I've seen quite a few people speculating that Chris Sims and Jennifer Clarke-Wilkes may not have been made redundant, but possibly fired for various reasons, or because contracts ended (given that Jennifer has been at WoTC for about 15 years, that latter guess was always going to be very unlikely!). For that reason, I feel it's a good idea to set things straight and find out exactly what happened; I'm sure neither want rumours like that to start! The short version: yep, they were lay-offs.
Chris Sims kindly shared with me that "Jennifer Clarke Wilkes and I were laid off on Wednesday the 28th. Our positions were eliminated, reducing the D&D team to eight people working directly on the tabletop game."
Hopefully that will put some speculation to rest! Here's the original article, for context.
Who makes up the 8 still working on the RPG? Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Jeremy Crawford, Greg Bilsland, Chris Perkins, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, Adam Lee.
The 8 does not include art or brand staff, including community manager Trevor Kidd, brand/marketing managers, Organized Play program managers and the like, which brings the number up to about 13.
As an interesting point of comparison, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens kindly shared that "We don't have any part time employees. The 25 full-time were folks that worked directly on Pathfinder products in design, development, editing and art. Currently, we are pushing 60 employees in the company and growing. In the next few months, we will be hiring more editors and developers to support Pathfinder. 2014 was our best year ever in both sales and profits. Still going up!"
Chris Sims kindly shared with me that "Jennifer Clarke Wilkes and I were laid off on Wednesday the 28th. Our positions were eliminated, reducing the D&D team to eight people working directly on the tabletop game."
Hopefully that will put some speculation to rest! Here's the original article, for context.
Who makes up the 8 still working on the RPG? Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Jeremy Crawford, Greg Bilsland, Chris Perkins, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, Adam Lee.
The 8 does not include art or brand staff, including community manager Trevor Kidd, brand/marketing managers, Organized Play program managers and the like, which brings the number up to about 13.
As an interesting point of comparison, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens kindly shared that "We don't have any part time employees. The 25 full-time were folks that worked directly on Pathfinder products in design, development, editing and art. Currently, we are pushing 60 employees in the company and growing. In the next few months, we will be hiring more editors and developers to support Pathfinder. 2014 was our best year ever in both sales and profits. Still going up!"
