20 year industry vet here. When I started, it was in a company that was hiring nothing but people that have never worked in games before (and they did not tell us this, like some bad reality show). Of the ~200+ people I worked with there when I started, I would very generously estimate maybe only 10-15 of us still in the industry. To be fair, conditions in the industry have gotten a lot better since most of those people left it. The days of doing 80+ hours a week are long gone for most of us as far as I can tell.
It's really all about loving who you are working with. Even if you hate the project or the hours, just enjoying being around the right people makes a huge difference. Writing that is making me realize just how many of my favorite people and closest friends are now elsewhere and damn, I miss them.
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.
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.
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…
I don’t know how you got from A to B on the Porsche. Embracer was funded largely by debt that they were expecting to get bailed out of by an investment that didn’t happen; the classic leveraged investment gone wrong. Microsoft absolutely could stomach whatever losses they face, especially since that was the whole idea a few years back when they started Game Pass, so them deciding to not follow through on that and tighten their belts now is a situation unique to them. At large, across the industry, are tons of companies making big bets like Suicide Squad or Concord or Warhaven that follow a live service template that’s been tapped out of customers and don’t work out, and even smaller companies following the traditional publisher model like Mimimi are so exhausted hunting for funding for their next game, just barely making it by on copies sold, that they decide instead to close up shop. That’ll happen when customer dollars are spread out around more games.
Personal opinion: This is actually excellent because we could actually use developers who have worked these jobs and thus are familiar with how they work, and then they can develop actually useful code for small businesses.
For example: restaurants often have the ability to order online, but they have zero rate limiting, so you can end up with 30 different orders made within 30 seconds of each other and all those people will expect their orders ready at the same time and in the meantime you’ve got exactly three cooks and each meal takes at least five to seven minutes to get out. Someone could design a rate limiter, no one has. Because there aren’t developers working those jobs realizing that workers are being worked to the bone because of businesses refusing to add limits to how much demand can come through their door.
Also, the good online ordering software DO provide those features. Restaraunt owners just tend to license the cheapest one (or pay their girlfriend’s kid to write an even cheaper one) for obvious reasons.
Because there aren’t developers working those jobs realizing that workers are being worked to the bone because of businesses refusing to add limits to how much demand can come through their door.
I’m not sure why you believe game developers would be better suited to this than people who actually do business software development. And it’s less about what the developers want to do with software than it is about what the people to are buying the software want to do with that software.
I meant more that a restaurant owner isn’t going to see or really get any value from an open source solution vs closed source specifically. They are just choosing a platform at a price point that works for them.
Open Source exists, but it is janky, lacking in features, and literally every single one is used to upsell the expensive proprietary software by the same company that has the features lacking in the open source release.