Mademoiselle Kit
We were promised figures. Is there a chance these figures will come to light?
You did not address whether or not zomg was making profit or not, the big issue about this. If Zomg was failing, give us the numbers. Otherwise, we are going to look at anything posted by a staff member in a skeptical light.
Since this concerns the game WE LOVE and its future, I'm afraid we will need cold, hard facts before we are satisfied. Was it in the black? Was it in the red? These conflicting statements are making it hard to trust anyone right now. I hope you can see the dilemma we are in.
We are going to need facts before we back down. If it was in the red, then why hide it? Show us, and while we will be sad, we will back down. But all this secrecy about the numbers is making me suspect the latter, and the idea that Gaia might be hiding this fact makes me very upset and angry.
I never wanted to believe Gaia would lie to me, but after this...well, I hope you can understand my dilemma. Only will facts before my eyes convince me otherwise.
In conclusion: Your post did not give us the answers we were seeking. Please try again.
I can't say enough how much I love the zeal you have for this. <3 I'm a stubborn b*****d (dark can testify), and I don't like backing down on something important to me. Seeing how passionately you stand up for this makes me feel like going outside the office and picketing at the entrance for statistics. But something I've been reminded of the last few days is that it's critical to weigh the benefit of an action against the cost.
Sharing zOMG's detailed numbers has the benefit of enlightening the community about why Gaia has to make certain decisions. I love the idea of everyone being able to see why we do what we do. It would add to community confidence and give people a better understanding of what it takes to run a business. But for people to understand why an engineer or artist would be assigned to zOMG or some other project, we'd need to share the financial details of those other projects as well. And if some of those projects were future projects, we'd need to share information about our past projects that were similar, specific marketing costs, user growth, expected revenue growth, etc. We'd end up basically divulging most of Gaia's financials.
And what's the cost of just opening up Gaia's books and sharing everything? Well, that one hits Gaia pretty hard. First off, this would be a huge invasion of some people's privacy. It would require posting salaries, expenses, and other things that allow people to figure out personal info of our staff. Even if we posted it anonymously it wouldn't be hard to figure out who makes what given that some projects have just one or two people on them.
Second, it would expose Gaia's plans and strategies to competitors. Gaia is trying to make money (which is good for everyone here) by making facebook and mobile games. We're also still being challenged by other forum sites. These markets are pretty cutthroat. If some company saw how much we spend per project, how efficient our marketing is, how much we make per player, how much we're investing in future products or a ton of other info that could be inferred, they'd have a huge advantage over us. There are thousands of ways they could use the knowledge to play our own game better than us. They could hit us where we are weak. They could copy what we do well. Gaia needs to keep its financial numbers within the company.
So I know you guys mean only the very best in demanding to see the numbers. And I admire your feistiness more than you know! But I already got too specific and it's not a good decision for Gaia to let that snowball. We need you guys to trust us on this one.
Gaia tries really hard to make decisions that a responsibly business would make. And we'll all do our best to hold each other accountable to this. Pirate's honor!
-Swarf
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