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Leonerdo
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Leonerdo
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I believe there's been some instances of what you could call "bad" poaching though where a company is doing it to another for the sole purpose of putting them out of business, taking all their talent. That's kind of fucked up.
What Steven said wasn't poaching though, that was just spreading the word about open positions. He's been doing that for years now. There's a lot of turnover in the tech industry, and in particular right now a lot of layoffs, so getting the word out there is good for the company that needs employees and for the potential people looking for a job.
I don't think any company in the game-making business is above poaching from other companies, Intrepid included. Good developers (fit for the particular company) aren't a dime a dozen, so I expect things to get a little cut-throat. People can argue the ethics of it of course, but it's legal and probably very prevalent.
I guess I'm more worried about how he asked it. Asking fans to be "de-facto recruiters" for him and suggesting that people "evangelize" Ashes.
AoC doesn't need anymore implications of being a cult...
Nothing nefarious here.
Its really disappointing to see how some people think, then try make out like everyone thinks like that.
I think people who try to spin everything in such a way are the actual problem. Steven said in the context of the lay offs in the industry that players can spread the word of Intrepid still recruiting.
If this kind of paranoid doomer mentality is the standard to go by now, then we can just sack all future projects of any kinds because "we wouldn't want some rando to twist the intention to the most malicious thing possible".
I literally said "I'm not sure how other people interpreted it. What do y'all think?" How the fuck do you want me to raise concerns to be more palatable to you?
I asked a question. Y'all answered, I said okay cool, guess I'm overreacting. What is the problem with that? God forbid anyone ever cast the tineist doubt about Steven's Golden leadership.
There's a guy named Cliff Breczinski. He was the guy behind the video games Lawbreakers and Radical Heights. Radical Heights was a battle royale game during the height of BR craze, 2017-2018ish. It shut down I think a few months after it launched. It was competing directly against Fortnite and Pubg.
Cliff Breczinski accused Epic games, the creators of Fortnite, of poaching his company's devs.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/radical-heights/cliffyb-epic-poaching-boss-key-employees
Whether that's true or not, who knows. The employees in question apparently deny they were poached. But if it is true, then that'd be an instance of unethical, but not illegal poaching. It's a large company (Epic), with vast financial resources, poaching the devs of a smaller company, in order to suppress the competition that the smaller company's game can bring. It's generally only illegal when it's done for the purpose of obtaining another company's sensitive info or trade secrets from the poached employees. But it can be unethical without being illegal.
What's weird is if you google search "cliff breczinski poaching fortnite," nothing comes up, literally nothing. If you search it on duckduckgo, all kinds of news articles from the time come up. Google is known to censor, but I don't know why they'd censor this. Google and Epic have their own legal battles and animosity, some of which is still ongoing I believe.