GameDaily Biz has an interesting look at some recent internal flight going on over at Rockstar Games. Within the past year a co-founder, two marketing directors, a director of development, a senior product manager, a senior web designer and four people in the PR department have all left.

GameDaily floats some theories ranging from internal discord to the company's free-falling stock, but then shores the speculation up with comments from a professional speculator: Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter.

"Part of this is actually good, because if it shows you that they're getting more financial discipline by eliminating redundant positions... To me marketing should be more central and not pushed out to the individual studio. You want an overall marketing strategy to brand all Rockstar product... so maybe this is just better discipline," Pachter suggested.

"None of this sounds really bad, but if they're losing key developers then that matters," he continued. "My guess is this is cost cutting; I don't think these people left because they're unhappy. I think they left more likely than not because the company is saying, 'Hey, we don't need to pay all you guys to do all these redundant functions.' One of my biggest complaints about the company was that their costs were not in alignment with their revenues and therefore they were losing money. And I think that they spend too much money and I think it's entirely appropriate for them to lower the amount of spending, and one way to do so is to eliminate positions... I'm comfortable that directionally you want to see people leave and you want to see less crucial, critical people leave and anybody in marketing and PR sounds less critical to me. Take-Two needs to make sure that they keep the creative people that are responsible for their successes."

"I actually applaud them for cutting costs beyond what they've already announced... This is consistent with what investors would like to see. This is a positive," Pachter concluded.

Rockstar would not comment for the article.

It's hard to say whether this employee exodus is anything unusual. It seems that there are PR people jumping from some ship every few months and employees leaving after a game launch isn't that unusual either.
If the exodus happened over a much shorter period, I'd be included to agree, but it's hard to read too much into six to 12 months of comings and goings. Brian Crecente

Employee Exodus at Rockstar Games? [GameDaily Biz]

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