I’m going to agree with you, but only in the sense they hired more people than they should’ve, not that they should be firing people.
I really blame Telltale Games as one studio that demonstrated this issue in a microcosm. They had some successful games. Then they hired enough extra hands that they MUST make excellent games. Their next few games were not excellent. Then, everybody gets fired.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Quick query to chatgpt says that video games generated 187.7 billion USD in 2023 vs film which was 87.4.
And the vast majority of companies doing mass layoffs (like Microsoft) are still turning profits. They just want to turn larger profits or throw some labor on the sword to protect whoever thought it was a good idea to make Marathon of all IPs into an extraction shooter.
There are going to be massive knock on effects when the only major releases are the massive tentpole games and everything else is “janky indie games”. At which point we’ll have even more Gamers talking about how we should fire anyone who worked on The Last Of Us 3 and spend more money making those quirky B games like HiFi Rush.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Windex007@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Chatgpt told me 188 but then admitted it was 120 after I bullied it and then landed on 95
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah you can’t tell anybody on this site that you pulled some data from AI. Even if you followed the link and found the actual report and the numbers matched up you’ll still get down voted into oblivion.
The mass layoffs are definitely pure greed. At one point they served a purpose of ebb and flow and separating the wheat from the chaff, but things aren’t that healthy anymore.
Crunch time was great when it came with the bonuses and liberal vacation.
But now, anything that’s worth a damn gets bought up into large public companies who need to satisfy shareholders. Even the private stuff is still subject to the whims of the executives. There are still some good places to land out there but they’re slowly getting trashed over time.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Meh. I would rather trick people into showing their asses over the most trivial of things. Bonus points for actually pseudo-sourcing data.
And yeah. Just depressing that everyone becomes an 80s movie caricature the moment someone is criticizing THE VIDEO GAMEZ!!! Fuck labor if it gets us The Last Of Us 3, right?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Ehh, still mostly beats the hell out of working enterprise health insurance. At least game developer unions are slowly becoming a thing.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How many releases is a very different number than how much profit. Only a few of Microsoft’s releases likely account for a sizable percentage of the entire industry’s profits in a given year. The fact is that investors saw dollar signs, and the industry expanded to a level that the market doesn’t actually sustain. How many metroidvanias do you want to play in a given year? And given that Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out this year, how likely are you to play Tales of Kenzera: Zau after you’ve bought and played those? Mass layoffs are not a good thing, but it’s a mathematical consequence of how much companies are permitted to expand relative to what people actually buy.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
So because a studio’s first game didn’t outperform the latest in a 30-ish year old franchise that came out to rave reviews, everyone should be fired? Keeping in mind that Kenzera Zau had an EXCELLENT showing in press events (sad game about losing a father from a popular actor) and basically every major outlet said “This is fine but nothing special. But I would love to see what they make next”.
That is exactly how so many of the major publishers got into this mess. It used to be that we could get something very much “this exists” like Sly Cooper and Infamous that eventually leads to a critical and sales darling like Ghost of Tsushima. Now? Infamous didn’t outsell GTA5? Hope you mother fuckers like soup lines.
Or Naughty Dog. I mean, Crash 1 is kind of a bad game with a LOT of jank. It wasn’t until Crash 2 (and especially 3) where they were actually fun to play. And that studio eventually became the folk who made Uncharted and The Last Of Us.
Yes, there are studios that have consistently underperformed for publishers that are struggling. But most of what we have seen are major publishers/platform holders just wanting to juice up some Q3 numbers by doing mass firings or the giant mess that was Embracer where they just overspent and never let any studios finish making anything. And then you have bullshit like Phil Spencer having the gall to talk about how Microsoft needs to make more games like Hi-Fi Rush the week they fucking shut down the studio that made it.
But hey, you took ECON 101 so you obviously know better.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.