As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
Comment on Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles [including video games]
massive_bereavement@fedia.io 2 months ago
Is this the final step in enshittification?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 months ago
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Nowhere near it.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of dwnsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
massive_bereavement@fedia.io 2 months ago
This reminds me of the CG studios going bankrupt at the same time the movie they worked in incessantly is released.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.