🤓 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
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.
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.
If you have a blockbuster product, layoffs improve your financials even more.
Poor product? Layoffs make your financials not look terrible.
Work productivity goes up too much (unit of work measured / hours of labor)? Well, that means you can do layoffs because you don't need productivity that high. Plus, at least initially it will look even better since you lowered the denominator.
Terrible productivity? Layoffs make it look better quickly.
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.
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"
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don't aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn't require the best.
Ok let's say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn't make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
They don't, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don't want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don't need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.
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).
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.
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.
Replace gaming industry with any white collar work in general these days, I feel like we are all just training the AI models until they get good enough to replace us all these days
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.
They think only in the high-level and then only the most self-aware of them even wonder why they don't understand the low-level. "Throw man-hours at it" is always the solution. It's fucking maddening.
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.
That's pretty much business 101 though. It's almost always cheaper long term to retain employees (especially high performing employees) rather than getting rid of and re-hiring. But when you are at the edge of bankruptcy or can't afford to keep people (sometimes simply for 'profit') then short term it's a better idea.
Companies are not ethereal, so there are always going to be short term decisions made that hurt long term.
i see what youre saying, but i think youre missing some stuff here. companies being "on the edge of bankruptcy" is usually also the fault of csuite douchebags. where do you think all the money companies make goes? it goes to the obscene csuite salaries. those fuckers make these ridiculous short term decisions that only benefit them while taking credit for every success and claiming every failure was due to "market forces" completely outside their control. yeah companies are responding to the situation of the moment, but how the fuck do you think they got there in the first place?
the last place i worked had this problem constantly. management makes a dumbass decision that hurts the business for no benefit, then we get in a tight spot because of it, and management makes another decision that only really hurts the actual workers with the justification that they have to because the company is in a tough spot. rinse and repeat. no accountability, no repercussions, and nothing meaningfully changes except for things get worse for all the people doing the actual work.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
You may want to take the same advice. 'Usually full of C-Suite douchebags' shows how out of touch you are with reality. The majority of companies in the US don't even have a C-Suite and are mom and pop shops. Even those that do have a proper corporate structure, you can remove every ounce of salary and benefits from the C-Suite and still wouldn't lower prices significantly.
Management makes bad decisions? So do workers. Everyone does, that's humans, no one is perfect. Do workers more often get kicked to the curb over management? Sure, that's reality. If you move yourself into management, and workers make errors that cost the company, who do you get rid of?
Perhaps it's a giant combination of factors and not just some sucker with 'C' in their title.
Leadership makes the decisions and gets to keep the profits, so they should be held to a higher standard of accountability. Small businesses that don't literally have "CEOs" still have leaders. These people took responsibility, and should be treated like it.
If you're a ship captain, and your sailors make errors that cause the ship to sink, you're still ultimately responsible because it's your ship, and who hired those sailors?
Ahh, so realistically you want one person to take blame, but not have the reward. Makes sense.
Close a company because you have to keep everyone regardless, or get rid of people to ensure those who are left stay employed. The realistic decision made every day. When a government decision raises your costs overnight by 50% and customers don't pay for it, tell us, who is at fault? Guess it's the manager because they didn't anticipate that right?
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.
What kills me with this ridiculous form of corporate thinking is the sequel does not have all the quality of life improvements of the original, i.e., they don't build on lessons learned. A game may have patchs that add features that improve playability, or make settings easier to find, or just add some cool mechanic that everybody loves. Then the sequel comes out and all those features are missing for some reason. It's fucking infuriating!
Why do you think they like AI so much? The bought into the hype and now they think they can just own a data center and make more money that way. Everything can be their “creative vision” because they’re the smartest and most talented because they got themselves so rich and god/society reward the best
I think they 'like' AI because it's the promise of how much what they see as 'redundant' being done. Unfortunately some people think that's story boarding, artwork, anything that is creative, and forgetting that so much of the office could be enhanced and improved with 'AI'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody but Indies are hiring 30 year old game developers.
I can tell you from experience that most of what you learn developing games is not really applicable in broader Software Development, not just the libraries (and often languages) being different but also the design principles often being different and the software architectures definitely being different - gamedev tend to create systems oriented to visuals and driven by human actions and by timed events, operating both on insanely tight timings that push towards overoptimization (the rendering layer) and on very lax timings (stuff reacting to human actions) plus data integrity isn't much of a concern, whilst most stuff out there is data-driven, often operating at machine-talk speeds (faster than user driven, slower than game screen rendering speeds) and data integrity is often of paramount importance (especially in corporate systems dealing with valuable info, money or things that cost money to do).
So at least in Software Development having "5 years at Blizzard" isn't all that impressive, at least not for the typical hiring manager who tends to be in his or her 30s or older.
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.
On the other end of this, Pokemon is still being developed by guys who can't develop in a modern engine and are just coasting on the popularity of the franchise. I have Scarlett and I got about an hour in before shelving it for other better games, and I was so into Pokemon I've played through about a dozen ROM hacks.
As long as we all lay them off constantly so their children are always near death from malnutrition they will always come back when we tell them to. Plan can not fail.
I mean, you joke. But this is just the definition of contract labor.
In theory, contractors earn sizably more than salaried workers. If you're bringing in $200/hr, you can get away with working six months a year. Or working two years and then taking a year off.
But because so much of this contract work has been outsourced overseas or managed through networks of subcontractors, you end up with people actually earning a $30-60/hr salary for work that's getting billed at $200/hr by some gatekeeping intermediary. And you end up with a steady stream of people in-between jobs whose skills atrophy and whose interests in the long-term function of the project don't align.
Alternatively, you've got a bunch of these little indie pop-ups that churn out reskinned GACHA crap based on whatever happens to be popular at a given moment. And the name of the game is to get enough end-users to win yourself a corporate buyout, then dash out the back door with all the cash you can stuff in your pockets.
The idea of seasonal or boom-bust employment isn't unworkable on its face. But without labor solidarity or a professional organization to prop up wages, you just end up with a bunch of middle-men and corporate suits draining the lay workers dry.
I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.
Don't worry all the rage is outsourcing now, so they can lay an entire studio off and ideally that studio gets another contract somewhere else (most don't).
83 replies
🤓 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
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.
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
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.
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"
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don't aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn't require the best.
Ok let's say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn't make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
They don't, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don't want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don't need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.
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 capitalism doesn't seek perfection, and it's far from a fair system
It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.
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
"you undercook chicken...layoff, you overcook fish, layoff, you charge too much for a sweater, layoff..."
TBF undercooked chicken would deserve a layoff.
It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.
Replace gaming industry with any white collar work in general these days, I feel like we are all just training the AI models until they get good enough to replace us all these days
yeah we have to stop working for these people.
Because it isn't. You recruit people when you need workforce, and you reduce employment when there's no work to be done.
Every time you do that, you lose institutional knowledge.
Everywhere I look, problems are coming from rich assholes removed from actually doing work making decisions.
It’s called capitalism. This is the result
This has to be the best meme I've seen in a very long time, made it worth logging into Lemmy. Thank you :)
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.
They think only in the high-level and then only the most self-aware of them even wonder why they don't understand the low-level. "Throw man-hours at it" is always the solution. It's fucking maddening.
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.
Its like when tech-bros re-invent trains or taxes or something
That's pretty much business 101 though. It's almost always cheaper long term to retain employees (especially high performing employees) rather than getting rid of and re-hiring. But when you are at the edge of bankruptcy or can't afford to keep people (sometimes simply for 'profit') then short term it's a better idea.
Companies are not ethereal, so there are always going to be short term decisions made that hurt long term.
i see what youre saying, but i think youre missing some stuff here. companies being "on the edge of bankruptcy" is usually also the fault of csuite douchebags. where do you think all the money companies make goes? it goes to the obscene csuite salaries. those fuckers make these ridiculous short term decisions that only benefit them while taking credit for every success and claiming every failure was due to "market forces" completely outside their control. yeah companies are responding to the situation of the moment, but how the fuck do you think they got there in the first place?
the last place i worked had this problem constantly. management makes a dumbass decision that hurts the business for no benefit, then we get in a tight spot because of it, and management makes another decision that only really hurts the actual workers with the justification that they have to because the company is in a tough spot. rinse and repeat. no accountability, no repercussions, and nothing meaningfully changes except for things get worse for all the people doing the actual work.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
You may want to take the same advice. 'Usually full of C-Suite douchebags' shows how out of touch you are with reality. The majority of companies in the US don't even have a C-Suite and are mom and pop shops. Even those that do have a proper corporate structure, you can remove every ounce of salary and benefits from the C-Suite and still wouldn't lower prices significantly.
Management makes bad decisions? So do workers. Everyone does, that's humans, no one is perfect. Do workers more often get kicked to the curb over management? Sure, that's reality. If you move yourself into management, and workers make errors that cost the company, who do you get rid of?
Perhaps it's a giant combination of factors and not just some sucker with 'C' in their title.
at least get their cock out of your mouth while youre talking to me jeez
Leadership makes the decisions and gets to keep the profits, so they should be held to a higher standard of accountability. Small businesses that don't literally have "CEOs" still have leaders. These people took responsibility, and should be treated like it.
If you're a ship captain, and your sailors make errors that cause the ship to sink, you're still ultimately responsible because it's your ship, and who hired those sailors?
Ahh, so realistically you want one person to take blame, but not have the reward. Makes sense.
Close a company because you have to keep everyone regardless, or get rid of people to ensure those who are left stay employed. The realistic decision made every day. When a government decision raises your costs overnight by 50% and customers don't pay for it, tell us, who is at fault? Guess it's the manager because they didn't anticipate that right?
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
What kills me with this ridiculous form of corporate thinking is the sequel does not have all the quality of life improvements of the original, i.e., they don't build on lessons learned. A game may have patchs that add features that improve playability, or make settings easier to find, or just add some cool mechanic that everybody loves. Then the sequel comes out and all those features are missing for some reason. It's fucking infuriating!
Why do you think they like AI so much? The bought into the hype and now they think they can just own a data center and make more money that way. Everything can be their “creative vision” because they’re the smartest and most talented because they got themselves so rich and god/society reward the best
I think they 'like' AI because it's the promise of how much what they see as 'redundant' being done. Unfortunately some people think that's story boarding, artwork, anything that is creative, and forgetting that so much of the office could be enhanced and improved with 'AI'.
Funny because it’s true. Painfully true.
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.
Without a golden parachute.
..B..b.ut the yacht can stay. Right??
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.
Got free time for making memes? Guess what...
That’s a paddlin’
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.
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.
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.
If it's not "spreadsheet-able" it doesn't exist. -- typical MBA.
Three Months Later
"Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI's are in the toilet all of a sudden."
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.
It probably makes for a good look in your CV. You work there for a few years, and then you can apply anywhere else with better chances, I guess.
Nobody but Indies are hiring 30 year old game developers.
I can tell you from experience that most of what you learn developing games is not really applicable in broader Software Development, not just the libraries (and often languages) being different but also the design principles often being different and the software architectures definitely being different - gamedev tend to create systems oriented to visuals and driven by human actions and by timed events, operating both on insanely tight timings that push towards overoptimization (the rendering layer) and on very lax timings (stuff reacting to human actions) plus data integrity isn't much of a concern, whilst most stuff out there is data-driven, often operating at machine-talk speeds (faster than user driven, slower than game screen rendering speeds) and data integrity is often of paramount importance (especially in corporate systems dealing with valuable info, money or things that cost money to do).
So at least in Software Development having "5 years at Blizzard" isn't all that impressive, at least not for the typical hiring manager who tends to be in his or her 30s or older.
You can probably Occam's razor as to why they don't make their own studios
I had a professor who had worked for a big company, was laid off, joined a smaller company, then the bigger company bought that one up.
Was your professor Steve Jobs??
No? I don't think he ever worked in game design.
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.
On the other end of this, Pokemon is still being developed by guys who can't develop in a modern engine and are just coasting on the popularity of the franchise. I have Scarlett and I got about an hour in before shelving it for other better games, and I was so into Pokemon I've played through about a dozen ROM hacks.
Pokemon is not developed by Nintendo though. They are only the publisher.
Yes, I'm taking about the lifetime employment part.
Leg end
Cool 😎
As long as we all lay them off constantly so their children are always near death from malnutrition they will always come back when we tell them to. Plan can not fail.
I mean, you joke. But this is just the definition of contract labor.
In theory, contractors earn sizably more than salaried workers. If you're bringing in $200/hr, you can get away with working six months a year. Or working two years and then taking a year off.
But because so much of this contract work has been outsourced overseas or managed through networks of subcontractors, you end up with people actually earning a $30-60/hr salary for work that's getting billed at $200/hr by some gatekeeping intermediary. And you end up with a steady stream of people in-between jobs whose skills atrophy and whose interests in the long-term function of the project don't align.
Alternatively, you've got a bunch of these little indie pop-ups that churn out reskinned GACHA crap based on whatever happens to be popular at a given moment. And the name of the game is to get enough end-users to win yourself a corporate buyout, then dash out the back door with all the cash you can stuff in your pockets.
The idea of seasonal or boom-bust employment isn't unworkable on its face. But without labor solidarity or a professional organization to prop up wages, you just end up with a bunch of middle-men and corporate suits draining the lay workers dry.
I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.
computer + business = layoffs Don't you know?
Business+Business = also layoffs.
B2BLO
Don't worry all the rage is outsourcing now, so they can lay an entire studio off and ideally that studio gets another contract somewhere else (most don't).
i think they're onto something... oh wait!
“We have the best game profits. Because of layoffs”