Games Journalism General

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regalterry said:
Cucker, my brother in Christ, when costumers actively cheer when game journalists and developers are getting laid off, and laugh at them crying on social media, that should motivate you to do some introspection.
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Ideology is much more important than introspection.

They'll never understand that laughing at gamers, insulting gamers, treating them as less than causes this.

If you don't support the consumer, the consumer won't support you.
 
You’re firing the people that make the games. Games that until mere weeks ago you were talking about as if you didn’t already know you were going to dump them like high school students about to go to different colleges. It’s less disrespect and more something resembling complete contempt.
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It's not contempt - they all have to go at roughly the same time. Does this moron think that you have a team of 30 struggling, then you lay off ~20 and the 10 can't see the writing on the wall and phone in the effort more than they already are? You need these people to work and part of having them work is managing their motivation so yes you specifically need to lie to them.

Here’s how much the industry hates the people who work in it: an executive literally suggested that they consult AI to feel better. Really. What happened, was there not enough quarters to fill a sock so you could just beat each individual person? Great pitch to the workers you’ve let go while you yourself are not a worker who’s been let go. There was a lot of criticism about the post, and to his credit, he did delete it, but I am still dinging him for not including the prompt he used to write it.
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It's almost like he's nearly aware here and then just diverts course. Yes, the company is too big to manage resources. They don't have enough people for HR exit interviews is clearly a sign that the company is too big to properly function.

I’m not sure what we should do about this. I don’t have a solution to pure, destructive avarice. And the belief that everyone could go indie and make money that way (“as long as the games are good”) is about as far from reality as I am from ever understanding why God cursed me to live on this planet.
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But this is literally the answer - even if not literally indie, but smaller studios. Quite literally shocking how a journalist can't do the most basic research but here you go.

A loose list of the contenders for GOTY 2025 and the amount of people that worked on it
Split Fiction - 80 people
Death Stranding 2 - ~150 people
Expedition 33 - 30 people
Blue Prince - ~20 people (mainly 1 though)
Avowed (included here as a courtesy, but not really GOTY for me) - 80 people

Wow - it looks pretty much every great game made this year was made by a smaller studio. AC : Shadows had 1,000 to 3,000 people work on it (with a 2 hour credit sequence) - which is more than every studio on this list combined 10 times over and is a pile of garbage.

Not even a new concept, as Astrobot (65 people), Balatro (1 person), Wu Kong (30-130 people), and Metaphor (70 people) were all GOTY runners in 2024 as well. Undertale was a small team, Stardew is a small team, A Way Out was small team, etc.

To be a game journalist and not be able to put together that smaller studios are outpacing faster ones is insane. Quite literally that's like your only job.

Because if Xbox Game Pass is profitable, then why are we acting like it’s in such bad shape that we need to let go one and a half Sydney Opera Houses worth of salaries? And if it is in such bad shape, why aren’t we addressing that instead? Either excuse, either reason, either situation involves some pretty big questions.
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This literally involves 0 questions. Even if Gamepass was the most profitable thing to ever exist - there's 0 reason why xbox should funnel that money into underperforming studios "just because".

Yes, I’m making it sound like these executives are rubbing their hands together like it’s dinner time and clicking the ‘fired’ box on a list of employees. And they’re probably not. These are theoretically people, too. I’m sure there was at least ten seconds of them feeling a twinge of something resembling a memory of guilt. It’s not easy to fire people, especially when you have to tell a horrified HR department that they’re going to be the ones who do it on your behalf. So, if it’s not intentional, it’s completely callous. People shouldn’t be treated this way. Especially ones who made their company a profit.
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The executives don't care - to the executives (in this case, Microsoft) bought a product (in this case, a studio). If the product doesn't do what you want it to do, you get rid of it. It's not like they're axing friends and family. You don't cry when your microwave stops working - why would you cry when XXX Studio stops working? You can try and fix it but at some point the costs becomes too much and you're better off with a new one. The people who really sold these studios down the river were the old execs who took a huge payday for selling to MS and fucking off knowing the fate of purchased studios.

Also "made your company a profit" - some of these studios never released a title and very few of them produced a profit. If the studios were making money, they wouldn't be in this position in the first place.

I think that Obsidian games are mediocre slop but they're releasing games, people are buying them, and they've had 0 layoffs. Almost like there's a correlation there and not like a studio making Perfect Dark and only having a trailer to show for it after 7 years.

It's shocking to think that anyone who claims to be in the "video game space" can just flatly be so wrong about how it operates.
 
The important thing to remember are these are Marxist Journo-activists. They have no idea how business or money works. In fact, they hold nothing but contempt for the idea of buying and selling things, or money in general. To them, those people are owed a career, a job, a comfy life in a trendy as fuck new york apartment building in a upscale neighborhood (far away from blacks but close enough to walk down and taste real ethnic food), becuase they have the right ideas, and are "putting in the work." Marx had this stupid thing called the "Labor Theory of Value" which states that someone digging a ditch with a fucking spoon is worth more than someone doing it with a shovel becuase they put in more effort.

So no, to these people the idea that a game studio should do something like "put out a game" or even "put out a product the chuds will buy" is anathema to them. They literally can't conceptualize it.
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
The important thing to remember are these are Marxist Journo-activists. They have no idea how business or money works. In fact, they hold nothing but contempt for the idea of buying and selling things, or money in general. To them, those people are owed a career, a job, a comfy life in a trendy as fuck new york apartment building in a upscale neighborhood (far away from blacks but close enough to walk down and taste real ethnic food), becuase they have the right ideas, and are "putting in the work." Marx had this stupid thing called the "Labor Theory of Value" which states that someone digging a ditch with a fucking spoon is worth more than someone doing it with a shovel becuase they put in more effort.

So no, to these people the idea that a game studio should do something like "put out a game" or even "put out a product the chuds will buy" is anathema to them. They literally can't conceptualize it.
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They also assume
a: Everyone lives paycheck to paycheck like they do
b: Competent devs(hell, even the incompetent ones can pull this off) can't find other work in the video game industry or elsewhere
 
p1138 said:
They also assume
a: Everyone lives paycheck to paycheck like they do
b: Competent devs(hell, even the incompetent ones can pull this off) can't find other work in the video game industry or elsewhere
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It's also the same attitude we saw when the Trump admin started gutting the "deep state" -- the federal worker caste. They think they're entitled to a forever career, regardless of economic realities or even their own performance.

7 years with nothing to show for it? Yeah what are you gonna do about it, eh? ART takes TIME, CHUD! They're ENTITLED to that job becuase they EARNED it by having the right SKINTONE, GENITALS, FETISHES and OPINIONS, you nazifascistdudebroincelcapitalist!
 
Tanner Glass said:
A loose list of the contenders for GOTY 2025 and the amount of people that worked on it
Split Fiction - 80 people
Death Stranding 2 - ~150 people
Expedition 33 - 30 people
Blue Prince - ~20 people (mainly 1 though)
Avowed (included here as a courtesy, but not really GOTY for me) - 80 people
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These numbers aren't accurate and these studios made extensive use of contractors.
 
Alcoholism said:
These numbers aren't accurate and these studios made extensive use of contractors.
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Even if you want to include contractors, the core teams are still the size they are. Unless you think that they're using thousands of contractors and that larger teams aren't using any they're still all tiny teams compared to Ubisoft/Rockstar/Activision.
 
Tanner Glass said:
Even if you want to include contractors, the core teams are still the size they are. Unless you think that they're using thousands of contractors and that larger teams aren't using any they're still all tiny teams compared to Ubisoft/Rockstar/Activision.
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But some of them are using a thousand contractors
1,230 professional roles for split fiction

Death Stranding 2 doesn't have its credits on mobygames yet, but it's still a 20 minute sequence with a fuckton of names scrolling past

1,211 professional roles for Avowed, which btw is a fucking dogshit game

403 professional roles for Clair Obscur

114 professional roles for Blue Prince(this one is obviously way smaller than most of the rest)

Now it's not the same as the 3000+ that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc use but it's still a lot
 
"Contractors" is a terrible metric. If you work for 2 weeks on the project (aka you're a voice actor, motion capture actor, or something else temporary) you get a full credit. There's also the hot new trend of crediting the entire studio. The IT Administrator isn't a core member of the team and the president of EA Partnership didn't do a single tangible thing to the game.

More than 50% of the list for Split Fiction is every single person possible being credited at EA for localization of the script in various languages - it's kind of disingenuous to count them as "real" team members for the sake of what we're taking about.
 
Tanner Glass said:
"Contractors" is a terrible metric. If you work for 2 weeks on the project (aka you're a voice actor, motion capture actor, or something else temporary) you get a full credit. There's also the hot new trend of crediting the entire studio. The IT Administrator isn't a core member of the team and the president of EA Partnership didn't do a single tangible thing to the game.

More than 50% of the list for Split Fiction is every single person possible being credited at EA for localization of the script in various languages - it's kind of disingenuous to count them as "real" team members for the sake of what we're taking about.
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Sure, but that's not the point. Bioware(who apparently had over 200 employees in 2024 and has since downsized to under 100) didn't have thousands of employees either, but has 3656 professional roles in the credits.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/2327...uard/credits/playstation-5/?autoplatform=true
Larian who made BBaldur's Gate 3 has a little over 500 employees now apparently, but 2,333 professional roles

Bloat is still bloat. However even if a game studio credits the janitor's dog, the fact is those smaller game studios are still using a fraction of the resources that the "larger" studios use. Contractors can certainly count as most of that bloat but you can't just claim only 150 people worked on death stranding 2 or only 80 on split faction, because that's simply not the case but they do have far less contractor bloat.
 
HTTP Error 404 said:
Marx had this stupid thing called the "Labor Theory of Value" which states that someone digging a ditch with a fucking spoon is worth more than someone doing it with a shovel becuase they put in more effort.
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So that's why everything commies touch fail, not like anyone is surprised.
Funny because this is precisely what devs now are like: Retards who never dug a hole in their life trying to dig a ditch with a spoon. Little wonder their games are all disasters.
 
CrunkLord420 said:
Have any of the old guard SJW gamejournos talking about Collective Shout? I checked Austin Walker, Patrick Klepek, Jason Schreier and haven't seen them say anything. The hypocrisy is overwhelming, right?
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If you really want to see hypocrisy, look no further than the A&N threads about them.
 
Looks like Gita Jackson finally closed down her social media accounts.
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Frosted Snowflakes said:
Looks like Gita Jackson finally closed down her social media accounts.
View attachment 7693385
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Seems she was the main character on Blue sky for calling Ana Valens a scab and then saying people shouldn't take low freelance rare jobs.
(Skyview archive)
So many of these people use the must be logged in to view option. Annoying.

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All the skeletons getting dug up
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(a)

Edit: Luke Plunkett of Aftermath wrote slop about it.
This Was Inevitable Waypoint 2.0's ordeal is the story of games media in 2025 (archive link)
 
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clickbait said:
Ideology is much more important than introspection.
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This is part of the "demoralization" process Yuri Bezmenov described back in the 80's when he defected from the KGB. Not only are these people indoctrinated with Marxist nonsense, they cannot be repaired or recovered. No amount of evidence, proof, etc. that they've got it wrong will ever sink in. They'll simply reject or ignore it.

They've already had their introspection. It has determined what they already know -- they do not believe they are correct. They know they are correct. It is fundamental to their identity and cannot be separated from them. It is the world that is wrong, not them. They will rail against it to their dying breath and die angry because the world never realized its error. And if it notices their passing at all, it will laugh and carry on.
 
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