Recent waves of layoffs shine a light on the systemic issues in the game industry and the post-graduation promises universities are making to students.
Very large teams spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make a single game. Historically, studios ramp up and hire employees in peak production and hand out pink slips after launch, as they “cannot sustain the expense of idle workers.” Critical and commercial failures escalate these layoffs.
They’re basically “gig workers” asked to put in ridiculous effort during a crunch, then let go as soon as the crunch is over.
They don’t get hired again till the next crunch.
So they’re only employed during the crunch and unemployed the rest of the time. Rather than studios actually managing a workload competently. If at least one of them started doing that, they could attract top talent on the cheap for the stability.
Well, that used to be the model when the big studios and the big publishers were separate entities. After the publisher consolidated the industry during the 00s, employment became significantly more stable. With enough revenue and enough labour power under their control, publishers started rolling development cycles, and employees would be shifted from project to project as needed.
Really what we’re seeing here are publisher making a lot of really bad investments in recent year, as they’ve gotten more controlling. They’ve been chasing the (near) passive income dragon for a while now, and it’s finally caught up with them.
After sinking millions and millions into NFTs, and some of them betting pretty big on game streaming frameworks like Stadia, and most recently everyone turning every IP into GaaS games, and coming up short at every turn, the studios seem to be stuck. They’re turning back to the drawing board to figure out what the next big thing in fucking customers over is, and abandoning efforts that have been in the pipeline for years.
And on top of it all, interests rates are finally back to historical levels, and the cost of gambling on striking lightning with whatever homogenized crap developers have been coerced into making is now higher, and investors are seeking more stability, which means… Time to fuck the employees again!
They’re basically “gig workers” asked to put in ridiculous effort during a crunch, then let go as soon as the crunch is over.
They don’t get hired again till the next crunch.
So they’re only employed during the crunch and unemployed the rest of the time. Rather than studios actually managing a workload competently. If at least one of them started doing that, they could attract top talent on the cheap for the stability.
Well, that used to be the model when the big studios and the big publishers were separate entities. After the publisher consolidated the industry during the 00s, employment became significantly more stable. With enough revenue and enough labour power under their control, publishers started rolling development cycles, and employees would be shifted from project to project as needed.
Really what we’re seeing here are publisher making a lot of really bad investments in recent year, as they’ve gotten more controlling. They’ve been chasing the (near) passive income dragon for a while now, and it’s finally caught up with them.
After sinking millions and millions into NFTs, and some of them betting pretty big on game streaming frameworks like Stadia, and most recently everyone turning every IP into GaaS games, and coming up short at every turn, the studios seem to be stuck. They’re turning back to the drawing board to figure out what the next big thing in fucking customers over is, and abandoning efforts that have been in the pipeline for years.
And on top of it all, interests rates are finally back to historical levels, and the cost of gambling on striking lightning with whatever homogenized crap developers have been coerced into making is now higher, and investors are seeking more stability, which means… Time to fuck the employees again!