John Erskine
What to know
John Erskine is the Chief Operating Officer at Cloud Imperium Games. Key sections include Works at CIG, Other Works, and Trivia.
John Erskine is the Chief Operating Officer at Cloud Imperium Games.
Works at CIG
He joined CIG at the beginning of 2013 as Director of Studio Services.
CIG Publishing encompasses everything technical that's not related to the game engine itself. Essentially after a developer checks their code into the source control, perforce, it goes into the build system, which is the start of the publishing pipeline. When a build gets generated, it goes throught a series of automated tests then eventually a QA department then eventually gets published to some sort of environment such as internal development environment, staging environment, testing environment, all part of the publishing technology group. Then there's also the live QA team and customer support team.
Most of the leadership team is based in Austin and there is a long relationship with the platfrom team in Montreal, such as e-commerce.
He is also a board member of Turbulent since 2019. He became COO in September 2024.
Other Works
He was managing a store in Austin that specialized in outdoor and travel gear. He had many friends at Origin Systems including his lifelong friend Paul Vaden and John was spending time there after hours playing because they had a great internet connection. They told him they had an open position working on Ultima Online. He became a game master on the Beta version in 1998 and helped with the customer experience and live operations side of the project. At the time UO was very cutting edge and much bigger than other online games of the day. He was very interested in the idea of people playing together online and connecting socialy.
He worked at Electronic Arts as Manager of Player Relations Development.
He left in 2001 to work with Richard Gariott and small team to start Destination Games. They became NCsoft westen division and built a publishing organization to service the rest of the world. He stayed there for nine years as Director of Studio Services.
He left with Richard and a small team to co-found Portalarium, focusing on social and mobile games as Head of Operations and building some cool tech but they never really had a product that hit the market strongly.
In 2012 they were talking with Chris Roberts about some of his ideas to get back into the games industry and when he launched the crowdfunding campaign Chris was hanging out at the Portalarium office space in downtown Austin and using that as a sort of base of operations. Chris and John were talking about Chris ideas and a few months later John was working at CIG.
Trivia
- He likes to play online multiplayer games, he likes the social experience.
- He was a big Wing Commander fan back in the day.
- He was President of the Colorado River Alliance.
- He started the non-profit Cleanup the Colorado in 2018 to address the massive amounts of trash in the Colorado River.
- He is a board member of the Texas Rivers Protection Association.
- He was on the board of directors of the Multicultural Refugee Coalition.
- He was Board President of the Austin Youth River Watch.
- He was on the Board of Directors of the University of Texas.
- His favorites games he worked on have probably been Ultima Online, City of Heroes, and Guild Wars.
- The first offices of CIG in Austin were in a historic home that happened to be where John's wife used to work before in an environmental firm on the first, second and third floor, however CIG office was in the basement.
Source: StarCitizen.tools. This article includes adapted Star Citizen Wiki content shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The Impound has added formatting, navigation, summaries, related links, and shopping links.
