I thought this would be interesting to the concept and digital artists that frequent Sumea, but there are other issues that this incident has raised up (well, to the 1up article anyway) concerning offshore expanding and outsourcing.
If you can't be bothered reading my summary, you should just head on over to the [url="http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152235"]1up story[/url]. [;)]
There's currently a huge stink happening over at [url="http://www.massiveblack.com/mbNew/index.shtml"]Massive Black Inc[/url], one of the predominant concept art outsource companies in the games industry.
Anyone else here visit www.conceptart.org? Of course you do [:)] It's the best concept art community site on the net. The founders of that site made the leap and created Massive Black Inc in 2002.
They do stuff for film and games, like Killzone 2, Hellgate: London, and Battlefield 2142. They do a tonne of work for the games industry, some of their clients include the like of Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Activision, id Software and Midway. The people working at Massive Black are incredibly talented folk, and the company has been pretty successful, and they've only been around for a few years. They even recently expanded and opened up a new studio in Shanghai.
This is where it all turns bad. Those who were heading the Shanghai studio were siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the studio (and another $50,000 after they were sacked!), and they were taking business and clients away to fuel their own company they had set up (called "Studio Takeover"!). Of course, that work was completed using the employees of the Shanghai studio whilst still under Massive Black's payroll, and using Massive Black's equipment and resources as well. [:0] A lot of other dodgy stuff included false bank and tax records, over-reporting expenses etc. The level of greed seen here is pretty extraordinary.
quote:Chen and others who are presently under investigation, formed a conspiracy to transfer Massive Black's business (including inter alia, clients, employees, intellectual property and revenues) to a new business owned by them.
From Oct. 2005-June 30, 2006, Zhang, Chen and their coconspirators removed more than $100,000 in cash from Massive Black and placed it in a secret account.
James Xi Zhang (head of the Shanghai Studio) was vice president of Massive Black Inc, and you can check out his work at.. http://www.jzconcepts.com/