just some guy, age 23
-yuri is life
-dandadan peak jump truther
-MCH main
-believer in a sign of zeta
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.
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
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 
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.
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
It has that distinct smell of "politician trying to get out ahead of a story about him doing coke off a rent boy's ass at Cabo", doesn't it?
Strain saying he’s stepping away to “care for Annie” is beyond belief lmfao
please think of us and how WE feel in this time of us laying everyone off without severance
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
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.
yeah I have nothing to say on this that wouldn't get me put on a list. just insanely infuriating.
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.)
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.
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.
I'm willing a "Patrick Klepek reports on this by talking to his old friend Austin & other former PS staff members" article into existence.
I know a couple years ago he made a huge stink about how even though he headquartered here in New Orleans that he couldn't get the tax credits he thought he was owed. All he had to do was retain a small number of not even on site, just in state local talent.
