erica

Erica

@erica

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freelance illustrator, designer, and idk buncha stuff

@kuraine's wife

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erica
@erica
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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

incredible fucking scumbag behaviour

in addition to this SECOND no-notice no-severance layoff after crop circle, now they're blaming it on "employee leaks to kotaku"?? Truly absurd, narcissistic behaviour.

MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

pulling the rug out from under 2.5 YEARS of your devs' work and giving them literally zero support, then blaming publishers' skittishness on THEM instead of your own incompetent handling of your current studios, incredibly, incredibly gross mismanagement from a pair of incredibly wealthy people

erica
@erica

doing this kind of shit should get you banned from seeing the light of day ever again. you had a chance to exist in society and you wasted it being a prick. time's run out, fuck off forever.

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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

SnepShark
@SnepShark

I hope all the employees hurt by this can recover quickly. (Edit: In spite of every attempt by the Strains to make that as hard as possible by deleting their LinkedIn....)

I can't imagine what could be in that Kotaku article if the owners think it could be used as justification for shutting down two entire studios. The bizarre "I hope they don't write about my health in the article I know nothing about" and "usually leaks like this only happen due to malicious hackers" statements don't give much to go off of :eggbug-tuesday:

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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

there is no fucking way this is the real reason. i have never heard of a publisher just pissing away years of development investment just because of a leak? Unless that leak was "the dev has been pissing away their money on bullshit for 2.5 years".

if this alleged Kotaku story is even real, I am now incredibly curious to know what the fuck was actually going on over there.

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MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

I give you 99% chance that either strain was planning to shut down the studio anyway and used this as an excuse OR the publisher was getting cold feet over how abruptly they shut down their other studio and he's pivoting to blame it on anyone but himself

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frenemymine
@frenemymine

It reads like the post of someone abandoning some low-stakes fan project due to personal drama instead of a company director ruining the livelihoods of dozens of people due to his incompetence

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georgio
@georgio

This is bonkers, and Jeff's painted himself into a terrible corner here: either they lost the publisher due to his incompetence as a leader, or they lost the publisher due to Jeff throwing his employees under the bus in a clearly vindictive move.

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Xuelder
@Xuelder

I don't know if anyone actually else knows this cause I am in the New Orleans scene, but I think there are two* additional stories being written by local papers as well.

*(The people I know who are on this works for two different local publications, so it might just be a partnered story between the papers/zines.)

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vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

not to contradict a single thing you've said here (i agree 100% on all counts) but i'm wondering to what extent "the funders pulled out" is upstream of all this and that's what is behind the strains' recent public freakouts. this is exactly the kind of case where we need good journalism to sort through the wreckage and find the truth, however inconvenient it is to the parties involved.

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authorx
@authorx

Yeah in both cases (Annie Strain's public statement and Jeff Strain's internal email) there's a lot of contorting to make them sound like the victims while quietly mentioning the actual reason is "we didn't get additional funding we were counting on", so either there's no notice and no severance because they didn't have any contingency for funding running out (bad management) or they just knew they'd have enough savings if that happened and didn't care about anyone else.

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in reply to @erica's post:

dismallyOriented
@dismallyOriented

This is essentially making it difficult for them to corroborate their job history because the studio no longer exists on that platform. I don't know if LinkedIn allows you to list a company that isn't on it as part of your work history on your profile.

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