Culture 1 in 3 Game Developers Laid Off - "Go Woke, Go Broke"

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"I’ve been laid off so many times in the last 5-6 years, had so many turbulent issues working in games. I have trauma and can’t ever fully trust anywhere now.- MANAGER (GAME DESIGN), CALIFORNIA"

GDC's festival of gaming released their yearly report on the gaming industry for this year. A lot of it confirms what some gamers have already come to the conclusion of when looing at games such as Dragon Age: Veilguard, Concord, or Highguard.

Right off the bat, the cover of the PDF shows what looks like to be a troon:
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The interesting statistics worth noting in the PDF are that of age, LGBT+ identification, and gender identification, as seen here with explanation of metrics:

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This is just the tip of the PDF findings, but these are a majority of them. I end off the article with this image:

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Oilspill Battery said:
The only game I have ever in my life seen actually justify the 65$ tag is factorio space age.
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I buy a few new titles (2-3 a year, the ones you need to buy new to play with friends or I can really justify... Forza, Space Marine, Hell Divers, Elden Ring... last one was Dune Awakening).... but I own way too many indies, puzzlers, sim games and older titles from stocking up on steam sales. I also buy some AAA stuff at like a $30 price point (Tsushima, Souls 3, Ratchet and Clank, Persona, God of War, etc...the kids are actually playing the co-op lesbos game right now).

Ps. Dysonsphere Program is a great Factorio clone, btw. Probably the best Chinese game I have ever played.
 
Edmund and his pet dev made around 10 million from Mewgenics in less than a week. It had barely any hype before a week or two of its launch. Modern game devs are so incompetent and entitled its genuinely insane they got a job in the first place
 
a-Lager said:
Edmund and his pet dev made around 10 million from Mewgenics in less than a week. It had barely any hype before a week or two of its launch. Modern game devs are so incompetent and entitled its genuinely insane they got a job in the first place
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To be fair fan retention just from having made previous games will carry something a lot.
 
Oilspill Battery said:
The only game I have ever in my life seen actually justify the 65$ tag is factorio space age.
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I’m with you there, Factorio has provided me with thousands of hours of entertainment.


Witcher 3 + expansions was $90 if you bought them all on release and they’re worth it. It was the last western AAA game I can remember that lived up to the hype.
 
Disdainer of the Plebs said:
Witcher 3 + expansions was $90 if you bought them all on release and they’re worth it. It was the last western AAA game I can remember that lived up to the hype.
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And you can grab that shit for a tenner now on GOG, DRM free!
Geralt approves of staying free, DRM free!
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a-Lager said:
It had barely any hype before a week or two of its launch.
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Not really true in the actual hardcore gaming space. The game has existed in one form or another since 2012. There was a ton of hype with the original announcement back then as this was coming from the dude who brought us Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac, two of the best games from the early 2010s. But then all the Team Meat drama happened and it was iced until Edmund got it back in 2018. At which point people were getting excited again, but even that was almost 10 years ago so the actual online visible hype turned more into people just silently tapping their foot.

But my main point here is the game selling a million copies so quickly didn't come out of no where, Edmund is a known quantity. Binding of Isaac has sold millions and millions of copies and people were looking forward to Mewgenics.

Times have changed though, a million copies doesn't make your game mainstream anymore, those are literally enthusiast numbers these days. That's exactly why the Western AAA market is struggling so much right now. They're retarded and can't figure out how to bring down their budgets and so they need actual mainstream success just to break even. But the problem is of course they keep making highly niche games that really only cater to fans of gay/tranny shit.

But that's the funny irony of it all. A lot of these games sell decent numbers, they could have a little gay gaming utopia to themselves if they would stop spending $100+ million dollars on every project. They can't figure that out though so they're just losing their jobs instead.

Personally I've just been sitting back and enjoying it as a hater. I'm a 90s kid, I grew up mostly playing Japanese games (especially anything with arcadey roots) and I always gravitate towards that. So I've been enjoying the last decade of them reclaiming the hardcore gaming space as the west constantly shoots itself in the foot. Nioh 3 just came out and is selling faster than the previous two entries with solid reviews from critics and fans. Even if I think it's a bit weaker than Nioh 2 it's still great. I am glad to see the west shit the bed so games like this are exposed to more people looking for something to play where the only gay character in the game is a guy who was killed by being pushed off a cliff, which had me laughing.
 
I mean ignoring everything else that was brought up already, I assume the live service business model isn't very conducive to high employment. A company that would've made 10 games over 10 years is now making 1 game and updating it over the course of 10 years. When like 50% of your industry is Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite, that just can't require as much manpower to operate
 
It's kinda weird how no one noticed. Instead you get bangers from small studios and foreign game companies taking up the slack. I really enjoyed the first dragon age thought the second was good but then moved on.

I don't care about a franchise dying if you already killed it.
 
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Kind of; devs are ignoring the full adage: "The customer is always right in matters of taste." The more you push stuff that your target demographic doesn't want, the more they're going to lose faith in your brand and look to your competitors. Stop being smug little gremlins and maybe stop making the agenda the forefront of your "games", especially at a time when disposable income is sparse for many people in said target demographic.
 
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There are consequences for a company making a shit product. And if you work for a company making a shit product you likely won't have a job after long.
 
Dog-O-Tron 5000v5.0 said:
Is this truly the final chapter of Gamergate?
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No. You also need to remember this whole saga is has been almost 15 years in the making. The game dev/journalist complex has openly held the paying customer in contempt since Mass Effect 3 all the way back in 2012. The gaming journoscum have been racking up the Ls but they’re still here. It will be over when none of these freaks cant pipe up without their replies looking like /b/ circa 2009.

Whiskey said:
It's kinda weird how no one noticed. Instead you get bangers from small studios and foreign game companies taking up the slack. I really enjoyed the first dragon age thought the second was good but then moved on.

I don't care about a franchise dying if you already killed it.
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Like I said, BioWare was the vanguard of AAA studios actively holding their customers in contempt, DAO was made before the rot set in, so replay the two of them - you will immediately see the difference. Mass Effect 3 was where the mask really came off, though.
 
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Poorly performing companies failing and people getting laid off is the normal state of things in any healthy business environment. It happened all the time when gaming was an innovative industry churning out banger after banger (and the 90% crap everyone but archivists forget). Sometimes, even great companies died or got cannibalized (RIP, Origin Systems and Looking Glass Studios), and their employees went on to work elsewhere.

What's not normal is a few zombie companies turning into bloated HR nightmare bureaucracies, and being sustained by corporate welfare while pushing out subpar product. The AAA game dev sphere has been this shambling profit extraction horror for over 15 years, and it shows. All innovation has been killed off, business models have been aggressively refocused on squeezing the customer, and it has become a toxic mire of loathsome DEI politics. It would be more surprising if people weren't tuning out.

Now, the expectation that you should get to keep your zhe/zhem sinecure "doing game dev" (i.e. playing office politics) is something that could only work for a few years when money is still abundant and nobody notices you are contributing negative value.

But sure, el Capitalismo est el Problemo.
 
Maybe make games set in Japan that feature Japanese people, and not your fetishized fantasy niggers. Maybe stop making dull reskins of the same boring hero shooters. Maybe stop making FPS games where people sprint like cheetahs and only hyper-ritalinized kiddies can enjoy them. Maybe make games that don’t nickel and dime players by building in a horrible grind then charging people to skip it. Maybe make military shooters that aren’t constant reiterations of the same stale shit. Maybe stop spending $150 million on a game so it needs to sell a million copies to break even. Maybe you stop taking government bribes to make propaganda games that push LGBTQ horseshit. Maybe stop thinking that faggots and parrothairs are your core audience (hint: if they don’t have jobs they can’t afford games).

Maybe you should find out what gamers want, then make it for them. Ever think of that, games industry?
 
CircuSphere said:
Ps. Dysonsphere Program is a great Factorio clone, btw. Probably the best Chinese game I have ever played.
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I've played it for about 100 hours, its a very solid 10/10 foundation but its also still extremely rough around the ages. It needs a lot of work especially around the construction tools given to the player (no cut and paste? no hotbar?) and the logistic towers kinda break everything with how strong they are. I do hope it doesn't get abandoned, would be a huge pity because its the only factory game that beats factorio in spectacle.
 
So if I'm interpreting this correctly (and please don't go to great efforts to correct me, because this is funny, and I don't want to be wrong :story:) ... you're more likely to be laid off in the video games industry if you're 1) a GDC attendee, 2) an obnoxious faggot (both words are interchangeable; apologies for the repetition), 3) inexperienced, 4) working at a bigger company (i.e. AAA).

In other words, just like literally every industry ever: if you're more interested in conferences and being a pain in the ass about yourself in the workplace, you're first on the chopping block when layoffs come because they're the only way to get rid of your worthless ass (this is also how very-low-performing, borderline-insubordinate, politisperg and other undesirables are generally removed from big companies -- it's fucking hard to actually get fired at a company that employs more than 10k people without straight up committing an actual crime on company property and usually against the company, because otherwise you might find a wily attorney to sue them over it, even if you're wrong, just to score a cash settlement).
 
“Noooooo. Just let me make one more live service design by committee looter shooter, bro! This time it’ll take off.”

Ever since the pandemic ended, the AAA industry has been in a slow burn 1983 style crash. I think the culture war stuff played a minor role though. The real problem was the massive bloated budgets, out of touch execs and large, unwieldy dev teams. Oh, and devs living in an echo chamber with their heads too far up their own asses to figure out what their customers want.

None of this is conducive to making a good game even if your budget is a quarter of a billion dollars. And with a budget that big, the execs insist on raising the prices in en economy where everything is getting more expensive and people are tightening their belts to cope with it. No one wants to buy overpriced corporate slop.
 
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