Business Big Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...

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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.

For those who want a QRD:


Just this week we've had these going on:

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But it's not just Big Tech, the vidya industry is also cleaning house bigly:

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All in all, rough seas ahead for the techbros.
 
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IOI's probably right to reconsider the publishing business. Its not often that a game is truly, blatantly going to be an obvious failure when it hits the market, but MindsEye really was that bad the entire way through its dev cycle, and IOI fucked up massively giving it so much benefit of the doubt over that life cycle.

As for Civ 7, I have no idea what went wrong in their core dev process, but they completely lost the plot, it reeks of "we tried changing the design because we can, but we don't understand what players actually play our games for". They tried to 'fix' the problem of players being done with saves before the final end screen by just constantly soft resetting the game state, which just prevented players from ever reaching a comfortable quit situation - so they only had uncomfortable ones instead, no wonder the sentiment tanked. A player saying "I've gotten what I wanted out of this run, no need to bully the AI into letting me conquer every tile of the map, lets start a new game" is not a failure state, its a success because they've played out an entire path of how a game could go, and still want to jump back in and try another.

No matter how large the Firaxis layoffs were, they weren't large enough. Axe them all and call Civ7 a squib game, cut your losses and start early on Civ8. Maybe look back at the older games and reintroduce some systemic complexity now that player resources, UX/UI design and other prior constraints have advanced significantly to allow complexity to be more palletable. 4X games are struggling in competition with Grand Strategies and RTS games right now - Not that any of them are mass market kings, but while RTS is seeing a minor resurgence as players rediscover the fun of short match gameplay, and Grand Strategies are continuing to grow as they take advantage of newer UX concepts to increase their depth without obfuscating things, 4X is stuck trying to keep individual systems simple, and make up for it with a volume of systems. But wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle, usually makes everyone unhappy. 4X's space should be in its ability for players to end up playing each game significantly differently to take advantage of inconsistent starting opportunities, and Civ is not making use of this at all right now.
 
Kuritan Deplorable said:
IOI's probably right to reconsider the publishing business. Its not often that a game is truly, blatantly going to be an obvious failure when it hits the market, but MindsEye really was that bad the entire way through its dev cycle, and IOI fucked up massively giving it so much benefit of the doubt over that life cycle.
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A big part of being a publisher is reviewing the game in development and suggesting/forcing changes. People gripe about this sometimes but game studios can easily go off the rails and the only thing that they will listen to is the publisher saying no more money.

Kuritan Deplorable said:
No matter how large the Firaxis layoffs were, they weren't large enough. Axe them all and call Civ7 a squib game, cut your losses and start early on Civ8. Maybe look back at the older games and reintroduce some systemic complexity now that player resources, UX/UI design and other prior constraints have advanced significantly to allow complexity to be more palletable.
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The Marvel game was a big mistake too. Make XCOM 3. Yes, the most it will possibly sell is XCOM 2 numbers, that's fine, that game still sold very well, Just don't spend $500 million developing it and you'll have cash coming in.
 
I have a feeling a lot of this ‘AI is replacing jobs’ talk is just cope to keep shareholders optimistic. I think these tech companies are cutting jobs without any actual intention to replace them with AI: a lot of jobs getting cut simply were not productive at all.
 
Peaches the Wonder Cat said:
A big part of being a publisher is reviewing the game in development and suggesting/forcing changes. People gripe about this sometimes but game studios can easily go off the rails and the only thing that they will listen to is the publisher saying no more money.
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Always remember that BioWare wanted to axe the flying from that one terrible game everyone only remembers for the flying until an EA guy decided he really liked it and they kept it around to keep him happy.
 
George Lucas said:
I have a feeling a lot of this ‘AI is replacing jobs’ talk is just cope to keep shareholders optimistic. I think these tech companies are cutting jobs without any actual intention to replace them with AI: a lot of jobs getting cut simply were not productive at all.
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Bit of everything...

The most obvious happening is that they are trying to offshore development to a third world country like India for cheap labor. A.I. standing for actually Indian is a joke for a reason, many of these companies are hooked on cheap labor and just using A.I. to obfuscate that.

The next happening is them getting rid of useless talent. Many of these companies over hired during Covid and need to thin out now. In addition, you have the "elephant in the room" being the DEI initiatives and how many useless bodies were brought in, get paid large amounts based on identity, and have run companies into the ground. You have Microsoft spending billions on Black-owned gaming studios that have done nothing for over half a decade. This current climate is unsustainable and A.I. gives companies an excuse to fire while saving face on these initiatives.

Finally, I think many are going on blind faith A.I. will be as big as others claim. The industry has become fucked thanks to the top two reasons. These companies have bled top talent and the young are not being trained take over anything. They seriously need a miracle to sustain in an industry where they screwed themselves in the long term.
 
Peaches the Wonder Cat said:
The Marvel game was a big mistake too. Make XCOM 3. Yes, the most it will possibly sell is XCOM 2 numbers, that's fine, that game still sold very well, Just don't spend $500 million developing it and you'll have cash coming in.
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The guy who pushed for the XCOM games (Jake Solomon) has now left, presumably with most of the talent that came with him or around his era. I doubt they can push a good XCOM game these days with the talent they did retain.
 
Kane Lives said:
The guy who pushed for the XCOM games (Jake Solomon) has now left, presumably with most of the talent that came with him or around his era. I doubt they can push a good XCOM game these days with the talent they did retain.
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All I remember from last time they gave us an XCOM game was bad memes and snake boobs.
 
Ahriman said:
View attachment 7841952

Mid-managers... I don't feel so good...
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I am honestly surprised more companies don't do this, I have read/heard one too many times about positions like "product owner", "product manager", etc do nothing but scream at programmers "WHERE'S MY NEW FEATURE? I PROMISED THE CLIENT THIS WOULD BE DONE BY YESTERDAY!", they will do anything but actually manage the teams/resources, at most telling you what needs to be done (with no further explanation) and delegate all tasks, what they do after that is anyone's guess, I suppose they either scratch their asses or go do the same at their second job (because of course these jackasses are the only ones being hired nowadays). I feel that for small teams at most you need one or two "middle managers" which double as analysts, people who deal with the client and gather their feedback/complaints to then destill it and pass it to the team.

I don't have to deal with half a dozen middle managers at my job but we do have some incompetent analysts/scrum masters, one of which did not take the hardware into account from the start and one week before deployment sent me to ask coworkers from other areas who maybe worked with similar hardware for "advice". It somehow reached the ears of our boss and he came to reprimand the analyst because he couldn't believe that big of a fuckup.
That situation and another one is why I began to despise overworked jackasses, yes very nice that you got three salaries and are turning your hut into a palace but for the love of god stop taking THIS PARTICULAR JOB AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT, you are delaying everyone. Productivity got so bad that our clients/bosses noticed and threatened to remove home office if we didn't raise productivity.
In the end it worked out yet I still hate overworked people since most don't have the responsability/ability to pull it off and just give more reasons to the crusty boomers at the top to call for RTO.
 
BlazikenLover said:
they will do anything but actually manage the teams/resources, at most telling you what needs to be done (with no further explanation) and delegate all tasks, what they do after that is anyone's guess, I suppose they either scratch their asses or go do the same at their second job (because of course these jackasses are the only ones being hired nowadays)
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I worked at a factory where the quality specialists/managers did nothing but forward the complaints to production with "Customer complaint, I don't know but fix it." Those people have these positions because upper management doesn't want to bother with overhauling parts of the department and risking it with hiring new people. Known issues are more comfortable than unknown ones.
 
The man The only man said:
I worked at a factory where the quality specialists/managers did nothing but forward the complaints to production with "Customer complaint, I don't know but fix it." Those people have these positions because upper management doesn't want to bother with overhauling parts of the department and risking it with hiring new people. Known issues are more comfortable than unknown ones.
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Relevant:

 
Baggywrinkle_v2 said:
I prefer outsourcing to H1B. Once they're here, they're going to stay and influence all the decisions to keep hiring from their caste. Let them just stay there and fix\ruin their own country.
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Ship them back, and once the Chinese build the dam upstream, blow that up and wash all the pajeets into the ocean.
 
Snekposter said:
Always remember that BioWare wanted to axe the flying from that one terrible game everyone only remembers for the flying until an EA guy decided he really liked it and they kept it around to keep him happy.
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Anthem... My God what a DISASTER that was.

The ONLY cool part was the iron man type armor flying and parts of the combat.

The rest was a disjointed mess.
 
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