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24 years ago, I decided that instead of going into video game development like I had always dreamt of in school, I’ll go into business software because at the time there was only one nearby game studio (Blue Byte), they weren’t looking to hire in the next few years and I wasn’t really willing to move very far at the time.
Looking back, that decision was one of the best branching-path decisions I’ve ever made in my life.
Thanks, Blue Byte! Indirectly you got me an amazing job! 🥂
Mainzer wissen Bescheid.
Yeah. Rebecca Ford (Creative Director of Warframe at Digital Extremes) recently did a follow up interview with NoClip where she outright said she was done with video games once Warframe was over. It has basically been her entire adult life to work at DE but she is under no illusions over how messed up the industry is and is basically just sticking on because she loves what she makes and who she makes it with.
And from talking to a few friends who went the game dev route after college? That is more or less where they are at. Layoffs are inevitable and you can look forward to endless abuse if you get noticed before that. So the ones who still love the games they are making put up with it. The rest either already left or are actively putting out feelers for other jobs. Because it isn’t like any of them are getting paid what they are worth.
And quite frankly, there are (or were, before layoffs), too many developers making games for how many releases the market can bear.
Quick query to chatgpt says that video games generated 187.7 billion USD in 2023 vs film which was 87.4.
And the vast majority of companies doing mass layoffs (like Microsoft) are still turning profits. They just want to turn larger profits or throw some labor on the sword to protect whoever thought it was a good idea to make Marathon of all IPs into an extraction shooter.
And the rest? It is studios like Strange Scaffold who are actually doing everything right (complete games at launch, no DLC, innovative gameplay, cool narrative and art style) but can’t secure any publisher funding and are basically constantly on the verge of ruin.
There are going to be massive knock on effects when the only major releases are the massive tentpole games and everything else is “janky indie games”. At which point we’ll have even more Gamers talking about how we should fire anyone who worked on The Last Of Us 3 and spend more money making those quirky B games like HiFi Rush.
But hey. Tell me more about how all these mass layoffs are actually a good thing.
Quick query to chatgpt says […]
This guy really thinks chatgpt is an authoritative source on anything. I am completely disregarding the entire comment.
Yeah you can’t tell anybody on this site that you pulled some data from AI. Even if you followed the link and found the actual report and the numbers matched up you’ll still get down voted into oblivion.
The mass layoffs are definitely pure greed. At one point they served a purpose of ebb and flow and separating the wheat from the chaff, but things aren’t that healthy anymore.
Crunch time was great when it came with the bonuses and liberal vacation.
But now, anything that’s worth a damn gets bought up into large public companies who need to satisfy shareholders. Even the private stuff is still subject to the whims of the executives. There are still some good places to land out there but they’re slowly getting trashed over time.
Meh. I would rather trick people into showing their asses over the most trivial of things. Bonus points for actually pseudo-sourcing data.
And yeah. Just depressing that everyone becomes an 80s movie caricature the moment someone is criticizing THE VIDEO GAMEZ!!! Fuck labor if it gets us The Last Of Us 3, right?
How many releases is a very different number than how much profit. Only a few of Microsoft’s releases likely account for a sizable percentage of the entire industry’s profits in a given year. The fact is that investors saw dollar signs, and the industry expanded to a level that the market doesn’t actually sustain. How many metroidvanias do you want to play in a given year? And given that Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out this year, how likely are you to play Tales of Kenzera: Zau after you’ve bought and played those? Mass layoffs are not a good thing, but it’s a mathematical consequence of how much companies are permitted to expand relative to what people actually buy.
So because a studio’s first game didn’t outperform the latest in a 30-ish year old franchise that came out to rave reviews, everyone should be fired? Keeping in mind that Kenzera Zau had an EXCELLENT showing in press events (sad game about losing a father from a popular actor) and basically every major outlet said “This is fine but nothing special. But I would love to see what they make next”.
That is exactly how so many of the major publishers got into this mess. It used to be that we could get something very much “this exists” like Sly Cooper and Infamous that eventually leads to a critical and sales darling like Ghost of Tsushima. Now? Infamous didn’t outsell GTA5? Hope you mother fuckers like soup lines.
Or Naughty Dog. I mean, Crash 1 is kind of a bad game with a LOT of jank. It wasn’t until Crash 2 (and especially 3) where they were actually fun to play. And that studio eventually became the folk who made Uncharted and The Last Of Us.
Yes, there are studios that have consistently underperformed for publishers that are struggling and, while it sucks… we get it. But most of what we have seen are major publishers/platform holders just wanting to juice up some Q3 numbers by doing mass firings or the giant mess that was Embracer where they just overspent and never let any studios finish making anything. And then you have bullshit like Phil Spencer having the gall to talk about how Microsoft needs to make more games like Hi-Fi Rush the week they fucking shut down the studio that made it.
But hey, you took ECON 101 so you obviously know better.
If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.
The point of a publisher is to have a whole company. It doesn’t matter if Game A sold because Game B sold. EA used to live on this where games like Mirror’s Edge could be “experimental” because The Sims and Madden made CoD money every year.
The problem is what we saw with stuff like (Let’s say it is “THQ”. My brain can’t remember the specific publisher I was thinking of and the name has probably been reused a dozen times by Embracer et al). Where they are over-leveraging themselves by wanting to make multiple AA or even AAA games and going under because critically acclaimed games just didn’t sell well enough.
But, again, that is not what has been happening for the past year or two (aside from Embracer which is a different kind of evil). It is not “Oh, you made bad games and we need to fire you to save the company”. It isn’t even “Profits are down all over”. It is “Well, we are actually doing great. But you finished your game and don’t have one immediately in the pipeline and the shareholders want to see bigger profits for Q3 so… get fucked?”
Which is why I once again cite fucking Phil Spencer talking about what a great game Hi-Fi Rush is the week Microsoft fucking canned Tango. That was not even “Look, everyone loved The Evil Within but didn’t buy it so…”. That was “Everyone loved Hi-Fi and it sold okay even with the Gamepass hit and our other games sold well but…”
But apparently you are in full bootstraps mode where you think like a CEO who wants to buy an extra porsche so…
This has a side effect of the people who went through the full game development cycle and can help to improve the process of developing of future games with actions based on their experience do not stay in the industry and thus the industry is bound to repeat the same mistakes again and again. I mean, I started working in the gaming 22 years ago, worked there for 7 years, then took 12 years of break elsewhere and now I am back for 3 years. After I returned I was surprised how almost nothing changed. It is still the demo-to-demo sprinting without proper planning or building the technical layers in advance. So the publishers/management is getting more or less faked demos and are always surprised that at some point they get a very badly made piece of software full of bugs and architectural flaws.
Me:
Shows a demo function just to show how it could be done.
Manager: (looking in his manager book)
-“So it’s already implemented!”
Me: no it needs to be programmed first
Manager: but it already is, i can see it on screen!
Me: it has to be implemented correctly.
Manager (looking in book again)
-“How much time if you implement quickly as quick as possible?”
Me: it will take X time.
Manager: Starts to call tech-lead and chief boot-licker to “convince” me it doesn’t need that much time.
After 3 hours of painful meeting I say okay okay okay and pushes ‘best I could do’ to production in the same evening. Reinforcing the idea that I’m a lying bad programmer and that Manager, tech-lead and chief boot-licker are correct.
Source: 10 years of gamedev
This is familiar to all devs, not just game devs
I mean, yeah. It’s an industry that has a near-unlimited supply of starry-eyed fresh college grads to throw into the meat grinder, and the executives of these companies absolutely love to take advantage of that. Maybe if enough devs leave the industry they might finally have to start respecting the people who work for them out of necessity.
Guy I know worked for a pretty big video game studio or two. (You’ve definitely heard of some games he worked on). Then he realized it sucked. Took a job in FinTech, made like double the money for half the work.
Ah I remember when people would tell me that working in the video game industry is a dream, then those same people would complain to me about working long hours for no extra pay (crunch) to finish a game before the deadline.
Yeah that totally sounds like a dream job, it’s so great you have to sleep in the office and you don’t get paid for that extra work /s
Nightmares are still dreams
