For those who might not know, this story is a lot more complicated than “evil CEO steals IP from game creators”, even though that’s the short version that gets shared around a lot because it sounds infuriating.
I highly recommend this documentary about the whole tale from People Make Games, it’s 2 and half hours long and I enjoyed every minute of it despite not really even being into video games!
This documentary really frustrated me. It seems the documentary creator wants to tell two stories at once but he conflates them. There is one story, the story of the financial maneuvering to take control of intellectual property. And there is another story where a mercurial creative is a nightmare to work for.
These are two completely distinct stories (IMO). The only way they connect is that the CEO who wrested financial control of the IP uses the difficult personalities of the creatives to justify firing them. So the conflation is: was it legally and morally justified to gain majority control over the IP vs. was it legally and morally justified to fire a difficult employee. It is a strange/absurd way to find some kind of journalistic balance and it just felt extremely amateur to me.
Kurvitz and Rostov legitimately sound like a nightmare to work for, as is often the case with single-minded and purpose driven creatives. They probably should not be in management positions. But there is almost no way anyone could say they didn't get finessed out of ownership of their creative work. I have no idea if it was legal but I do not see anyway to see it as moral, no matter how bad of a manger they were.
The article does mention the excellent People Make Games documentary, though is somewhat dismissive of it. And of course, it could be true both that Kurvitz is an asshole who was very hard on his coworkers and that he was robbed.
Comments
For those who might not know, this story is a lot more complicated than “evil CEO steals IP from game creators”, even though that’s the short version that gets shared around a lot because it sounds infuriating.
I highly recommend this documentary about the whole tale from People Make Games, it’s 2 and half hours long and I enjoyed every minute of it despite not really even being into video games!
https://youtu.be/JGIGA8taN-M?si=-7m8vs77wHRHv2AI
This documentary really frustrated me. It seems the documentary creator wants to tell two stories at once but he conflates them. There is one story, the story of the financial maneuvering to take control of intellectual property. And there is another story where a mercurial creative is a nightmare to work for.
These are two completely distinct stories (IMO). The only way they connect is that the CEO who wrested financial control of the IP uses the difficult personalities of the creatives to justify firing them. So the conflation is: was it legally and morally justified to gain majority control over the IP vs. was it legally and morally justified to fire a difficult employee. It is a strange/absurd way to find some kind of journalistic balance and it just felt extremely amateur to me.
Kurvitz and Rostov legitimately sound like a nightmare to work for, as is often the case with single-minded and purpose driven creatives. They probably should not be in management positions. But there is almost no way anyone could say they didn't get finessed out of ownership of their creative work. I have no idea if it was legal but I do not see anyway to see it as moral, no matter how bad of a manger they were.
The article does mention the excellent People Make Games documentary, though is somewhat dismissive of it. And of course, it could be true both that Kurvitz is an asshole who was very hard on his coworkers and that he was robbed.