Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

Author:Jason Schreier [Schreier, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

Early in the morning on Sunday, October 15, 2017, Zach and Lisa Mumbach had their second son. The next day, as they were driving home from the hospital, a high-ranking EA executive reached out and said he wanted to chat. Sure, said a giddy, sleep-deprived Mumbach. Come on by. When the executive arrived, he greeted the couple and smiled at their new baby. Then he pulled them aside and delivered some crushing news: Visceral was shutting down. Ragtag was canceled. The company would be holding a meeting on Tuesday to tell the whole staff.

The EA executive kept talking, offering explanations about how the game was behind schedule and how operational costs in San Francisco were just too high, but Mumbach wasn’t paying much attention. His mind was occupied by thoughts of his one-day-old child, and his old company, and the fact that suddenly the people he’d worked with for years would no longer be in an office with him every day. Mumbach wasn’t concerned about finding new employment—the executive had assured him that there were other spots open at EA—but he was worried that some of his coworkers might not be as lucky. “The game, I let that one go really easy,” Mumbach said. “It sucks to not get to make that game, but the studio getting shut down part of it, that’s brutal.”

On October 17, 2017, Mumbach walked into the Visceral office in Redwood Shores, California, for what he knew would be the studio’s final all-hands meeting. The rest of Visceral’s staff had no idea what was coming, and some were surprised to see him—wasn’t he supposed to be on paternity leave? Why was he at work? “My presence there alerted some people that something bad was going to happen,” Mumbach said. “Other people were oblivious. This one guy I love runs up to me as we’re going to the meeting room and gives me a big hug because he’s stoked, knows I just had a kid. He says, ‘Congratulations!’”

Crammed together in the first few rows of the theater on EA’s campus, the Visceral staff sat in stunned silence as executives Patrick Söderlund and Jade Raymond told them that the studio was shutting down. There were a lot of factors, the executives said. The video game market had changed, and EA no longer wanted to spend big money on linear, single-player games that a person would only play through once before selling them back to GameStop. The executives talked about the new mega-popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which they were looking to emulate, and they praised Visceral’s staff, offering platitudes about how talented the team was and how hard they’d all worked. Then they told everyone how to get their severance packages.

Once the meeting ended and dozens of employees filed out of the theater, reality began to set in. They would all have to find new jobs, either within EA or at other companies. Some of them would have to move to new cities, uprooting their families if they wanted to work at big-budget studios with Visceral’s pedigree.

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