It has already been mentioned that CIG is in progress of trying to pool their human resources in their various studios around the world. This puts more people with a similar set of skills and focus in the same place, avoiding some of the natural roadblocks of working with people in a different timezone. From a producer's perspective could you give any examples of how this organizational change has produced SC content more efficiently. Has this affected the speed/quality at which the Freelancer has been remodeled for instance?asked by AragornBH

That's a very specific question!

I'm wondering why he asked this specific question!

You can use the sound team as an example on this.

So this one is a good question. I know a lot of people have wanted to know more after Chris sent that email out to inform how this was going to work. People like to read what is said and then what's between the lines and there was no real reading between the lines on this one; it was truly just looking at the business, looking at the project and seeing what's best for us to do it as fast, as cheap as we can: which we're always doing! Every day we're doing that! Every hour we're doing that! So you're going to see changes and in normal game development this happens: you go through and you revamp the team.

The previous places I worked we revamped or reorged every year, every six months! It's pretty common because you learn so much more: like I know how to make that ship faster so I don't need so many people, or I need more people, or whatever the case may be. It's just the nature of business.

Have we seen anything? So this is in process of happening right now! We are talking about it because it was just announced and these things just don't happen [snaps fingers] over night! But we are moving quickly on them, so for instance one of the examples is we looked at our amazing audio team, the majority of them if not all of them (except for one) is out in the UK led by Lee Banyard. It's a fantastic team, they deliver quality stuff and they are very quick. The turnaround is very quick and their communication is solid and yadda, yadda, yadda: all the things that make teams great.

And their all in one place together.

And their all in one place together. And I think that was one of the things that when you see "why are they doing so well?", Well they're all in one place together. They're always together. So when things come up they just turn and they get it fixed so they don't have to wait twenty four hours for an email to come back. So that's a lot of the things we're doing: just putting little things in place that make sense. So we'll still have our multiple studios because it still makes sense to have that but we are unifying and I think we'll start seeing the knock-on effects of that in the coming months.

Right.

Freelancer one specifically? You want to speak to that one?

I got nothing on that one!

I got nothing on that one as well. That's a great one: we'll look into that one and come back to you!