Fun fact if you replace the word "layoffs" with "bonus for executives" the meme still works.
It's usually both.
Pretty soon the whole video games industry will rely on one unpaid intern.
Someone has to copy and paste the slop.
Part of the issue is also scope and budget. Games are becoming needlessly massive and overly complicated, overshooting estimated budgets. It’s unrealistic for these games to make meaningful bottom line.
So why don’t we reduce scope and go back in making simpler and fun games? Cause layoffs is the easy short term solution.
no! every game must be hyper realistic and break graphical boundaries ! it's the only way we can sell our game ! (seriously we're out of ideas)
/s
Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition
I'm not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000's.
Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.
Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only "hold off the wolves" so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don't have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the "easy" solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.
Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It's easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the past where basically every big game studio had their own engine).
Tldr:
Unreal is slop and enables this behaviour.
Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It's easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I've heard it's fallen off a lot since 5 but it's still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.
Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you've done for them lately.
"I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter" gets rewarded, not "I'm leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we'll be more successful in 7 years"
It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.
Because capitalism doesn't seek perfection, and it's far from a fair system
🤓 Ackshually that's all because of piracy. Games just aren't making enough money to pay developers' salaries. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to swap football team compositions every 12 months? Microtransactions help, but it just isn't enough with all the pirates. /s
Won't someone think of the shareholders
Everywhere I look, problems are coming from rich assholes removed from actually doing work making decisions.
It’s called capitalism. This is the result
Layoffs are a natural part of the corporate world. You hire masses of people to create the illusion of growth, and you fire masses of people to create the illusion of ruthless competence. Line go up no matter what.
All Hail The Line That Always Goes Up! /s
This has to be the best meme I've seen in a very long time, made it worth logging into Lemmy. Thank you :)
Layoffs always lead to loss of tacit institutional knowledge. In other words, they end up firing the people who know how shit really works.
Games are creative projects, so this is even more of a problem. They fire people who made the first game and knew exactly why the game was made that way, and it comes as no surprise that the new hires end up making the sequel completely different way. The new people can see the big picture but not the reasoning behind the tiniest details.
MBA types have never experienced tacit instructional knowledge because they just sit in their offices all day misinterpreting numbers to make themselves look good.
If it's not "spreadsheet-able" it doesn't exist. -- typical MBA.
spot on. these people's salaries are chump change compared to rsu awards. They dont care about making their core product, they care about the stock spiking periodically so they can sell. The stock price can even creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much to them. They really just need a yearly surge in price to sell based on something that looks like strategic competence. They arent paid to consistently uplevel the stock so much as they are paid to enable a pump and dump on their own companys stock. I work in one of these places now and have worked for several. They are believers in getting paid.
Three Months Later
"Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI's are in the toilet all of a sudden."
somewhere along the way the csuite forgot about or devalued institutional knowledge. they think of people like expensive hardware theyre renting, that they can just fire and rehire at no cost. they ignore the fact that the majority of the knowledge and expertise they need is stored in peoples heads and nowhere else. when they do a huge layoff theyre throwing all of that away and essentially starting over from scratch the next time. i suspect this is a large part of why games take way longer to develop now. the teams have to build up the knowledge and working relationships basically from scratch on every game, which is a slow messy process in the best of times but is made waaay worse by delusional schedules and excessive hours. these corporate douchebags keep literally cutting off their nose to spite their face over and over again like its a functional business strategy.
Csuites of all industries are becoming like nobles from feudal eras. The only difference is the lack of in-breeding happening, but give it a decade or more and it'll start.
They assume that they have right of rule despite having no actual commitments, then they throw a fit when they aren't fed.
They already have apps for dating amongst themselves
Back when I supported HR at a hospital I built these ultra detailed employee turnover reports, which included average cost of turnover (metrics for what it costs to cover shifts until the position is filled, cost of recruiting/posting positions, cost associated with hiring, separation cost of the employee leaving, etc etc). And of course they would focus primarily on nursing roles. They spent about 5 years doing just about anything they could; hiring bonuses, incentives, referral bonuses, various outreach programs and tuition assistance for nurses. After those 5 years they found no noticeable reduction in nursing turnover. What they did eventually notice, however, is a steady increase in turnover for all other non-nursing positions.
After another year or 2 of bullshit excuses and throwing whatever paltry perks they attempted to throw at us the only thing they found actually lowering their turnover figures...reinstate annual 3% raises. Because they found out paying their employees was actually cheaper than the annual cost of turnover.
"Does anyone have any ideas on how to boost morale that don't include pay raises?"
Not an uncommon question in meetings, if you'd believe people on the internet.
It's like trying to figure out how to grow a plant without water. Pointless from the beginning.
Meanwhile Nintendo provides lifetime employment. It's why they can pass down institutional knowledge to the next gen of employees. Hence why every entry in series like Mario and Zelda are almost consistently great.
Only a single rule is needed. If mass layoffs need to happen, the top person responsible, the CEO, must also leave the company in the same fashion.
What about a trial by combat clause? CEO has to fight one representative of the workforce. In America this could be a whole new genre of reality tv! We could call it... Luigi's Mansion.
Funny because it’s true. Painfully true.
It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.
It kinda baffles me that people still apply for jobs at EA, Activision/Blizzard, etc. We need more disenfranchised developers making their own studios like Supergiant, Respawn and Embark, who go back to making quality games that are passion projects instead of sloppy money churners. I simply don't understand why anyone would buy a game, then spend more money to not play the game in order to progress/level up/whatever.
Just to be clear I'm well aware Apex Legends could be thought of as a money churner, but it's still a free-to-play, quality product that just sells cosmetics so I personally don't see it in the same light as CoD, FIFA or Madden.
Gamedev along with Startups has always been a highly abusive work environment of longs hours and death marches were they just hire and use until they're burned by the job whilst paying them less than similar jobs outside the industry, an endless parade of bright eyed young people.
They're part of what I call "Prestige Industries" - alongside things like Modelling and Theatre, they are industries which attract tons of young people who, knowing only the externally visible side of that Industry, think that it must be incredible to work doing those things. With such an unending supply of eager and naive young people, such industries invariably end up (at least within the largest companies) being places with a very young workforce, highly exploitative (sometimes in more ways than just low salaries and long hours) which burn out their workforce or throw them out when they get older and wise enough to want better pay and work conditions.
This they're now doing looks to me like just doing more openly and on a schedule that's more convenient to them something they already did individually and on an ad-hoc basis (often on timings that were more convenient to workers, for example when people chose to quit after realizing they were being paid shit to work stupid hours).
The general problem of "Prestige Industries" has always been that they basically throw away most of the expertise they're building training people on the job for a couple of years, having basically an ocean of juniors, pretty much no mid-level types and then at best a handful of top experts. This IMHO is why both gamedev and Startups produce much buggier software than the rest of IT.
Probably part of it, but games are also more difficult to test automatically (which also means fast, often and predictable).
"Given these entities, make sure the price is correctly calculated as XY" is way easier than "make sure this game object doesn't clip into the ground", especially with the indeterministic physics systems that are often used.
Because when starting your own studio in the garage you and your family has no money or insurance.
Men, you're lucky men. Soon you'll all be fighting for your planet. Many of you will be dying for your planet. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. They will be the luckiest of all.
"you undercook chicken...layoff, you overcook fish, layoff, you charge too much for a sweater, layoff..."
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