Finance too. They're almost always first from the multiple I've personally been through. The new owners want those hands out of the pot asap.

So that's a dozen people. 1900 is more than a hundred times that. (#mathFTW)

These cuts will seriously hurt product.

Also, I sense my less-than-new windows version will be unsupported; and I only had it so the one game ran better.

Similar to 2008 but the 1% found out a way to keep their wealth intact while still fucking everyone else over.

Plus being an election year, they gotta cycle through everything and see what sticks.

You don’t get rich paying a ton of people 200k.

You literally do, though. Because wealth isn't a function of the volume of currency you've amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you've got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.

Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.

And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.

At some point, you've got to put forward an investment. You can't run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don't have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?

Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?

And please read comments more carefully next time. I did not say Microsoft was ever at fault, simply that they did not contribute anything to make Starfield better before release. Delays are a thing, but nobody thought it would be worth it to delay Starfield before release. If anything I'd bet money that Microsoft pushed the release

You think they’re not?

When Starfield was released Bethesda was already part of Microsoft. Sure, it was mostly done but Microsoft should have realized it was a turd and either delayed the release to rebuild the game or simply cancelled it. Instead they chose to take money from their customers for a game that is clearly not worth the asking price.

https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2024 not sure if this is what you're looking for but someone has been tracking overall video game layoffs for the past 3 years. 2023 was approximately 10,600, we're halfway there at 5600 in 2024 and it's only been a month. That's pretty fucked.

Lmgtfy

Game dev layoffs 2023

Take your pick of article. There are numerous to choose from, and most of them give a rough number and their sources.

In game dev.

you seem to be blaming the workers for turning out flops but in general it's the managements lack of planning and micromanagement that's the general cause.

no one who's a developer, artist, designer wants to add micro transactions, that comes from top down because it's a revenue generator. they want to polish the games so they can be proud of the work, but are not given time.

executives are not the ones generally being let go and the ones that are will be cashing out from the acquisition. expect those IPs to get worse and have more enshittification because that's what makes money and that's all corpos care about.

you don't get a larian studios from laying off talent, you get it from good management and giving your talent time to deliver.

Blizzards CEO Mike Ybarra is out "by mutual agreement"