Boss of Draw Something dev OMGPOP explains Twitter outburst
"I got very emotional around the Shay Pierce stuff."
Dan Porter, CEO of Draw Something developer OMGPOP - recently purchased by Zynga - has spoken to Eurogamer this afternoon to clarify his controversial comments made on Twitter yesterday evening.
In these comments he spoke out against a critical article written for Gamasutra by former employee Shay Pierce.
"The one omgpop employee who turned down joining Zynga was the weakest one on the whole team. Selfish people make bad games. Good riddance," he had tweeted.
"What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many..."
A longer statement was then issued to Eurogamer clarifying Porter's opinion.
"I wanted to say that I got very emotional around the Shay Pierce stuff," he wrote.
"Because what happens is that the people who don't blog and who stick with the team and who give their sweat and tears on the game aren't the one who are in the press.
"They are the ones I am loyal to. They are the ones I wanted to celebrate. When a guy who doesn't work on Draw Something and who works on his own stuff takes the press away from the people who do their jobs and give everything it makes me upset. "
OMGPOP hit the headlines last week when social gaming behemoth Zynga bought the studio and its app-of-the-moment game Draw Something. Zynga paid out $180 million for the 40 person-strong New York studio, plus an additional $30 million in employee retention payments. Draw Something is reportedly raking in around $250,000 a day.
The only employee at OMGPOP who refused to sign a new contract following the studio's acquisition was Pierce, who in his guest blog explained that he felt uncomfortable compromising his ideals to sign up with the controversial FarmVille developer, and that his would-be employer had shown a lack of flexibility during contract negotiations.
Pierce then went on to explain exactly why he has such a problem with Zynga, pointing at the developer's much-maligned reliance on game cloning and exploitative payment models. "An evil company is trying to get rich quick, and has no regard for the harm they're doing along the way. It's not making things of value, it's chasing a gold rush," he wrote.
"An evil game company isn't really interested in making games, it's too busy playing a game - a game with the stock market, usually. It views players as weak-minded cash cows; and it views its developers as expendable, replaceable tools to create the machines that milk those cows."