Stardock’s Brad Wardell Talks Gas Powered Games and Wildman

After getting to know Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor quite well during their collaboration on Demigod, Stardock’s Brad Wardell is offering up his personal thoughts on the team’s Wildman Kickstarter project and the recent layoffs that were necessary in order to keep the company running long enough to see the results of the make-or-break crowdfunding campaign. If they add some new incentives to bump my pledge above the $125 mark, I’ll be throwing some more money their way:

Chris Taylor has run Gas Powered Games in a way that most people claim they wish companies were run. He has always run GPG as a compassionate person who cares deeply about each person he works with.

It’s not just a studio. It’s a company that was founded by people who have seen the cut-throat ways of the game industry and decided to do things differently. They’ve made some great games over the years Dungeon Siege. Supreme Commander and yes, Demigod to name 3.

One of the things most people don’t know about GPG is that one of the biggest challenges they’ve had is that for every game project you hear about there’s often a project that got canceled that you didn’t hear about. That is, big publisher X contracts studio Y to make a game and half way through there’s some re-org at the publisher and they kill the game. So what does the studio do with all those extra people? MOST studios would just lay those people off. Not Chris Taylor. He would go to heroic lengths to try to keep everyone he could. He’d find some other project for them to work on even if it meant he would personally suffer financially to do it. He really cares about providing a stable environment for his people. He puts them first over his own interests.

I’ve seen people online (wrongly) claim that GPG has struggled because of game X or game Y. That’s that even remotely the truth. The truth is that their struggles have come from the games you’ve never heard of that got canceled by a major publisher leaving GPG holding the bag. It’s the plight of many studios and it’s why there are so few of them left. The fact that GPG has been so successful for the past decade is a testament to Chris Taylor and his management team’s skill.

Chris Taylor is universally admired and respected in our industry because he’s an avatar of what our industry *could* be if we treated our employees, our partners and our customers better. It’s easy to stand on the outside and come up with “Well, they did A, B and C!” without realizing that behind the scenes, he was having to choose between terrible terrible options.