Is Microsoft in panic mode after Sony's PS4 reveal?

[drkohler]

DirtyP2002 said:

It is not about about a few developers leaving, like you mentioned with Rare (Or Naughty Dog and Sucker Punch developers joined MS), it is about closing entire studios. And no, Sony did not just relocate most of the devs. They offered some of them a new position, but they did not absorb a lot of them.

Imagine you are in the situation of a developer of Zipper and you actually get an offer from Sony to work. You can chose between bein unemployed or work in a new city miles away. This is still a very bad situation to be in.

Unfortunately the games software industry is a brutal place, like many other places. If your company made a good game for X, that doesn't guarantee that you now have a job for life working for X, or Y or Z. The cycle starts at zero. Companies that are surviving have at least several projects in various stages, but even that cannot guarantee that you survive should any of those projects fail. Developing games means an exciting life - sometimes because making the game is great, more often because you don't know where you are in a year or two. A lot of burnt-out people lie on the paths to glory, I'd suppose.