Redundancies as Ignition Closes London Studio

At 4.30 pm on Novemebr 1, 2010 Ignition Entertainment Corporate Managers came in with the police and closed down its entire operations in GAINESVILLE FLORIDA. All 70 employees including executive management was told to cioollect their personal stuff and vacate the premises. They have spent $23m on REICH and it is a flop. Of the 9 levels only levels 1 and 2 are completed. It would be difficult to outsource the rest of the game since the other stages are partially completed. Past management staff has mismanaged the funds. There was no corporate monitoring on spending.

the armed police were a buzz kill for the interviews corporate management conducted yesterday and today for the new team in austin. hard to be interested in working at a company where management thinks it's cool to flush a building of employees with police with guns

Never before seen Reich art from a reliable source an artist who worked on the game.

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Unfortunately the art director and artist who worked on these resigned from the company when Paul Steed and Exigent an outsource studio were brought in to help with management, this was a disaster Steed was a drunk and abused the employees verbally and physically he was eventually fired by Ignition. The blame falls all on the shoulder of Vijay Chadha ceo of ignition who from the start put a 24 year kid named Jeremy Stieglitz in charge of the whole studio a boy barely out of college who could not even balance his check book let alone a multi-million dollar AAA game. Stieglitz spent millions on getting employees to little s**t land Gainesville Flkorida paying thousands to fly them down for interviews and hiring no talents and giving them outlandish salaries. The biggest mistake of all was when Vijay Chadha CEO with pressure from UTV their parent company and the 60% Disney shareholders suits wanted Ignition to present a premature slice of the game “Reich” to MICROSOFT AND SONY, the visuals werent ready nor the game play as it was all a mess. Chadha who was known to be a defender and friend to the creative spirit bent and got plugged in the ass by the Mouse. In the end 23 million was wasted on poor planning, untalented managers greedy producers and on a game director who was still wiping the milk off his mouth from sucking on his moms tit.
Janus by the way was the name of the original hero of the Reich game.

You got it right about that Paul Steed, he was video'd by the staff after crapping his pants during a long cocaine binge, he was also caught with a prostitute in the studio.

A complete t**t who couldnt conduct business if it bit him on the ass.

This comes as no surprise. It's been a couple years since I left Ignition Florida behind, and the friends I have that still worked there when the studio was shut down had nothing but horror stories throughout Reich's development.

1) Laying off/firing talented and seasoned developers, and hiring untalented ones to replace them at lower salaries to cut costs. Result: the game was redesigned from scratch 3 times (maybe more), after millions had already been dumped into each iteration.

2) The game went through several art directors and 3 game directors (hence, 3 reboots). The aforementioned Jeremy was the first, and while he had a vision for the game, it was a terrible one. He would constantly edit the story that the writers would come up with to insert his own stupid ideas. He couldn't keep his hands off of any aspect of development, sometimes even editing code (which would break things for unknown reasons until the engineers found out what he had done). He had no sense of how to design a game from start to finish. He had no concept of money management -- even once even throwing himself a housewarming party on the company dime and spending nearly $3000 on alcohol alone.

3) Paul Steed. I don't know too much about him, since he came on board right before I bailed. What I do know is that he always smelled like booze. I got a call a few months back from a friend at the company that told me an incredible story. The story of how Paul got himself fired. One night, an engineer was working late and when he went to leave, he found Paul drunk and passed out cold against the studio doors. When he reached down to wake him up, Paul punched him square in the face, knocking him down. As soon as corporate found out, he was fired immediately. I was then told that finding Paul in various states of drunkenness throughout the day was a common occurrence.

4) Again, the revolving door. People kept going in and out of the company like a (no pun intended) drunk tank. This wasted an incredible amount of money.

5) Several months ago, I called a friend of mine that still worked there and asked how the game was going (post-Steed departure). He said that they had literally just been sitting around for weeks, waiting to be told what game to make. Again, waste of money.

In the end, nothing went right. Nothing. There were some very talented guys there at various stages of the first iteration, which I was a part of, but things went to s**t incredibly quickly when we realized our game director had no idea how to direct a game. I'm glad I left when I did. I never looked back. Good f**king riddance, I say.

Oh, and here is some more concept art from the first iteration of the game:

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Yhea the project was doomed from the get go. I think there were two types of employess at Ignition. Those who were loyal to Jeremy from Artificial studios and those who were suckered in by promises of quick raises and being a part of a ground breaking game production. Corporate didn't give a rats ass about the employees nor thier families who some moved cross country to be in the swamps of Gainseville. Those concept samples don't look to shabby, from what I hear the stuff Steed and Exigent put out was s**t, big breasted bimbos which had Steeds prints all over them. Hopefully game people will stay away from the likes of Ignition and Douche bag Steed. Any company who uses armed men to fire employees has to be f**kin insane or think they are a military regime, be for real. Our prays go out to all the x-employees and their families. If anyone else has a story about their experiences at Ignition Florida come forward speak up don't be afarid whats the worse they can do? fire you? it's already been done.

Wow - I interviewed w/ them last year - thank God it never went anywhere. I had already heard tons about Paul Steed, none of it good, so when they mentioned his involvement, I knew they didn't know wtf they were doing. At the time, they were talking about a release 6 months later, and it sounded like they were still in pre-production - another warning sign.

Hey Some guy, you were the lucky one friend. Many weren't so lucky they got verbally abused and some physically by Steed who in a drunk rage punched a programmer for no reason who was working late one evening. He also got into a fight with another employee but that time he got punched in the eye and had to be hospitalized I think he got knocked out cold by a guy bigger then him named Chris who was the office manager. Steed has a reputation of getting drunk at bars and fighting small weak programmers. His other love is crapping in his pants from being so intoxicated from what I hear.
can you imagine:
Whats that smell? oh it's our boss, don't mind it, once the flies go away it passes.

Heh some leaked game play as popped up

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Looks intense

That was what it looked like at the time that I left, so I assume it's the first iteration. That was the level supposedly demoed to Sony and Microsoft.

It's a shame this went under as the game had great potential. The problem was that Ignition took a great, small independent outfit and decided to immediately grow them into a big-money AAA studio without stopping to think that it might not be a good idea.
When the game tech was in working state it was golden. You could sit in a single big box room and just play with the game mechanics for hours. If the game had made it to market without losing that playability it would have been a monster hit.
Jeremy needed a good right-hand man to curb his worst tendencies and let him focus on what he is good at. Instead he eneded up surrounded with the incompetent, the deranged and a bunch of massive egos. Some of these egos were "untouchable" and interefered with the game's direction. Hiring exceptionally talented artists from non-gaming backgrounds can work well (see those concept pics?) but not when they end up thinking they're running the show and start violating every practice that's needed to make a game dev studio function properly. This is a common theme with Reich and Wardevil.
Having seen the way people were relocated to Florida then hit with pay cuts, changes of responsibility etc. it's no wonder morale was shot. There isn't a team in the world that could have "risen above" the crap that was going on there.
I left Ignition not long after the move to the new building in Gainesville. I was tired of all the lies, egotism and rank incompetence and the effect that was having on a team that had a great kernel of talented devs. Since then it's just been one more sick/hilarious story after another.
Everyone affected has my sympathy.

I posted this in another news thread about the story on a diff. site, and am reposting it here.

I worked at Ignition from between august '09 till mid-may '10

Everything being mentioned so far is 100% true.
Paul Steed is a ultra douchebag of the highest caliber.

Storytime

Early this year, we almost got him fired. Almost. By that point all the complaints about steed had finally reached some boiling point with his superiors at UTV. All the hostile workplace complaints, pending sexual harassment claims, and numerous complaints about his mismanagement of resources and personnel, had forced UTV to step in. Paul had found out about this visit by the corporate guys and had initially tried to cherry pick who would be interviewed, obviously so that he could pick the few people that were in his club of lapdogs. However UTV insisted on interviewing the entire departments. The Wednesday prior to the Monday corporate visit, Paul, probably seeing that s**t was going bad for him, got ridiculous drunk late that night on the office premises, wandered around, urinated on things, and threw up on one of the building entrances before passing out. Then reflexively sucker punched someone who tried to help him up. This was caught on security cam. He never showed up to work the next day, by that afternoon though almost everyone heard what had happened. Friday, our internet goes down for an hour and a very anxious looking paul steed immediately afterwards calls a meeting and makes a grand show about how he believes our internet was "SABOTAGED" and that he would personally look into the security camera footage to find the culprit. Of course most people saw through his plan to get his hands on the security camera footage, too bad for him it had been seen by HR the previous day and already sent off to UTV. During the monday interviews with UTV. The whole studio pretty much threw Paul under the bus. it was glorious.

However due to his conflict of interest type situation where he owned the outsourcing studio that we used, he was almost like an inoperable brain tumor, we couldn't totally be rid of him. So instead he got knocked down about 3 positions from the top and forced to work from home indefinitely, and was replaced by a guy who looked like sawyer from LOST.

Paul though, being the douche that he was couldn't leave well enough alone. The entire time that he was working from home, he was trying to sneak his fingers back into the old pies, and handle stuff that he wasn't supposed to be handling anymore, bribing people with offers of doing their more preferred styles of work, or better arrangements, to slowly rebuild his power. All the while bragging about "how much tail he gets when he travels to china by lying to girls about green cards" (he's a married man with a family btw) or mentioning how "when he gets back in charge he's firing all the bitches!" and that "Women weren't worth the trouble to hire anymore."

This went on for a few months. Then around 2 weeks before i left, Paul just kinda disappeared with a very white washed email about exploring other options or some crap like that. We figured at the time he either got tired of being sidelined or UTV finally found out how to can his ass. Rumor has it he actually just got drunk at a bar, got into a fight, and attacked the cop that was called to break up the fight, and that he couldn't post bail. Though i can't find confirmation on that, it sounds like something Paul would do.

I'm at least thankful to Paul for one thing, his bullshit was what gave me the drive to go freelance to get the hell out of there.

Also, he still owes me 1 airsoft gun i lent him for a mocap shoot that he broke, and promised to replace but didn't >:(

Lets not pretend that Jeremy didn't have faults and put the blame on everyone else around him. The concept artists actually saved the game development from being ditched in a major presentation to Ignition corporate UTV in 2008. Some 8 million or more was poured into the studio at that milestone. If this did not happen many employees would probably have been canned and development stalled. Jeremy didn't need a "right hand man" because he had two left hands and was pretty much crippled by his lack of mangerial skills, he needed experience working under someone who knew how to direct a AAA game, unfortunately he didn't have that and Paul Steed wasn't the answer. Jeremys a brilliant guy and an awesome programmer and I think with some time he will develop into a decent game director but at that time he was not ready. We wish him well with Trendy. It is however deeply sad that so many people lost their jobs and that the game may never see the light of day.