Don’t buy anything unless it’s from Indy devs.
Anytime companies like EA show all their games for sale, they are actually just showing you a graveyard of dead developers that they killed.
Don’t buy anything unless it’s open source, otherwise you’re just renting it
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As did every industry. Google hired something like 80,000 jobs during the pandemic, then laid of 12,000. My department went from 8 to 30, and we fired one person.
This is just course correction.
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No it’s actually increasingly worse considering even that, as the model of expending entirely the goodwill of a studio name and milking the trust dry has been proven to be more and more lucrative to the shareholders.
As more and more layers of investors owning investors owning investors that then own 48 studios gets added on, the incredible churn of talent is continuously ramping up and gutting the souls of particularly young passionate artists, but also actual successful team compositions.
It’s not that they couldn’t pay and enjoy great success with the quality a cohesive and safe studio can make. It’s just that making great games, that’s not on the top of anyone of these megacorps priorities
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It’s the normal layoff cycle of new game development amplified by the Covid boom.
Why does the layoff cycle keep happening? Because developers are okay with it. They keep signing those contracts and not joining unions. And that’s their choice.
How many unions are there for game dev, and how successful are they in the industry?
My experience trying to join a Union in America makes me critical of this callout.
The main issue with video game development is it is many people’s dream job. They are willing to put up with anything to get the job; until they aren’t, and then the next crop of fresh faces are waiting in line to get their dream job. In that setting, a union won’t form as there is just too much competition among prospective hires, too many people not doing research into the industry, and too many people willing to work insane hours for no gain.
Acting and professional sports are dream jobs with plenty of fresh faces waiting in line and yet they have unions.
Actors and professional athletes both have an advantage: name recognition. There is only one Tom Holland, there is only one Michael Jordan. It doesn’t matter how many people are lined up, the industry cannot replace them 1-for-1. The same is not true of video game development. Think of the last video game you played, do you know the name of even a single developer that worked on it? Almost certainly not. That person will be replaced by one of thousands of people in line; Tom Holland cannot be. This gives actors and athletes significantly more bargaining power to affect change in the industry, such as forming unions.
There’s tons of recognition in game development as well. Notch? ConcernedApe? Peter Molyneux?
There’s tons of no-name actors and athletes to go with the big names as well.
This was an ironic read for me. Your examples really solidified the opposite of your point for me. People can name their top 20 favorite offensive linemen in football. You had an entire industry and thought of 3 names that most people even within the fandoms would fail to recognize.
Who even is concerned Ape?
Just because you don’t recognize them doesn’t mean no one else would be able to. I couldn’t name an athlete I hadn’t read about in the last five minutes if I tried. That doesn’t mean they don’t have name recognition.
Interesting that you only chose one of the three names as something you didn’t recognize.
“It’s exclusively the workers fault that their employers are shitheels”
You can acknowledge that workers need to do more to better their own working conditions without placing all the blame on them. The publishers have as much free will as the developers, they choose to be awful as much as developers choose to work for them. And they have a lot more power to influence change.
You really don’t need a full article to say ‘late-stage capitalism.’
There’s nothing behind this but corrupt behaviour and greed.
It’s salary consolidation. It’s shitty, but these jobs aren’t actually being cut, they are just being demoted post-pandemic. This happens to every “skilled labor” industry eventually. All the more reason why tech needs to unionize yesterday.
Dig deep enough and I’m sure you’ll find wall street at the bottom of this hole. They are the source of all enshitification.
