No one, however, is doing anything quite on the scale of Ratcliff's work for Sony. Ratcliff, a computer science major from the University of Missouri, is leading a team of 14 programmers and artists creating PlanetSide, an online warfare game. The employees Ratcliff needs also don't come cheap. Ratcliff's been struggling to hire about five more for his team. Not that there aren't good tech workers in St. Louis.
Top programmers are scarce.
Finding talent in St. Louis has been brutal because of the strength of the economy. But Ratcliff hopes that will change now that the economy shows signs of slowing. He also hopes recruiting will be easier with the Sony name behind him. That happened in October, when Sony Online Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of the Tokyo-based electronics giant, bought a San Diego game developer known as Verant Interactive. Ratcliff had joined Verant a year earlier, after working on a graphics-based game for Simutronics.