There’s a whole lot that bothers me about the layoffs at Crystal Dynamics that went down recently. There’s the fact that it seemed like nobody could muster up any enthusiasm for Tomb Raider: Underworld—a marketing problem. Then there’s the fact that, despite it selling 1.5 million copies, it “underperformed” according to Eidos—a problem with the bean counters who apparently couldn’t see that the enthusiasm for the game just wasn’t there. So of course there’re layoffs at the developer, who made a game that…well, reviewers couldn’t decide if it was better or worse than Legend, but that in and of itself is a high compliment. From where I’m standing, it looks like only one group in the equation did their job, yet they’re the ones being thrown out into the vast expanse of misery that is the early 2009 job market.
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