Violet said:
THIS is what I'm worried about.
Some of you here who are gamers may have heard of a company called Sierra On-Line, Inc. If not, they were one of the biggest players in the computer game industry in the '80s and '90s and in the mid '90s they were the market share leader in that area. Their only competitors were EA and Microsoft. What they are most known for are their adventure game (games in the same genre as the Fate of Atlantas) series, such as King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and others.
After going public on NASDAQ in the late '80s they underwent, from 1990-1996, a period of rapid expansion driven mostly by acquisition. They acquired around 12 different, smaller studios, in all different areas of software; They allowed all of these studios to retain their own brand identity and gave them a large amount of creative autonomy, and allowed their acquired studios to retain their management and physical headquarters.
They began to overextend themselves. Where they were once a company which was driven by computer games, they began buying RTS game companies, home and garden software companies, cooking software companies, casual entertainment companies--In an effort to have their finger in every genre of the 1990s.
This growth (they went from 300 employees in 1991 to around 1,500 in 1996) made themselves a target for acquisition by even bigger companies. And in 1996 they were acquired by a direct marketing company, who turned out to be as corrupt as Enron (The name of the company was Cendant. Cendant also bought Blizzard Entertainment at the same time). The parent company used Sierra's name in their illegal dealings, and when all of the illegalities were discovered, much of Sierra's profitability was wiped out. Internally, there was a lot of mismanagement and the new CEOs of Sierra didn't know how to run Sierra, or what the Sierra brand even meant, and didn't know how to run all of those various subsidiary studios of Sierra, and many of them were closed eventually and key employees were laid off, in the wake of the Cendant Scandal.
After changing hands several more times, being sold from company to company, Sierra began to be unprofitable and it was eventually closed in 2004. The brand name continued to be used on products of the parent company until 2009 but it ceased to exist totally that year. In just around 8 years after massive growth and over extension, it ceased to exist.
