I have a dream of making a game of my own one day, and I have already decided to self-publish it. It's the safest move.
Worked on a personal game for 7 years nearly every day. Signed with a publisher and gave up on the project the following year.
It's pretty easy on PC, with Steam itself and itch.io being pretty good for indies. Earning enough money from your game is a different story...
It shouldn't be legal to report high earnings and lay off a large portion of your staff, that feels like something a poorly performing company would do
That‘s how it is in Germany. You can only get laid off without a negotiated severance package, when the employer is in financial trouble. Even then you need start laying people off the employer needs to do it according to the social contract (e.g. single mothers last). Both is really hard to proof (in court) so usually everyone gets a severance package anyway. This means when you hear about big layoffs in Germany usually all of them get a severance package or agree to something else. These layoffs are not comparable to the USA. This is the shortened and positive descriptions of the process, but of course there are also (justifiable) downsides of doing it this way.
What would be some of the downsides? Just curious.
Some examples
- You need to pay a lot of lawyers on both sides
- You can get fired for not having kids, being young or not married
- People who are bad at their job are hard to lay off (this can include well payed managers)
- Companies find other creative ways to lay you off (if you charge your phone at work, you are stealing electricity)
Come to Germany and see for yourself :)
No!!!! Put down the beer and pretzels!!! Come to America and grab a Fresh™ slice of the Original™ FreeMarket® System©
We have all those same downsides, and many MORE!!!! Now with 80% less upside to compensate!!!
Yeah, I would get dinged for all three on that second point.
Wow there. We can't go around regulating things. What do you think we are COMMUNISTS?!?
Yeah, I just knew Blizzard had to be on the list
Almost none of this is unique to the gaming industry; it's all symptoms of under-regulated capitalism.
It's not unique but the games industry is worse than most.
There's a natural cycle to the development of a video game that's very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you've been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that's what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.
Unionization is also super uncommon at these game development companies. Would definitely help prevent layoffs. True for every industry again, but they are underrepresented here.
Unionization doesn’t prevent layoffs. It’s clear you have never been in a union.
Unionization doesn’t always prevent layoffs
Fixed that for you.
I'm sure you didn't mean to imply that unionization NEVER prevents or at least helps to prevent spurious mass layoffs, since that would make you a total imbecile about how labor relations in general and collective bargaining in particular works or at best an otherwise rational victim of gaslighting disinformation campaigns carried out on behalf of the people doing the layoffs.
It doesn’t always, but it can. I have been in a union. But thanks for assuming you know anything about me douchebag.
Their name is Teddie K. They're a fascist who at best might have an eco in front.
It does not but the game industry has a lot of parallel to the movie industry l where some parts are very unionized.
So basically incompetent leadership falling ass backwards in tons of cash from your successes.
PC Gamer usually posts good takes, shame about the comment section sometimes
I've noticed as well. Why does it seem like so many people hate PC Gamer?
I have no idea but if I had to guess, I'd say the audience of PC Gamer is PC gamers, and the average PC gamer fucking sucks
Hank Green actually posted a video relevant to this yesterday. He was reading a Fox News article about a machine that can turn C02 into fuel that an internal combustion engine can use.
He then scrolled to the comments and saw all the posts talking about climate change being a hoax. He says it would be very easy to assume the average Fox News reader is a climate change denier. If you were to ask him how many people in the US deny climate change is real, he'd guess around 50%. However, surveys have consistently shown it is less than 10%. It is a minority of people. His point was that people leaving stupid comments are not the average person, they're just really vocal, and try not to assume stupid comments are reflective of the average person's beliefs.
You can't even assume those people are people. There's a lot of bot powered disinformation out there.
the average loud PC gamer fucking sucks
Fixed it for you.
Those assholes don't represent the average PC gamer any more accurately than the Gamergate troglodytes represent all gamers.
I doubt that the average PC gamer is commenting on those articles.
how i see it, pcgamer sometimes has high effort posts like this and other times has some really low effort posts, sometimes almost cyclical as they often use the same image pool over several topics (e.g its a meme that anything witcher related, pcgamer will use geralt in a tub as a header image)
because of the less serious posts, it kinda blots out the more serious ones.
I feel that perhaps "jab" is understating it!
More like a haymaker.
Games
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
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My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
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