Sierra Reorganizes

Sierra announced Monday a complete reorganization of its development divisions and other entertainment areas in an effort to focus "on key products."

As a result, many of its semi-independent development studios are now being consolidated back at Sierra's Bellevue, Washington, headquarters. These studios include Yosemite Entertainment, Pyrotechnix Inc., Synergistic, and Books That Work Inc. Select teams and individuals will be offered positions in Bellevue.

In the meantime, the other Sierra brands will be unaffected; Berkeley Systems, Impressions, Papyrus, and Dynamix will remain where they are.

"We've decided to pull a number of our smaller operations into our Bellevue headquarters to achieve a critical mass of development and marketing talent into one location," said David Grenewetzki, president of Sierra. "These are moves that we have anticipated for a while, but we've not been able to focus on them due to the divestiture of our company. Integrating our teams to strengthen our brand and build on our online commitment is a strategic move that will help us continue our mission to develop and bring to market the most creative and most technologically advanced products that are fun, innovative, and provide a wide range of appeal."

Sierra also announced that it will be shutting down its house magazine InterAction with the spring 1999 issue.

"We started InterAction in an era when there wasn't much of a popular press devoted to computer software, but now our market is served by numerous specialty magazines that do a great job in covering our products," said Grenewetzki. "It's time for us to get out of the publishing business and concentrate on our principal business of developing software."