Potential New Studio to Form From RTW Redundancies

23 of the 60 Realtime World staff who were working on the social gaming universe Project: MyWorld have seemingly been rehired by an unknown figure who is looking to form a studio around the game. The administrator of the company, Begbies Traynor, has said that there has been “considerable interest from potential buyers” since the studio went bust.

Project: MyWorld, a Realtime Worlds property, looks to create a virtual version of the real-life world, including cities and buildings, with its website describing it as: “a platform for creating a virtual version of the real world and combining it with 3D online gaming and social networks and media.”

Through this, a new studio is allegedly being be set-up, based around MyWorld which had a spring 2011 release date. GI.biz claims that the staff will remain in the current RTW Dundee studios, with an anonymous source saying that: “the new deal and that it was just a matter finalising the paperwork.”

The source continued: “The entire MyWorld team was called in for a meeting yesterday, during which people found out who was being rehired.”

More details are likely to emerge over the next week, but if the reports are accurate then we can hope that at least 23 of the former RTW staff are getting their jobs back.

Labour MP and potential leader Ed Balls commented on the closure and, in my opinion, used it as a platform to promote his party’s push for tax relief and said:

This follows the scrapping of a tax relief in George Osborne’s Budget without industry consultation or discussion, despite it being vital to keeping thousands of jobs in Dundee and surrounding areas.

While I think it’s a little spurious to link RTW’s demise to tax relief his point still stands about removing the effects of moving relief. Like I said though, it’s kind of a just an ad for Labour’s lip service.

As a side note (and this is meta videogame press stuff), a couple of websites (Eurogamer and Develop) have reported this story with a slightly misleading headline. Gi.biz quotes the same source as above as saying:

All the APB team – over a 100 people – were told to gather in a meeting room. And then the names of those who were being made redundant were read out over a microphone, and they had to leave the room one-by-one and collect their redundancy package.

The specific bit is “were read out over a microphone”. Two sites have used the word “tannoy” when reporting the story, which is actually subtly misquoting the source as a tannoy suggests people sitting at their desks and finding out of the blue from a announcement PA. While that very well may be the case, the quote doesn’t support that assumption and “tannoy” is misleading. They could have used a microphone so that the 100 people in the room could all hear what was going on, but that’s speculation on my part.

I contacted Develop writer Will Freeman via Twitter who agreed with the distinction, but the story hasn’t been altered yet. I also reached out to the GI.biz reporter Johnny Minkley for clarification of the source’s meaning. He told me via Twitter that it was “a case of names of retained employees read out.” (My emphasis.) That differs from the other reports which say they were “fired” by microphone. He didn’t elaborate as to what context they were read out, but did note that “I never referenced a ‘tannoy’ in my original report.” Eurogamer has since removed tannoy from their report.

I’m not hounding the sites (I’ll leave GJAIF to that), just pointing out the significance of the semantics in reporting, especially with such as sensitive issue (for an idea, look at the Eurogamer comments). The fact that they were told enmasse rather than individually could be a story, but it’s still too speculative for my personal liking as we don’t know any of the details.

I’m sure this story is going to develop very quickly over the next few days, so keep an eye on it. Let’s hope that as many as employees as is possible can get back into work, especially in such a precarious economy.