- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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It’s not just video game workers. It’s happening everywhere. So, it’s not a sign about the games industry, it’s a sign about industry as a whole.
The only positive thing I could see on this is the explosion of more gaming studios that will bring more interesting games in the coming years.
This presumes that the closing of studios / layoffs will result in the same sort of funds used to pay for those sorts of investments are going to be recycled and available to new startup studios…
Also assumes that it doesn’t result in people leaving the game industry as a consequence of career game devs deciding the video game industry is largely an untenable career path if any sort of job security and stability is a goal in your life…
…because that’s why I left…
Started working in more general software industry work around 2012. The last game studio I worked for generated something like $8 million / day at its peak revenue point, but they still closed us down and let us all go within 2 years of hitting that milestone in the middle of a new project we were working on.
Haven’t worked more than a handful of days crunch since, and doubled my pay as well.
Not saying I wouldn’t have rather stayed because I didn’t love the work, but I wanted to own a home someday and start a family, so I had to pivot in order to be a relatively more reliable bread-winner for my family.
I know more than a few friends and family who did similar.
Got into the industry, got burned, left it for good.
I think its pretty understandable to want some more life stability after going through those motions.
I wish I could have stayed in it. I loved it, and I loved my coworkers, and I loved making something that people I knew and cared about enjoyed… but I also can’t work in an industry where after 2 years of working on weekends until 3am making a project that then makes SOMEONE literally millions a day, all the while getting paid barely enough to pay back minimums on student loans, I and all my coworkers STILL lose our jobs out of the blue.
I see that you went the general software dev career path, but is that pretty common? We always hear about that disillusioned dev who starts their own game that makes it big (or are warned about those who end up destitute), but rarely about what the vast majority do. What is the “safe” way to change course in your former industry? Also, do you still make games for fun?
And sorry this completely unrelated to your comment, but your video was the very first one I saw on Loops yesterday and appreciated your take on their app.
It is sadly far more common than I think many might realize.
I went to school with a bunch of folks who worked all over the industry, and now only a little under half of them remain in the game industry.
They’ve worked at Bungie, BioWare, on Ken Levine projects, DOOM 2016, games for Netflix, etc. and so many like myself dropped out mostly because of the depressingly high rate of studio closure and mass layoffs that so much of the industry engages in.
I know of at least one that has gone off on their own à la indie dev whom originally worked on the Saints Row games while at Volition, but he’s yet to reach the success I imagine he deserves - given that he was probably one of the most talented folks in our cohort at our game dev school.
The “safe” way probably is one involving mass unionization, but I don’t see that happening - same with software. It just popped up post-Reagan - which seems to have been the point where new career fields didn’t adopt a pro-union stance…
As far as “for fun” goes, I sometimes do little visual projects, but no - the last time I worked on game stuff directly outside of just some casual consultation was at my last game job in 2012.
Also, that’s super crazy you saw that and crossed paths here, too. 😅
Glad at least a couple folks liked it.
I’m hopeful for a more federated circle of platforms to revive something more akin to the internet pre-Facebook, but I don’t know if it will ever get there.
Lemmy and Mastodon are great, but they still are nowhere at critical mass… and the platforms have largely remained somewhat stagnant feature-improvement-wise.
Who knows what will happen, but I am hopeful things overall in the Fediverse will continue to improve - even if it is mostly as a side-effect occuring from nefarious leadership among big business continuing to consolidate the major wings of the internet…
Indie studio near me was hiring. But the wage is poor, if the game did become vastly successful there is no guarantee of anything in it for me and if it’s unsuccessful I lose my job.
I didn’t bother applying, they closed up a little while ago. Another I looked into on glassdoor and apparently they had been bought by private equity recently and it was turning to shit.
At this point I just can’t see any reason to care about my job. I need the money, but I don’t give a shit about the product of it. Just make sure my numbers look ok and don’t stand out for anything, don’t work too hard and go home.
Investment money has basically dried up. Even indies need that, unless you mean the “one person in their garage working off Patreon” type of studio. For awhile Chinese companies were holding down the fort and trying to expand in North America, but they’ve largely withdrawn that strategy and focused on domestic production. That’s why so many indie studios working on their first game shut down in the last two years.
For this to reverse itself interest rates will need to come down, but for that to happen without catastrophic inflation we would need several years of un-fucked monetary policy. So basically it’s fucked for a long time and possibly will never exist again in the way it did. This is on top of all the other issues the vfx/game industries have with crunch, chaotic management, etc.
I wish people would actually stay in the industry but this is unlikely. Why would someone continue to work in an industry that will cut them at a moment’s notice for no reason? These people will leave gaming and become software engineers in other fields. There are more people just looking to work than there are people looking to start a full studio.
Death to AAA, long live indie passion project shareware nonsense.
When I read articles like this a Jimquisition episode starts playing in my head.
Jimquisition is an amazing reviewer/games journalist. I like how pro-consumer she* is. Obligatory fuck Konami.
*she/they
Oh my gosh, I had no Idea Jim is trans. My bad.
It’s been about 5 years since they came out, so if you haven’t been following them in recent years you wouldn’t know! They go by James Stephanie Sterling now.
Literally the only thing I know about them is Jim saying fuck konami and yet that is burned into my memory.
Because Konami is Konami, and Konami is the worst!
Consolidation is not good. I think the massive tax cut to corporations in 2017 is a big part to blame.
When corporate taxes are higher, they give their profits to their employees as a tax write off. When it’s lower, they pay the tax and use the cash to build up value for the shareholders. This includes corporate consolidation.
Remember when everybody was talking about corporations storing profits in offshore accounts waiting for tax rates to go down? Well Trump have them that and they have brought that money back and used it to buy up their competition.
Honestly, small business owners should be at the forefront of complaining about this. The entire tax change made it harder for small businesses to compete with large businesses.
When corporate taxes are higher, they give their profits to their employees as a tax write off. When it’s lower, they pay the tax and use the cash to build up value for the shareholders. This includes corporate consolidation.
This.
Remember when everybody was talking about corporations storing profits in offshore accounts waiting for tax rates to go down? Well Trump have them that and they have brought that money back and used it to buy up their competition.
Also this.
Small businesses don’t even seem to be a talking point anymore.
It’s the era of the syndicates and Guilds 🍻
Cheers for developer cooperatives!
We accept your surrender.
To everybody who said not to be worried about this and that if this was actually a bad idea capitalism would solve it magically from indie game studios appearing out of thin air to replace the roles played by AAA game development…
Take a long walk off a short pier you naive assholes
The golden age of video games is over, yes indie games will step up to the plate to fill some of the gap, but at a structural level they simply can’t replace AAA studios. By definition AAA game studios have a capacity to create video games that smaller studios don’t and even more importantly for the career of promising game developers AAA game studios can play a crucial role in providing early career experience. AAA game studios also provide the possibility for game developers to start families since at least in the past larger companies tended to be more stable and could guarantee more stable employment.
This was not inevitable, and as fans of this medium of art we collectively failed to stop this from happening or even really to put up much resistance to it at all. We failed the artists that make the art we love.
I think your smashing of AAA games / their studios and a Golden Age of video games is borderline ridiculous.
I think history has shown (Nintendo specifically) that game play is king, you do not need a billion dollar project with ultra realistic graphics to have fun… many people, like me, have a ton of fun and rarely play any AAA games
The second part is also ridiculous (specially the family part) considering AAA Studios were the worst at exploiting their staff and lay them off the second the beta game was sold in early admissions
I think history has shown (Nintendo specifically) that game play is king, you do not need a billion dollar project with ultra realistic graphics to have fun… many people, like me, have a ton of fun and rarely play any AAA games
Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.
You are really failing to understand the basic dynamics going on in the labor market of game development here. Larger entities can do things smaller entities can’t, if you want to dispute that argument you are going to have a hard time doing so as the logic is very basic.
Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.
Look at Ubisoft’s large open world games or the Red Dead Redemption series, an indie game studio could never bank on creating similar games as the raw time it takes to pay developers to make that big of a detailed landscape would be infeasible for a precarious indie game company to tackle. This is just basic business sense.
I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.
The second part is also ridiculous (specially the family part) considering AAA Studios were the worst at exploiting their staff and lay them off the second the beta game was sold in early admissions
Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if only one or two things go wrong?
It’s not so much that Nintendo is massive… it’s that they don’t FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.
They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.
The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.
Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game’s profit chart shows even a slight slowdown… all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned… and then bailing on the industry completely.
Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.
The reason it’s shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work… so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.
It’s just finally catching up as the owners’ boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.
It’s not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.
Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.
When Nintendo came out with the wii, they were laughed out of the room by Sony and MS because their games were too simple and graphics lacking… it was a huge success, that is what I meant… plenty of small, indie even, video game studios have and can produce huge hits… more importantly, they do not need to make a kajillion dollars to break even which means their games are not akin to armed robbery
Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.
I am not refuting that… I am refuting your claim that not having AAA games means the video game golden age is over… AAA video games have been mostly pain in the last 7 years… we can have tons of fun with no AAA titles
You are saying “If Mercedes Benz collapses, cars are over”… I am saying “there are plenty of other car makers to keep the industry as a whole”
I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.
Never claimed any of that… simply said I have fun with them and won’t miss AAA games
Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if only one or two things go wrong.
What AAA Studio are you thinking of? which one has NOT laid off tons of people as soon as their very successful launches cash in?
Can you define “golden age of video games”?
Gamecube-PS2-Xbox 360 Era. It was a time when game developmental costs had come down a bit, the demand for games was pretty steady, and the market wasn’t oversaturated. It allowed AAA devs to make some big creative swings and return a steady profit.
There’s a lot of different genres that are popular today where you can point to a game from that era as the progenitor. Stuff like Resident Evil 4 for the third person action shooter, Devil May Cry for spectacle RPGs, Katamari Damacy and Pikmin for uh…whatever the hell they are.
I don’t think AAA has ever been as creative as they were during that period. For over a decade now, pretty much all creativity in games has come from indies, with AAA being comprised of copycats.
The original Xbox was the contemporary of Gamecube and PS2, not 360.
for some reason I always think the 360 came out much earlier than it really did.
god has it really been two decades?
Two decades and two months!
When Factorio was injected into my dopamine receptors. Time has been a blur ever since.
The time when OP was a kid/teenager and nostalgia hits the hardest.
The period during which working in game development could be considered somewhat theoretically reasonable to pursue as a career.
It has been plenty unreasonable to work for AAA game companies for a long time. Long crunch, layoffs between projects, abuse by managers has been widespread for like 15 years at least. And attempts to remedy these issues with collective bargaining has been met with obvious union busting for several years at least.
Perhaps your definition of a golden age existed and had ended, but if so the end was longer ago than you think and we’re watching the end of an inevitable decline. You also have to compare this to everyone else’s conditions. The fact “gig economy” is even in our lexicon should show how unstable tons of people’s employment and income are.
I don’t really disagree with this sentiment, my point is we risk losing the essential narrative of why what will occur or arguably already has occurred happened if we don’t continually reemphasize the actual issue.
What did you expect anyone to do about this? Every CEO has a responsibility to make number go up above all else and will literally be fired if they’re not willing to do what it takes to make that happen. There is literally nothing any gamer can do to stop that. And you call other people naive?
Organize, unionize and have a militant solidarity with people doing the labor to make art.
“Gamer Culture” in general has a longggggg way to go in this regard.
It’s a rough world out there for people trying to unionize…
https://kotaku.com/ubisoft-halifax-shutdown-unionized-rainbow-six-mobile-2000657752True but also my point is kinda that you might as well try because without workers having meaningful leverage in their workplace, management will undoubtedly drive large corporations that impact the entire industry into brickwalls for the dumbest, most shortsighted reasons.
Yeah, I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying, but tech jobs are a long ways away from having unions be the norm.
I’d love to have one in my job, since the only kind of job security you get in software is becoming a specialist in some niche area where you’re the only one who knows how anything works, which isn’t exactly a low-stress position either.
Not that I disagree a stable studio has it benefits for all the reasons you listed, but even in the best of times most AAA is still not a normal 9-5 environment. Your expected to crunch just for your team to be laid off immediately after releasing something. Those studios were shedding labor like snake skin even before these bigger cuts. AAA has also been creatively bankrupt for literal decades at this point, executive boards churning out the same game year after year, with lootboxes and micro transactions being their greatest innovations in recent memory.
I can agree we need stable studios, with leaders who prioritize their employees, creativity and passion - but come on, glazing these corpos as shepherds of some golden age of gaming is absurd. Innovation WILL continue without them.
