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.
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.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use it to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”
Sanchez’s List
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Thermian. One of the all-time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.
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When a company is using AI in place of a person, it’s not a sign of that they are “futuristic” or “forward-thinking…” It’s a sign they are cheap, chase fads, and make short-sighted decisions that are not designed to improve their relationship with their customer.
Anyone using some headless white-label monthly subscription version of ChatGPT in an attempt to save a nickel on their bottom line - even if it means making everything worse for the company, product, employees, and customers in every way possible - is probably someone you don’t want to do ANY kind of business with - whether you’re a contractor, customer, or client.
The democratization of technology is a double-edged sword.
For every improvement in UX and lowering of a once impassible barrier of entry, we seem to inevitably gain a massive number of “eXpErTs” who can suddenly stand upon the now much lower skill floor.
Shortly thereafter seems to be a destruction of the general reliability of whatever field these “eXpErTs” flood - usually a field which used to be inherently cryptic and had complex prerequisites just to begin operation within, let alone master.
Like… it makes me almost miss when “using a computer” meant you had to understand how to browse a directory in DOS…
Because at least then you literally couldn’t begin to operate in the field unless you could wrap your head around understanding the basics of syntax.
Now you can just have an entire legion of dullards misspell or misspeak 30% of a malformed question to some random free LLM that still has trouble telling you “how many Rs are in the word strawberry,” and have it confidently fart back out a wrong answer that they will then copy-paste into a paper or article which will then be added to the pile of growing misinformation currently stuffing a frighteningly expanding part of our collective knowledge base.
Except FOSS. Because if you can fork it, it cannot be enshittified… every time they attempt to, another fork can be made.
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Maybe I should start like a service where we get someone like a dedicated “agent” who has their assets hidden to buy tickets for you for a small fee… and then transfer them… like an agency… for travel…
WAIT a second 😱!
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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…