Funny how simple website changes and past trends can determine when big shake ups will be happening within organizations.. or more specially, Take Two / Rockstar.
Past trends can give you a really good idea of approximately when announcements will be made or what the announcements will be. But, any other small events (like sudden forum maintenance or website domain changes) can help fine tune your predictions.
By the way, it looks like all of their websites have now been redirected back to their original domains instead of centralized at Rockstar HQ. It was all done pretty quickly, so it appears that they might be testing a future change and possibly making more "internal changes" to additional studios.
It was just announced that Team Bondi is closing their doors, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Expect many more announcements or internal restructuring over the next couple months.
Anyone out there watching their stock prices?
That Activision Blizzard Analyst Day call is today too.. should be a good news day. :)
** Update
Another group of layoffs has hit within Take Two. This time at 2K Games Mafia 2 studio.
* Hot on the trail of the recent Minor Rockstar Update and the "Max Payne 3 is getting close?" posts, Rockstar has just announced that Max Payne 3 is getting closer to completion and that we're going to be getting a lot of news within the next few months.
* Also, hot on the trail of that Diablo Clone post (in which Diablo was once compared to a clone of Gauntlet, but now users just call new games clones of old Blizzard games), just 2 weeks later a wonderfully confirming forum post was made by an average MMO-Champion user.
* Activision Blizzards Analyst Day is coming up this Thursday, so expect some new announcements this week. During past Analyst Days, there have been new game announcements (COD6) or confirmations as well as zany Activision quotes about the current state of console, gaming, and their vision of their future.
* You've probably already heard about the massive Copyright theft by "Chad Love", if that's his real name, of ART4LOVE.COM. When I first heard about it over a week back, I immediately thought about that "Everyone Is A Pirate" post. There were potentially thousands of people who purchased pirated art from this very professional looking website, and they were even provided a Certificate of Authenticity with the art. This is just one small operation out of thousands of other fraudulent (but professional looking) websites out there selling pirated goods to unsuspecting consumers.
* I have a bad feeling about the game length of Diablo 3. It looks like leveling in the game is too quick (e.g. Lvl 30 by Act 2), and each of the Acts will be much shorter than Diablo 2. It's almost as if the difficulty levels were created to extend the length of the game rather than for re playability purposes like in D2. I really hope we won't be seeing too many "this game is too short" reviews. I may have to look into this a bit more to see if Blizzard has made any recent comments about the game length.
* Did some researching and found out that each Act is about 2 hours long. So, that's 8 hours for a full playthrough of the game and then you can go back and do it again and again on different difficulty levels. According to Blizzard, you will be able to complete the difficulty levels faster as you progress too, so Nightmare and Hell will take less than 8 hours. That sounds rather disappointing and I hope it's not accurate. Each play through should be at least 25-30 hours in length (not 8), and then shorter periods for each followup difficulty excluding Inferno. It really worries me that the game is going to be too short now and will rely on Auction House metagames and simply replaying the exact same game again but with NPC palette swaps..
On a related note, the reason why they only need players to test such a small section of Diablo 3 in the beta is because D3 is much easier to manage, test, and QA than WOW. D3 has a very small fraction of thousands of WOW quests and gameplay mechanics. A small QA team can easily spellcheck and test everything in the game over a short period of time. The only testing that's really needed from us is for load, server, and technical reasons.
The RockstarToronto.com and RockstarVancouver webpages are no more, they've taken them down and are now being re directed to the main Rockstargames.com website. Those are the only two sites I had followed, but if there were any other independent Rockstar websites, they would all have been changed as well.
The new Rockstar Toronto website has also been updated with the following statement: "Presently, Rockstar Toronto is working away on multiple titles, including the forthcoming Max Payne 3."
They been hiring many new employees over the past few months, for both console and PC positions. Once Max Payne 3 is finally completed, we'll have a much better idea of the other titles they're working on. Hopefully RDR PC.
The Rockstar Vancouver page mentions that they're only working on Max Payne 3 right now. Rockstar has been very quiet about the MP3 development progress and there hasn't been a release date although it's suspected to be late 2012. It's been delayed multiple times so far.
Rockstar Vancouver has been hiring for Audio/Gameplay Programmer and Level Scripter/QA positions over the past several months. I can't tell if they are hiring for the same position over and over though. All of the other Rockstar divisions are currently hiring, but Vancouver has nothing on their job board as of today. Rockstar Toronto, though, has been on hiring blitzes all year for several different jobs and they're still hiring.
That raises an eyebrow. Everyone is hiring except for Rockstar Vancouver, they're only working on Max Payne 3, possibly hiring for a couple replacement jobs only, it's been delayed multiple times, and Rockstar doesn't like talking about it.
Rockstar just announced (a day before the webpage changes) that they'll be presenting at the upcoming 8th Annual Equity Growth Conference. It will be taking place on September 13, 2011. I'm not expecting any big announcements from this conference.. the only thing that came out of last years talk was that "Kids Are Embarrassed To Play Wii According To Take-Two". However, a few weeks later there were huge shake ups within Take Two, and Ben Feder (the guy who gave the talk at G7 Equity Growth) stepped down as CEO of Take Two.
I wonder if there will be any other shake ups (e.g. firings or layoffs) this coming October or sooner. September might be a good time to sell stock and then purchase back in November at a lower value. :)