However, most publishers don’t live on credit; they have cash in the bank to pay the bills and can, in many if not most cases, project their expenses vs. cash needs out for a year or more.

/looks around at the smoking ruin of the global economy

I’m not as impressed with the forecasting abilities of execs as you are.

/general_rant_ON -not_aimed

But what I was alluding to, more specifically, was the thought that everyone laid off was going to have to go through the holiday period wondering what was going to happen to them and their families. Whether they’d have a job come the new year, whether they’d have to move to take a new job and what about our health coverage with the wife just diagnosed with that chronic condition and COBRA wants $1,200 per month to cover us and jesus christ what about the kids and can we even afford to have a holiday season this year, am I going to have to borrow money from my parents…

So no, there is no good season to lay off people, but you can at least plan it understanding that human beings are involved and that timing counts. It isn’t like they don’t know far in advance what the financial situation of the company is going to be, in most situations; a significant chunk of an executive’s time is spent running budgets and projections for every period from the next 3 months to five years out. I’ve been there and done that; believe me, THEY KNOW.

IMO, a sizable chunk of what is wrong with industry in America – and the game industry specifically – is the whole concept of “It is just business,” as if people weren’t involved at all. To me, that’s just an easy way of saying “Fuck ‘em; I’ve got my stock options and salary and it is going to be a *great* Christmas for me.” I’m sure they rationalize it differently inside their own heads – who thinks of themselves as an heartless asshole, after all? – but the end result is the same: somehow, being a dick doesn’t count if it is “just business.” In fact, the mantra of “just business” is there to make it *easy* for otherwise good people to be dicks.

At the risk of setting up a straw man to knock down: I disagree. You can plan some disasters for a graceful landing and this is one of them.

/general_rant_OFF

Because QA is a entry level job having lots of QA vs having good QA makes the difference. Having 20 crappy testers won’t equate to 5 good testers.

Blizzard obviously has more CS jobs and needs as they have larger volumes of players and larger international player base then Lord of the Rings.

It depends how well run your CS is.

It’s going to naturally get more expensive as you add more CS staff, just because of the natural tendency to add layers of management to keep the behemoth under control.

On the other hand, as you scale up, it becomes more cost effective to automate certain things, design tools to increase efficiency, and so on.

So, it costs more in order to scale up, but if well run, shouldn’t cost any more on a per user basis to support the big game than to support the small one. In some ways it will become cheaper.

Now, the real issue is: How much does good customer support lend itself to a healthy game that continues to grow?

i didnt have much faith in turbine before lotro, but i do now…

To clarify myself – I’m interested in how the per-capita costs to CS WoW (a game that is both popular and bug-free) compare to say Vanguard, a game that was a comparatively tiny AAA title and seemed rather glitchy months after launch. Are there ANY economies of scale? I’m certain Blizzard spends an order of magnitude more $$ than anyone else on CS/QA simply due to the volume, but I’m quite curious about the per-player match-ups.