When you work in a creative field like video game design, passion fuels innovation, but poor leadership can burn it all down.

When one mismanaged project led to layoffs, one developer found a way to reward one of their most loyal players with a goldmine of premium content before the company went under.

Read on for the full story!

Freed a whale

I’m a Game Designer and Developer.

Unfortunately, the gig was doomed.

I worked for an employer who was scraping the bottom of the barrel with his funds.

His grand strategy for roping in new investors was to release a new game in a month and impress VCs at GDC.

Fine. I’ve seen worse.

I’ll do my job well.

The project is grossly mismanaged.

The whole team designated to this last Hail Mary project— around eight people — worked their butts off to get this thing rolling.

The CEO thinks he can do all of our jobs better than us.

He throws all good game design and development advice out the window.

He pushes us to ship trash and threatens to fire us.

The employees started to see the writing on the wall.

“*****, you can’t afford to pay us another month.”

We all know we’re getting canned.

We do unpaid overtime to ship polished trash we aren’t ashamed of.

In our mind’s eye, we begin to see why the company’s current games have such bafflingly bad code and painful technical debt.

We’re all fired a week later.

But before he left, the developer had one last trick up his sleeve.

On my way out, I remember a player loyal to one of the live games.

A whale.

He genuinely cares about one of the games from this company.

He’s sunk hundreds of hours and dollars into it.

He’s reported game-breaking bugs to us.

I’ve spoken to him to get feedback and improve the parts of it that people really care about, and I’ve grown to really like him.

I go to the backend tool, pull up his support ID, and unlock all of the best premium content for the game.

I give him 100k worth of premium currency.

And then I bounce.

Not all heroes wear capes – some write code!

What did Reddit think?

This story made this commenter feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

This redditor thought the story was headed in a different direction.

This user imagines what must have been going through the player’s head when he made the discovery.

It’s nice to see someone get what they deserve!

Their ship may have been sinking, but this developer found a way to make sure someone deserving got the treasure.

The company may have lost, but this player sure won big!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.