You have got to love public forums where people get to be people without all the PR nonsense working as an intermediary for discussion. This rings especially true for the CEO of OMGPOP, the indie company who made the game Draw Something and was recently purchased by mega-corporation giant, Zynga.
The CEO of OMGPOP was pissed off at former employee Shay Pierce for deciding not to stay with the company after their buyout from Zynga. After some harsh words for the former employee, the CEO now rescinds those comments with a bit of embarrassment.
According to VentureBeat, CEO of OMGPOP, Dan Porter, originally tweeted this response to Shay Pierce who felt a moral obligation to forfeit his tenure at OMGPOP due to not feeling the buyout from Zynga...
The one OMGPOP employee who turned down joining Zynga was the weakest one on the whole team. Selfish people make bad games. Good riddance!
Yeah, because obviously this guy was only terrible up until he decided he didn't want a part of the billion dollar empire known as Zynga? I respect Pierce for maintaining his independence. Besides, the indie community is where the real games are, not those shells under the AAA banners.
Anyways, Porter wanted to clarify his stance because like all things on the internet, when people seen his tweet there were explosions and rage faces aimed at Porter, and he wasn't having any of that. In an e-mail sent to VentureBeat, saying...
“When the game blows up and we have the chance of a lifetime to do something special, and one employee — who didn’t work on the product and is more about his own games than the team — jumps in the press and becomes the story, it is very hurtful to all the people who are on the team,”...my point is that it wasn’t about Shay. It was about the 41 other people who made it happen,” Porter wrote. “Those are the people I would throw myself in front of the train for and those are the people I want to celebrate.”
Meh, that e-mail reeks of damage control. I have very little respect for carefully worded expressions used to save face as opposed to being honest. Porter should have just said "We're gonna make a boatload of money under Zynga and that fool Pierce could have ruined it for us. Screw him!" I would have been a little less disgusted in Porter because at least he would be telling the truth.
Marcus "Notch" Persson also chimed in on Twitter calling Porter an "Insane idiot", to which the CEO kept up his damage control persona, saying...
“It’s been a (sic) craziest ride. So yes, I may be temporarily insane. I just wanted my team who stuck with us to shine,”
Right, of course. It's all about the team, not about all that money Zynga knows they can make on the creative IP, right?
Anyways, this is probably the one time major gaming websites will lambaste someone from the industry even though we still have some pressing issues at hand regarding Electronic Arts and Capcom. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how people respond to OMGPOP from here on out now that they're under Zynga, who is quickly growing to become the casual/social version of Electronic Arts.
You can check out the entire story over at VentureBeat.
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