This right here is why I try to support indie gaming everywhere I can.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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It might turn out that indie devs have a more sustainable business model than the big AAA game devs.
Honest artists are more sustainable than corporate black holes.
Who woulda thunk it
I'm a gamer but it's still so hard to care about layoffs in an entertainment industry. We'll have fewer games in the next few years? That's like at the bottom of the list of issues we're facing in 2024.
It’s tough for those in the industry right now. Real tough. People are struggling. Things probably will improve this year though
I dunno, my livelihood is pretty high up in priorities for me personally.
We’ll have fewer games in the next few years?
We won't, we'll have much more games. Just fewer games developed by 100+ person teams.
This seems like a very selfish view on the topic. All you care about is your games?
All you care about is your games?
I also care about the people developing them when they're a small business making exceptional quality, such as Flow Fire Games. But I can't be fucked about Ubisoft's 300-strong team in 5 countries producing shitty assets for a perfunctory openworld serving CEO's monetization wet dreams. I don't even have to get into Dunbar rationalizations, they destroyed the franchises I enjoyed, now I get to enjoy some schadenfreude.
so the answer is yes you have a selfish outlook, you don't care about the workers because you just care about hating ubisoft.
It's a shame but people shouldn't be surprised about this. Everything increased during the pandemic so businesses tried to keep up and expand (to make as much money as they could) and now things have fallen back down to earth, hard.
This is an over-simplification of the problem. The root is two things, shareholders and also, shareholders.
During pandemic some sectors saw massive growth and that caused shareholders to be very happy. But now we have normal growth, still growth, but normal non pandemic growth. Shareholders see that as a bad thing, you aren't growing at the rate you were two years ago and that is causing us to make slightly less money now. This causes the executive team to miss their bonuses. (the microsoft CEO only got 48 million this year instead of the full 50 million)
The second part is that tech companies have learnt that when they lay off people, shares go up. There is no reasoning behind the vast majority of the layoffs aside from this - there isn't really a money shortfall (everyone preaches massive profits after all), in-fact companies like Microsoft are struggling with retaining talent as evident by their creative output the last decade. But share prices go up if you announce firings. So if you can fire the workers, share prices go up covering the only 5% growth instead of 10% growth 'fall' and you get your bonus.
Then there are companies that exist solely on investment, high interest rates this past year has caused the investment market to die off. no one can get their next round to cover development so small companies or stupid companies that shouldn't have ever existed (embracer) are struggling.