Comment on Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers
doublejay1999@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The games industry is RIPE for organising worker owned studios. All the skill and talent is there.
Why suffer the insecurity of being cut to protect a profit margin ?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.
One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”
And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.
And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.
Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 8 months ago
Reminds me of this video I watched yesterday when looking for CC content.
We basically have what OP describes already in form of indie studios & games. Mind you, not all of them are the same of course, but many are very much that. But that doesn't really matter, because a game can be so good and created with so much love over so many years, and it can still commercially flop for a huge variety of reasons.
CrossCode is one of those examples. It's an absolutely stunning game, it was a complete surprise hit for me which made me instantly buy into their early access at the time after trying the demo but as good as the game is, and even the ratings for it are, no one actually knows about it - and even less people are actually willing to try it. You have no idea how many times I tried to pitch this to for example Let's Players who enjoyed other character & story driven games, but for them it's a similar situation. They won't pick games that are some sort of underdog, because that would not get them views. But games like this desperately need the exposure to even be seen by people. And people who hear about games like this also need to give them an actual chance. But for the vast majority, if the game isn't coming from a big publisher or studio, they won't even care.
Overall the gaming industry is tremendously fucked. A lot of people predict some sort of implosion happening at some point but I kinda doubt that happens, even though it might be necessary, especially if it takes down some of the giants like EA & Ubisoft, distributing all those developers and licenses into the wild. I believe in the long run it would be better for the industry.