Crispy Gamer burns employees, CEO and Community

January 22nd, 2010 Comments

So Crispy Gamer bought gamerDNA in the fall. As I’m sure you noticed, the community management is now completely gone at gamerDNA. There haven’t been any updates to the site, blog, twitter account, etc. Crispy Gamer of course has kept running ads on the network- since that’s what they really care about. They basically did exactly what Curse, IGN and other networks do best- buy up good website, gut them for their ad revenue and leave it to become a ghost town.

And then yesterday, the Board chooses to fire the entire editorial staff of Crispy Gamer, and the CEO of CG resigns.

So now Crispy Gamer will have no editorial content, gamerDNA has no development or community management- and the Board has a nice ad network to fill their pockets.

Also, because of the way that stock options work, probably few people were vested for any meaningful amount, which means the investors and board are likely the only ones with shares that matter at all- and of course will be the sole ones to benefit from the ad revenues.

And as always, the board members keep their jobs, compensation, etc

Good job! Way to fuck over not one, but two communities, your CEO and awesome employees!

And of course CG has been completely silent about this on their site, Twitter feed, board, etc. Way to go for transparency! Layoffs don’t have to go down like this, you can always be open and honest like Zappos did when they had to do layoffs the other year.

I am a former gamerDNA employee- for whatever that matters. All of this is public information that’s been posted in various places around the internet.

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  • The real culprit probably isn't just the Board of CG, but rather the investors (who probably comprise 70% of the board).

    2009 was an outright shitty year for VC funding. It certainly wasn't doing gamerDNA any favors and even though CG got a bit recently I heard they were burning through it like it was kindling.

    Most of the venture cycle is broken and neither company was actually making appreciable money from day 1. That's hard to do, and bucks much of the initial 'web 2.0' model, but basically if you weren't printing money in 2009, then you weren't getting much for funding.

    What pisses me off is how CG treated the situation. The zero transparency kinda gets to me. At least be honest with us. They bought gDNA probably with the intention of just running an ad network and firing all their editorial- they just finally pulled the trigger.
  • Sonofabitch! Way to drive a coffin nail into what used to be one of the most rocking Gamer communities like, ever.

    There was a time a lot of us were passionate about GamerDNA, myself being one. A lot of us I've noticed have felt the site has gone bland, slow, and a bit of a ghost town. We all keep in touch via Twitter or elsewhere, but still.....

    Now I see the crispity, crunchity disgusting side of what went down. Bummer.
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