OMGPOP boss sparks Twitter fury by criticising former employee

Dan Porter should be a happy man now, having sold his company OMGPOP to Zynga for $180m. He?s not happy though: it seems he?s decidedly peeved at criticism of his new employers from the one employee who chose not to make the move post-acquisition.

?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 tweeted on Saturday (31-March), before following up with this: ?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??

What did Shay Pierce do to annoy Porter so much? He wrote this blog post about his reasons for not joining Zynga with the rest of the OMGPOP team.

You should read it in full, for the context, but here?s one of the choice passages: ?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. 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.?

Okay, it?s perhaps understandable why Porter disagreed. But his tweets have provoked a furious response from developers and gamers on Twitter, spurred in part by a response from Minecraft creator Markus Persson, who replied to Porter with a pithy tweet saying ?You?re an insane idiot?.

Many many others have followed, with plenty of promises to delete Draw Something from their smartphones and tablets.

Expect this row to rumble all week: by describing Pierce as ?the weakest one on the whole team?, Porter could find himself facing legal action from his former employee. Perhaps more importantly though, his reputation with the wider games development community is currently mud.

Then again, having sold your company for $180 million, with tens of millions of players who?ll never be aware of this controversy, perhaps Porter won?t be losing any sleep over the spat. Watch this space.

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