According to Kotaku: 25 Days Into 2024 And 5,800+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced
According to Kotaku: 25 Days Into 2024 And 5,800+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced
Microsoft recently announced 1,900 layoffs across Xbox, Activision, Blizzard, and ZeniMax
this is a running tally they're compiling in a single "article" and yeahhhh. not looking very good right now
i think it's very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we'll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.
This is true across tech workers. Having a nice salary kept unionization at bay, but there are no assurances during hard times.
These coordinated layoffs are almost certainly intended drive down labor costs in the long run by flooding the labor pool. Sure in a year we'll get "not enough developers" stories forgetting to mention the drastically smaller salary...
Yeah and without that the crunch time practices will never change.
God I hope we don't go through a phase of crappy games designed and developed using AI.
Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they're terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it'll be industry standard, and it'll be...fine. It'll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you'll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they'll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it'll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, "like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in." That's right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You'll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It'll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.
Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.
Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They'll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.
Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.
Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You're underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we'll end up with something similar to Garry's Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We'll experience things we're not familiar with, as long as we're experiencing them with other people.
Yeah like the clip shows in the 80/90s TV series. Yuck.
Seems like a good time to go indie. Big game companies are bloated and unhealthy. Specialization is so niche that there clearly isn't the kind of interdepartmental communication there ought to be, and it's pretty obvious that the money people have their hands in way too much.
That doesn't seem to me like an environment that's conducive to art.
BG3 came in like a wrecking ball. Sucks for all the actual devs though.
Baldur's Gate 3? What does that have to do with it? I don't really understand :)
Why is it happening this week? Are we approaching end of financial year in the US or something?
All the companies that didn't want to do layoffs at Christmas
A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there's been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it's a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.
Some companies end their fiscal year at the end of January, i.e. FY23 ends January 31, 2024.