Wildman at Bay: Inside Chris Taylor's Fight to Save Gas Powered Games
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Even now, Taylor isn't sure what he should have done differently in 2012. It was shaping up to be a great year. Age of Empires Online was going strong, but Taylor knew he couldn't stake his whole company on AoEO, so he had already taken care to line up a number of other contracts for different publishers. Heading into the fall, Gas Powered had four months' worth of (burn) in the bank, the operating costs needed to sustain the studio, and its health seemed more secure than it had in years.
But it never rains. Not only did Microsoft inform Gas Powered that they had decided to suspend development on Age of Empires Online, but suddenly Gas Powered's other contracts started falling apart. Right now there's a small team at Gas Powered completing work on a project that Taylor is sure will never see the light of day, just to fulfill a contract with a publisher.
Suddenly Gas Powered's cash reserves represented a life meter, a timer counting down on how long the company had to save itself. To reduce the outflow, Taylor laid off a significant portion of the company. In retrospect, he suspects he should have cut deeper. But he couldn't.
(We laid off thirty people in October and in December,) he explains. (Two rounds of layoffs. But every round is painful. And every round, you cut closer and closer to the bone. You're getting into the people who've been with the company for five years, ten years. You're getting closer to the people who have invested themselves in the company. So you hang on.)
