Employee Exodus at Rockstar Games? on GameDaily BIZ (thanks Gamer's Hell) outlines a number of recent departures from the developer, saying there have been resignations and firings along with positions eliminated by studio closures. They analyze this with help from some anonymous industry insiders, but their requests for comment from Rockstar have not been honored, leaving them to speculate about what, if any, influence the original Hot Coffee scandal (story), subsequent subpoenas (story), and bad financials (story) have to do with this, or if it's more about the games:

This list may not be entirely comprehensive either, but is it merely a coincidence that these people have left when there's been so much turmoil at Rockstar and Take-Two? Certainly, when Jamie King (a Rockstar co-founder), two different directors of marketing, and others all leave within the same period that the parent company's stock is in a freefall, it smells fishy. One of our sources even heard that Rockstar may have fired some employees because they were not pleased with certain review scores for Table Tennis, even though the Xbox 360 title has garnered an average of 83% on GameRankings.com. So there would seem to be some internal discord at Rockstar as well.

Whether or not there is really an employee exodus is hard to say since we're not privy to everything that goes on at the company. It could be viewed as employees jumping off a "sinking ship," but it's also possible that much of this stems from cost cutting measures in a tough year. Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who follows Take-Two's stock closely, believes it's the latter.