this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Today on "the gamedev community literally can't catch a break"...

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 7 months ago (5 children)

For the people that don't want to read the article, this seems especially relevant:
But much has changed since 2022: Embracer, which owns Gearbox, bet the house on a $2 billion deal with a Saudi investment group that fell through in 2023. Ever since, its many, many properties have been hit by layoffs on a near-monthly basis.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 7 months ago

Another good reason why every company shouldn't be bought by the same big companies over and over again.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

So I assume the leadership, which gets paid the big bucks due to their decisions making much larger impacts on the company, will take responsibility for the action and will be fired due to their salary being based on the level of personal responsibility to their company's success/failure.

Oh wait, no. Once again we wipe out the bottom rung workforce, expect the remaining employees to do twice the work with no extra pay in the face of increasing cost of housing and living, meanwhile their professional gambler CEO either gets off scott free or snags a golden parachute on the way out the door to their next job.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Firing the people that do the work to make the company money is just good business! They're a dime a dozen, just hire another 2 managers and a couple marketing execs and soon you'll be printing money! /s [these companies are freaking dumb]

It's crazy what you can get away with when you have some money and no sense!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago

Yep, Embracer bought a LOT of studios expecting this deal to work out, and then it didn't, so many of those studios are now effectively as good as dead in the water or on their way there. It amazes me how so many people and companies always forget the basic financial idea of "don't spend money you don't have".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Just straight up skipped a step in “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Embracer overextends, extinguishes.

[–] mindbleach 2 points 7 months ago
  • Some rich assholes buy your functioning company

  • Rich assholes fuck up trying to get even richer

  • Functioning company is somehow screwed

Over and over and over, lately.

I don't think blaming capitalism is a complete answer, here - the functioning company in step one was capitalist. There was, at that point, a group of people making stuff to sell for profit, and it was working okay. (Should've been unionized a decade ago, and management probably committed criminal skeezery, but the company did function.) There's nothing fundamentally impossible or self-contradictory about expecting the part where people do stuff for money to keep doing the thing it's for. On some level, this is people being bad at capitalism.