Electric Sheep Company lays off 1/3 of their staff

by Moo Money Dec 17th 2007 at 5:15PM

Filed under: Real life, Business models, Economy, Events, real-world, Second Life

In a shocking blog entry today, Jeremy Flagstaff noted that the Electric Sheep Company has laid off approximately one-third of their staff, or about 22 people. It has been previously noted that ESC had to cut back on the number of islands for CSI: NY, and now both AOL Pointe and Pontiac are pulling out of Second Life. This news should come as no surprise, but it's still heartbreaking to hear that it happened so close to Christmas.

While it is not known at this time exactly why the layoffs occurred, Jeremy speculates that they will be focusing on technology like OnRez. Joel Greenberg, whose job status is unknown at this time, announced on Twitter that ESC is shutting down their virtual ad network project. In a prophetic blog entry written last week by Rez Menoptra, he speculated on how long builds will last in virtual worlds and who will remember them.

Massively will update you with the latest news on this topic as we hear it. Stay tuned!

Tags: aol-pointe, breaking, christmas, csi-new-york, csi-ny, electric-sheep-company, esc, jeremy-flagstaff, jeremy-vaught, joel-greenburg, linden-lab, pontiac, rez-menoptra, second-life, sl, twitter

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Valerie Williamson said on 7:09PM 12-17-2007

The Electric Sheep Company has gone through tremendous growth over the past year. We successfully serviced our great portfolio of clients and have built incredible applications to make virtual worlds easier. In 2008 we see the market shifting and have restructured our company to focus on large programs for our customers, while also building our own technology and software applications for virtual worlds. We are reorganizing our resources to better fit this focus and unfortunately that means losing some of our people. While this is difficult, we’re extremely positive about the future of the Metaverse and the company, and believe we have the best team in place to take The Electric Sheep Company and the industry to the next level.

Ghen said on 7:47PM 12-17-2007

"we hired a bunch of people and cut the ones who were either under-preforming or just couldn't do what we wanted"

Its ok to say, we all know it ;) Doesn't make the fired people bad, just wrong for your particular company.

Nacon said on 11:11PM 12-17-2007

"The Electric Sheep Company has gone through tremendous growth over the past year. We successfully serviced our great portfolio of clients and have built incredible applications to make virtual worlds easier."

I, on other hand.... don't think so. It's not a success if those clients are either lacking traffic by nearly Zero and or leaving SL for good.

I guess you could say it's a success to get`em suckers for paid commission job.

CSI:NY is still a failure while ton of SL residents has good success with steady traffic and profit flow in SL.

I can tell ESC is about to leave soon because most of the RL business clients they had (counting MOU's clients) are realizing their loss with SL-tards.

Harsh? Of course it is... but it's long over due.

Valerie Williamson said on 2:50AM 12-18-2007

Hi Nacon,
I would disagree, CSI is by far one of the most successful corporate experience to hit SL since it's inception. While CBS will not allow us to publicly state numbers, I can assure you that the numbers are very strong and continue to be so on a daily basis. There is a steady flow of large scale, daily traffic to the multiple sims up for this experience. Any experience that gets 4,000 visits per day seems pretty healthy to me.

It might be fun sport to trash experiences like CSI and others, but the fact of the matter is that these experiences attract new users to SL. And the ton of SL residents you mention above are benefiting from the users that content like CSI and I Am Legend continue to bring to SL.

Clients still like SL and feel that this is an innovative platform, we do here at ESC as well.

ESC has no intention of leaving SL, our focus is on opportunities like CSI and I Am Legend that drive new users into virtual worlds regardless of the platform.

Sansarya Caligari said on 11:28PM 12-17-2007

@ Nacon:

SL resident businesses have a much different goal than a corporation. SL residents want to pull money out of SL, it's hand-to-mouth profit. A Corporation wants image-building, it's PR for them to be in SL, or they want to be able to collaborate utilizing cutting-edge technology, meet with clients, meet with their employees, train, or recruit. ESC has done wonderful things for SL in terms of development, building a portfolio of what can be accomplished, and provided tremendous content for other residents. The problem lies with the instability of the grid and new people's ability to take the big leap on the learning curve to truly appreciate SL.

Pavig Lok said on 1:24AM 12-18-2007

It's sad to see ESC downscaling at this time and my good thoughts to out to the artists, techs and other folk facing retrenchment. When the original IT reshuffle of the late ninties and early noughties happened this was the fate of a lot of web folk too. Now after much pain and teething problems the web is a reliable bread and butter industry to work in.

I wish them all the best in their future endeavours and am sure the knowledge and skills they've gained in working for this new developing medium will promise them all a fine future. Several years down the track virtual worlds will be a solid business, and ESC's many innovators will remember fondly that they were there in the beginning, when the business was still predominantly experimental. Good luck to you all :)

dirvin said on 7:30PM 2-01-2008

My son-in-law is or maybe the word is, was, an employee of the Electric Sheep Company. He hasn't received a paycheck for the past two months, despite his continuing to do work for them and them accepting it. When he didn't receive a check today, 2/1/08, my daughter went on line and looked up ESC and found out there was a layoff in December and he wasn't informed he was laid off.
He has tried for two to three weeks to contact them to find out what is going on and they haven't bothered to reply. They have accepted his work, though.

I question their ethics about not telling him one way or the other if he is laid off. He has a wife and 2 1/2 year old son to support.
He could have been looking for a job for two months if they'd been honest.

skribe said on 4:22AM 12-18-2007

Yep, ESC will continue onward and upward because despite this setback they have superb people both 'in the trenches' and as motivators. And in the grand scheme of things that's what really matters.