- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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I mean, yeah. It’s an industry that has a near-unlimited supply of starry-eyed fresh college grads to throw into the meat grinder, and the executives of these companies absolutely love to take advantage of that. Maybe if enough devs leave the industry they might finally have to start respecting the people who work for them out of necessity.
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.
And quite frankly, there are (or were, before layoffs), too many developers making games for how many releases the market can bear.
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.
Quick query to chatgpt says […]
This guy really thinks chatgpt is an authoritative source on anything. I am completely disregarding the entire comment.
Ah I remember when people would tell me that working in the video game industry is a dream, then those same people would complain to me about working long hours for no extra pay (crunch) to finish a game before the deadline.
Yeah that totally sounds like a dream job, it’s so great you have to sleep in the office and you don’t get paid for that extra work /s
Nightmares are still dreams
