accused of.
Random revengeful guy from his former company can't concoct so many details and facts which were confirmed by other sources.

[Makkenhoff]

Personally, I'm inclined to believe all parties involved or not, can be stubborn on the point of contention, no matter how stupidly the ego in question get flaunted.

[MinT]

aannndd.....



nobody cares.

[Dr. B. Banzai]

I don't care how the sausage is made. I just want to eat good sausage.

[Gregorovitch]

Valko eredeti hozzászólása:

He DIDN'T decided to "post it in a public forum right before a big release of theirs with practically only his view of the whole thing", it was the only fault of that rpg forum. CA just clarifies what he was accused of.

This is so totally untrue. Chris Avellone wasn't accused of anything by anybody. He has no need to defend himself. He's had no reason at all to make poisonous post after poisonous post for two or three days on the Codex. He is under no obligation whatever to answer any questions Codex trolls have put to him there.

He has voluntarily and possibly premeditatedly generated this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all by himself just before the release of Deadfire. He has used half-truth, innuendo and ommision to do as much damage to his formeer friends and colleagues at Obsidian as he possibly can without technically directly lying.

He has done so in the full knowledge that Obsidian must perforce stay absolutely silent and cannot defend themselves against his vitriol for the moment. This is becasue a) it would make a bad situation worse so close to release and b) their lawyers would have told them that under no circumstances whatever should they make any public comment or reply to Avellone on any public foreum etc. as it may prejudice any legal proceedings at a later date.

Why has he done this? Who knows. It may be simply revenge, or it may be he's just had a breakdown of some sort. Or it may be his ego just can't stand the first big Obsidian game he had no part in making turns out to be just as good or even better than previous ones he was involved with without his help. That he just isn't quite as important and indespensible as he thought he was.

Whatever, Avellone will pay a price for this down the line. Let's hope Deadfire doesn't.

[Nasenbaerus]

Gregorovitch eredeti hozzászólása:

He has voluntarily and possibly premeditatedly generated this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all by himself just before the release of Deadfire. He has used half-truth, innuendo and ommision to do as much damage to his formeer friends and colleagues at Obsidian as he possibly can without technically directly lying.

Oh, might you enlighten us how you know this for fact? What I see is a generic guy which hasn't as much of a clue as everybody else but needs to defend one party of a fight which he actual like but without any knowledge whar is true and what isn't. So come along with hard facts,

Gregorovitch eredeti hozzászólása:

He has done so in the full knowledge that Obsidian must perforce stay absolutely silent and cannot defend themselves against his vitriol for the moment. This is becasue a) it would make a bad situation worse so close to release and b) their lawyers would have told them that under no circumstances whatever should they make any public comment or reply to Avellone on any public foreum etc. as it may prejudice any legal proceedings at a later date.

No you are a lawyer giving counsel? ;-)
The part about it would hurt them to stir the heat further however sounds quite right and is best "they" can do. I for myself don't know what is the truth, so how do you?

Gregorovitch eredeti hozzászólása:

Whatever, Avellone will pay a price for this down the line. Let's hope Deadfire doesn't.

Well, your wishthinking at least. But what if Avellone doesn't pay a price, are your depressed then? ;-)

The whole topic gets on my nerves. Esp. people like you. :P

[Valkor]

Gregorovitch eredeti hozzászólása:

This is so totally untrue. Chris Avellone wasn't accused of anything by anybody. He has no need to defend himself. He's had no reason at all to make poisonous post after poisonous post for two or three days on the Codex. He is under no obligation whatever to answer any questions Codex trolls have put to him there.

He has voluntarily and possibly premeditatedly generated this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all by himself just before the release of Deadfire. He has used half-truth, innuendo and ommision to do as much damage to his formeer friends and colleagues at Obsidian as he possibly can without technically directly lying.

You're just btalantly lying now, I'm sure you've read his comments here about crapstorm

BrokenClock eredeti hozzászólása:

User:

So ideally what would you like to see happen Chris?

I know you don't wish upper Obsidian management to see another dime but there is an awful lot of collateral damage to the Anthony Davis' of the company. The timing of this article and the dirty laundry in the aftermath seems obvious its meant to be destructive on some level.

MCA:

I would occasionally read comments saying “you were upper management” and “he must have gotten a big payout” and “he signed an NDA, got severance, etc.” and it made me realize most people didn’t know how that all shook out, so I answered it. It wasn’t a great time in my life to deal with all that bullsh*t with everything else going on, so when I hear something to the contrary, I correct it.

I’m not management, I got nothing, but that was ultimately a good thing for the freedom it allowed, it just took a little time to get there.

As for collateral damage, I might have said this before I don’t think defending Obsidian’s upper management translates into helping Obsidian employees, either financially or job security wise. Even if an employee is kicking a*s at their job, they can still be yelled at, blamed, or let go for something that’s not their fault – but is often more the responsibility of the upper management that caused the issue (fighting with publishers, money problems, etc.). Hell, an employee may not even been aware they’ve been earmarked for being let go months before it happens (that’s hardly something that happens solely in the games industry, though).

It is symptomatic of some of these issues that Obsidian rarely can work with the same publisher twice, even if they’d like to – a number of publishers don’t want to deal with Obsidian’s upper management twice in a row. I do think this means that Obsidian’s increasing efforts to work to publishing things on their own is a good thing – it’s one of the only ways their process is going to work in the long-term.

And I’ve said this before: I like the Obsidian devs (although I don’t know many of the new ones, obviously), I still see many and talk with them, I work and help the ones who are still there when I can and the ones who left (even working with them again), and I like the games. If Obsidian does well, however, that often doesn’t trickle down to the employees. If I support bad management practices, I don’t think that helps anyone there.

I do think that if the issues are raised, there is a hope that management will course correct in the hopes to prove to everyone they aren’t like that in an effort to defend themselves – and by doing so, would be good for the employees overall.

That said, the performance and reception of a good game will help employees (esp. reputation and resume building), but that’s not the issue here – my issue is the management. I think they are disorganized and cause a lot of problems, and they are not responsible for what makes the company’s games good - in fact, they arguably do a number of things to damage the process (while I'm skeptical of Glassdoor reviews, I am less skeptical about the common points among all of them).

(Myself included, I’m not blameless – I’ve never claimed to be a good manager, and I wasn’t even a manager at Obsidian unless I took on a specific design role.)

Source: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/rpg-codex-interview-chris-avellone-on-pillars-cut-content-game-development-hierarchies-and-more.121588/page-80#post-5595611

[todd.carpenter]

It is an interesting read but at the end it is what it is! An discpute between partners who knows if Obsidian "mistreated" him? There are two sides to every story and I am sure if both of them said everything they wanted to about the matter the way they wanted too the stories would be very different.

Ultimately it is about the game. If POE2 is as good or better than one then Chris leaving was a good thing. If POE2 is terrible then Obsidian sucks and they lose some credibiility where it counts (my wallet) and they will have to reflect on whether or not Chris could have made a difference.

Chris seems happy working for himself and obviously that is something he wanted to do so good for him!

Obsidian seems to be making a game I want to play so good for them and me!

[Nasenbaerus]

todd.carpenter eredeti hozzászólása:

Ultimately it is about the game. If POE2 is as good or better than one then Chris leaving was a good thing. If POE2 is terrible then Obsidian sucks and they lose some credibiility where it counts (my wallet) and they will have to reflect on whether or not Chris could have made a difference.

Indeed. However afaik CA wasn't THAT important for the first PoE either. It's not like he had written the whole storyline or am I mistaken? So, I guess it's hard to say if he would have contributed something great to PoE2. Maybe, maybe not. I'm entirely unbiased and can't say if CA is a genius writer or isn't as I never read how much he contributed to a game I played. I didn't care to be honest.

[Fallensoul]

CA atleast in terms of PoE was only "responsible" for the companion characters Grieving Mother and Durance and their story. Which ultimately was cut because it was deemed to be to "ambitious" at the time and that they couldn't handle it in the time they had avaiable(at that point they were already running short on time). So yeh who knows if the story he had planned for them would've been great but in the end they would've only been companion storys so even then it wouldn't have been that crucial of a part.

[Valkor]

Phoenician Carpenter eredeti hozzászólása:

Eric Fenstermaker was lead writer for Pillars of Eternity, and Josh Sawyer is narrative lead for Deadfire. To my knowledge Chris didn't play a big role in writing for the firat game.

Played a small role for PoE, but giant leap for Obsidian...what was more important?

[Aerothorn]

This is a good piece well worth reading, and it would be a lot better if you didn't try to shoot your marketing in the foot with the dismissive and divisive "SJW" comment.

[Tikigod]

Sounds like pretty standard business conduct, with CA just trying to intentionally over dramatise at a very consciously picked time to try get back at the fact that Obsidian is being run like a business, and not a college frat house made up of developers.

For example:

"They tried to stop me working on RPGs!".

Yeah, non-compete clauses in termination agreements are pretty typical, even in games development. They're the thing put in place to try stop people leaving from taking what they know about current on-going (and future) projects and using that information and skills to make something in direct competition to it.

Such clauses usually are very specific as to what can't be worked on in order to not be directly competing against the company they are leaving as they have to allow people to make a living. They also have a fixed duration before not being active anymore.


Overall, CAs behaviour and a lot of the complaints raised make me think a whole lot less of him as a person. He may be seriously talented, and I have a lot of respect for the work he's done but you can be talented, great at your job yet still be a self-absorbed twit caught up in your own legend.

[Army Pea]

Pillars 2 reviews will overshadow this office drama ;)

Trust me on that.

[Silverquick]

Aerothorn eredeti hozzászólása:

This is a good piece well worth reading, and it would be a lot better if you didn't try to shoot your marketing in the foot with the dismissive and divisive "SJW" comment.

Naw SWJ has a bad connotation these days, and has the image of someone who is little more than the common internet troll.

As in... Hypocritical, control freakish, and even fascist given their attempts at free speech censorship.

So yeah he's not wrong about that.

That said, whatever Chris Avellone's problems with the company are (and this isn't the first time I've heard about them from others)... we don't have all the facts either way. So hard to judge at this point.