https://youtu.be/YEr5VfUydek

It is so over for Annapurna.

If you don’t know who Annapurna Interactive is, they’re essentially the A24 of video games. They were originally a division of Annapurna Pictures, which was founded by Megan Ellison, film producer of movies like Zero Dark Thirty, and also notably the daughter of Oracle co-founder and multi-billionaire Larry Ellison.

I want to be clear, Annapurna is a games publisher, not a developer. They are the ones that do all the marketing and distribution for the games that they sign, they are not the people actually making the games. Annapurna Interactive has published a lot of games that maybe you’ve heard of, games like Stray, Neon White, What Remains of Edith Finch, Cocoon, Outer Wilds, and they also published one of my favorite games of all time, Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition.

Also, they were profitable, which in this video games industry is very difficult.

So how did this all change? Well, last week we got news that 25 members of their staff, essentially their entire staff, except three people, resigned en masse. At the time, we only knew three things about why this might have happened.

1. Annapurna earlier this year made a deal with Remedy to publish the next Control game, as well as bring Control and Alan Wake to film and television.
2. There were talks to apparently spin out some portion of the company for some reason or another.
3. Lastly, Hector Sanchez, who was an early Annapurna leader, who left the company in 2019, had returned to the company in April from Epic Games.

Now last night, Rebekah Valentine at IGN published this incredible piece that you should absolutely go read. It’s called Inside Annapurna Interactive’s Mass Walkout: Internal Politics, The Surprise Remedy Deal, and Why It All Happened. I’m not going to be able to cover everything in that, and I don’t really think I should. But I am going to use that to give you a little bit of an understanding of what is happening here, so that I can tell you how I feel about it and the things that I think are going to happen from here on out.

Annapurna Interactive is created in 2016 out of Annapurna Pictures. And it starts with these three leaders, Nathan Gary, Deborah Mars, and Hector Sanchez. Sanchez leaves for Epic in 2019, and they bring in a person named Nathan Vella.

In 2019, Megan Ellison just up and leaves… disappears for like two years or something. Apparently this is a thing she would do, but never for this long. And if you read other articles that kind of pairs with this like temper and unexpected way of going about things that she would have, there’s a real undertone in some of these pieces that she was pretty difficult to work with. And part of that was her disappearing for a while. And remember the period of 2019 to 2021 is when Annapurna is continuing to build a reputation in the industry for publishing these small… or maybe call them indie video games. They are pumping out critical hits and also managing to make a profit in a video games industry where that’s more and more difficult.

Megan Ellison does return in 2021. She names Nathan Gary, the president of all of Annapurna. And then she puts Mars and Vella over interactive. And then as far as I can tell, just dips. I’m not 100% sure what her presence was, but that’s what it seems like. Gary then hires a person named James Masi into a leadership role that’s close to his over the whole of Annapurna.

And then earlier this year, Ellison decides that she wants to be hands-on again and fires James Masi and then essentially demotes Gary just to be the head of only Annapurna Interactive. Understandably, Gary leaves the company and then a bunch of other people resign in protest as well.

Ellison seemingly realizes that she fucked up and rehires everyone who left, including Gary and Masi. And then they start talking about spinning off a company from within Annapurna Interactive so that she can do things her way and Gary can do things in his.

Valentine in this article says that the company would have been called Verset, and it’s where most of Annapurna Interactive’s employees and existing work would go. Annapurna interactive would no longer be focused on small projects and would instead be going after AAA games. This is a spinoff that never happened. It apparently died. No one kept talking about it.

Different people have different feelings about why that is, but it does turn out that Ellison and Sanchez were still doing work as if it had happened because in August, Annapurna and Remedy Entertainment announced the deal that we talked about earlier. And literally no one at Annapurna interactive is aware of it except those two people. This, as well as Ellison starting to take more control over Annapurna Interactive, causes nearly everyone there including all of those leaders that we’ve talked about to sign a joint resignation letter and put in their two weeks notice. The only people left at Annapurna interactive are Megan Ellison, Hector Sanchez, and a person named Paul Doyle who came over with Sanchez from Epic Games.

Developers got no advanced warning that this is happening and Annapurna keeps saying that those developers have nothing to worry about.

To me the story has some holes but like what happened here is pretty clear. Annapurna’s ultra-wealthy founder got bored with the toy that she made and then abandoned it for two years. And then when she saw that Annapurna Interactive had established this brand and a business, she came back. Maybe she wanted to pull some of that goodwill into the film division which was struggling at the time. Then she mostly went away until something happened earlier this year.

If I had to guess that the thing that happened it’s probably that she started talking to the people at Remedy and that got her excited. Maybe she saw the signs of big AAA video games money instead of medium indie video games money. The part about her trying to spin out another company that’s essentially Annapurna interactive but without all the name recognition is just completely transparent to me. It seems like she wanted the name and the prestige to do the thing that was more interesting to her now and wanted to give the scraps to all the people that had been working to build that business to begin with. And then when that idea fell apart she just started doing what she wanted to anyway and rightfully the people who had built that brand and that business said “I’m out.”

Listen, I have gripes about Annapurna Interactive they often put themselves in front of the actual developers that are making the games. They get that name recognition because they fight for it over the name recognition of developers. And that’s not great but what happened to them is also not great.

If I had my way I’d hoped that they go build their own business after this, their own publisher, but the problem with that is that oftentimes that means being at the whims of another billionaire and whatever their specific idiosyncrasies are.

Who knows maybe they’ll find a way to make it work. In any case I hope that the games that Annapurna Interactive would have signed in the next few years find a way to get signed find a way to make their names in the world.

The stuff I care about is playing video games from people that are creative and making interesting and new things. If that keeps happening we don’t need Annapurna Interactive.

If you want to support me monetarily you can do that at ko-fi.com/matthorton and I’ll talk to you all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/09/21/annapurna-is-cooked/