Un-job status update, 2024
Friday, April 12, 2024
Comments: 16 (latest 24 hours later)
Tagged: job, life, possibility space, prytania
Well, that was a pretty good four months.
Prytania Media's first subsidiary has been closed 'without warning'
Prytania co-founder Jeff Strain attributed the closure of Possibility Space to an incoming report from Kotaku's Ethan Gach.
-- gamedeveloper.com, April 12
That "incoming report" is the same one mentioned by Annie Strain -- Jeff's spouse and the other co-founder -- in her post last week. (Wayback link because they yanked it after a couple of days.)
Note that, by their own words, both Jeff and Annie are upset about an unreleased article. In fact, about what might be in an unreleased article. An unreleased article about the closure of Crop Circle games, a studio I did not work for. (Crop Circle, Possibility Space, and a couple of others were sibling studios under an umbrella called Prytania Media.)
Yeah, I have no idea either. Keep an eye out for future journalism on this mess. I'm sure it will be fun reading, in some sense.
In the meantime, I guess I'm available for work again!
Comments from Mastodon
@zarfeblong Ah, crap. (I know you’ve heard it from others - sorry.)
@zarfeblong That sucks. I interviewed there a year ago and was excited to see where y'all went with it when you were ready to announce.
I am still somewhat reeling, but more grounded folks point out:
If you look at the CEO’s letter, it doesn’t actually blame the closure on the Kotaku reporter. It says the funder “expressed low confidence they would be willing to invest”. There’s a lot of circling around “leaks” and “confidentiality”, but what it *says* is that the money got cut off. No money, no studio.
https://twitter.com/sweetpotatoes/status/1778837645797335183 (Nicole Carpenter) for the text I’m talking about.
@zarfeblong Sorry to hear you got fired so abruptly and for such profoundly banal-sounding reasons!
@evan Thanks. It seems more likely that the real reason is “money” but the letter goes off in some directions before saying that.
@zarfeblong I saw the news a bit earlier today and was really surprised. I'm really sorry for the closure, and I hope you and your colleagues will be ok.
@zarfeblong this is the dumbest goddam thing, they didn’t deserve you, and I’m sorry you had to find out this way.
@zarfeblong oh fudge :(