Maybe they should stop gambling on hundred million dollar games that have to become the next Fortnite to break even. It’s ridiculous how much the budgets on a lot of these games are, and I can’t even tell where it went.
Same thing with movies, especially. Not everything needs to have a budget rivaling the GDP of a small country.
I dunno. I believe in the mythical era of DOOM, where id had some of the best and brightest just jamming away. But anything this millennium is certainly questionable.
I need to read Romero's book. Sandy Peterson is constantly posting about it. Lots of upper management weirdness and demands. I think what killed Microsoft is they had brilliant people who were being told to do stupid stuff because of management that had no idea how anything worked.
Sadly, that also describes a money laundering business. Success is such a trick to people they don't realize it's fake.
Gambling implies a chance of winning. Their insistence on owning the chuds by catering to a nonexistent audience would still have these games be dead on arrival even if the budget was smaller. The problem isn't the budget. It's the lack of quality.
Big budget games and movies could be profitable again tomorrow, but only if they drop the nonexistent audience and go back to making things with mass appeal.
Woah there buddy! If we don't eliminate the toxic "self respect" from our senior staff, they may push back against our incompetent management!
Hiring new rainbow retards is win/win! They get a job, and we managers get an illusion of competence and authority as we waste a hundred million dollars of other people's money!
Why do they continue to go through the interview cycle and look for yet another corporate job. Go make a game!
I voluntarily left my corporate job after nearly 20 years when the opportunity to be “laid off” was presented to me. Didn’t bother with interviews at all. I do everything as contracts and consulting. I can pick and choose what I want to bid on, who I want to work for, and what I’m in the mood to do. I took a month off because I had just done a big job and got paid enough that I figured why not. Now I’m looking into subbing some menial tasks to family and friends. I’m training some teenagers to do some of it. They get good pay, I get to help the future of white men. All of the “benefits” can be bought. If you need health insurance go buy it, retirement do it yourself. Who needs stock awards when you control the income.
Yeah I was well connected from years of doing good work etc, but someone who was at Rockstar that long should be as well.
Do you just go around and bitch at anyone and anything that’s done anything at all positive? Maybe if you’d get off your ass and try something your life wouldn’t be such shit.
Nothing I do ever works out or benefits me, why bother? It's why I fucking hate all you faggots telling people like me to kill ourselves gambling on starting a business that's doomed for failure.
It's all just networking for me. Sort of the benefit of developing friendships from work, everyone knows everyone else. Started out just talking to guys after I was out of corporate and it was "oh hey you can help me with this I'm working on." My former company and all it's peers contract out so much of what employees used to do, but most of it is on a pay-per-job not hourly basis so many won't test the uncertainty. I do a little of both depending on the task. For sake of context it's basically the industrial side of tech, so let's just call it utilities versus software an IT. I'm not sure it would work in software and IT because it's so infiltrated by Indians. But for a good game dev, use that severance I'm sure he got, get with your friends that were also gone, make a game and put it on sale.
You overestimate what you need for this. The only thing you truly need to succeed at what cccp is suggesting is networking. This is a lot easier said then done, but if you have it (and said Rockstar dev damn well should with a resume of working there for so long), that really is the biggest and hardest fight already solved. The next part is just applying it properly
Devs need to stop begging at the feet of rotting gaming giants, they will only get laid off again. the industry is too bloated in collapsing under its weight, especially with the younger generation more into social media than they are into games. if they still want to be in the game industry, they need to go indie and build a company from the ground up.
The only devs getting hired are DEI freaks. They don't have the talent to make their own games which is why they're destroying existing franchises. The ones with actual talent already have their own indie studios.
I want to know how many devs getting hired are gamers or have even a residue of game development talent. It sounds like many who get the job think that Candy Crush is peak gaming, that gamedev is a "9-to-5 job so I don't have to do manual labor," that games should be political tools, or that it's a grift on western companies willing to pay through the nose. I don't want those kind of people making games that I play. That goes for the C-levels too; too many bean counters and hard-nosed business types who don't even like games are holding the reigns and even impose 100 hour weeks on their teams.
I think we'll see a quality uptick if such people get flushed out of the industry.
The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers
I fully support them on this endeavor. Anything that will hasten the death of the AAA industry is fine with me. There is no fixing the industry until every one of these people is removed from it.
In my experience, it rather just makes it harder to fire the useless bad apples you don't want. It's the bottom of the barrel who needs the union's support, not the rock star cornerstone of your team.
The biggest issue is that every union will outlive its usefulness though. If only there was a way to get rid of them after they actually do the useful thing they set out for.
Western game dev is being purged of DEI hires and activists. It just so happens that half the people working in western game dev fall into these dead weight categories, so it looks like "industry wide" layoffs. Asian and eastern European dev are not experiencing the same firings.
The barrier for entry to make games is very low. The really good devs can still make games and release them independently. The shitty ones are the ones that ruined our games so they can go back to India where appropriate and the rest probably got hired quickly to go agitate ICE.
Is it standard practice to lay off devs after shipping a project? First I've heard of that. Contracts with freelancers would end, of course, but that's different than laying off staff.
According to Link, “It's weirdly common to hear about people getting laid off from the same company more than once—i.e., they get laid off, rehired, and laid off again in a span of two or three years, often without a different job in between” (Schreier 2014).
When your games have become so run of the mill boring and preachy, and you lose the target audience to chase a different audience. The one doesn't care enough to actually buy the thing they claim to enjoy, then this is what you get.
Attentions are elsewhere, and the financial maps prove it. The harder you push a message at the cost of the game, the worse you do financially.
But please, keep it up. Companies that no longer care about the game enough to let it happen to this degree, no longer deserve my money anyway, no matter how much they change to entice me back.
I am not a battered spouse who thinks that the company has changed at the first sign of not beating me for a few days.
They just get re-hired, the rats and roaches move from one crumbling domicile to the next, the leeches find a new host, the grifters flip their script over and start anew.
When someone's been fired multiple times (see how some of the Highguard devs bragged they were also Concord devs) that isn't "1/3rd of devs", you're stacking debuffs onto someone already downed, but who keeps getting rezzed.
It's the fact that video gaming rapidly went downhill around 2016 (Mafia 3, Battlefield 1, etc.) that got me away from it, which was a net positive.
I remember writing an essay around early 2017 noting that video games tended to be less degenerate than film. I couldn't write that today, because I no longer observe any difference. Later games like Cyberpunk 2077 are absolutely degenerate to the extreme, said game portrays a grossly artificial, technologized hellscape: a fertile ground for mental illness.
Then you had The Last of Us 2 or whatever with its trans playable characters, and, look, the rest of it is just hazy to me, because most of what I read about video gaming is just from you people, and so much of what is posted here is comical and incredulous.
Part of me is glad that video gaming has succumbed to the total degeneration that earlier fully claimed Western (and plenty of non-Western) film. Having last played a video game over a year ago, and going for a whole year (2023?) without playing any either, it really becomes obvious that it's like a drug in hindsight.
'What did you achieve with all that?' Other than a few YouTube videos with more views than I expected, nothing. I don't even remember most of it.
Finally, if AI is taking away the jobs of bad people who profit from producing filth... who cares!? Let's get those numbers up!
Maybe they should stop gambling on hundred million dollar games that have to become the next Fortnite to break even. It’s ridiculous how much the budgets on a lot of these games are, and I can’t even tell where it went.
Same thing with movies, especially. Not everything needs to have a budget rivaling the GDP of a small country.
The answer to "why not make ten $10M movies instead of one $100M movie?" is "you can't embezzle $10M from a $10M film."
It's gotta be the same with games.
Just look at Ashes of Creation for an example from last week.
It's been like that the entire time.
I dunno. I believe in the mythical era of DOOM, where id had some of the best and brightest just jamming away. But anything this millennium is certainly questionable.
I need to read Romero's book. Sandy Peterson is constantly posting about it. Lots of upper management weirdness and demands. I think what killed Microsoft is they had brilliant people who were being told to do stupid stuff because of management that had no idea how anything worked.
Sadly, that also describes a money laundering business. Success is such a trick to people they don't realize it's fake.
I remember when Destiny was all the rage, they were boasting the biggest budget for a video game ever!
the game that came out ended up being smaller than Halo.
Gambling implies a chance of winning. Their insistence on owning the chuds by catering to a nonexistent audience would still have these games be dead on arrival even if the budget was smaller. The problem isn't the budget. It's the lack of quality.
Big budget games and movies could be profitable again tomorrow, but only if they drop the nonexistent audience and go back to making things with mass appeal.
Who made the biggest profits during the gold rush?
The guy who sold shovels and sieves.
The real winner in all this isn't any game studio.
It's Unity and Unreal.
And performing terrible practices like crunching, and low pay
And hiring fresh rainbow retards for half the price so they can fire the talented old grognards who actually knew how to code clean or optimize.
Woah there buddy! If we don't eliminate the toxic "self respect" from our senior staff, they may push back against our incompetent management!
Hiring new rainbow retards is win/win! They get a job, and we managers get an illusion of competence and authority as we waste a hundred million dollars of other people's money!
The main problem is that having a g ame perform well takes a) time b) skill. Modern studios have neither.
Their mindset boils down to "Be delusional."
Also "It's crazy until it works. Then you're a genius."
Not that I'm not laughing at wokists getting fired, but I'm curious if any big studios or publishers laid off their media and advertising people.
You know, the very definition of zero value added employees.
Meanwhile, a former Rockstar employee with RDR 1/2 and GTA V under his belt can't find a new job. Link
So the Concords, Highguards, and Forspokens of the world are coming home to roost.
Why do they continue to go through the interview cycle and look for yet another corporate job. Go make a game!
I voluntarily left my corporate job after nearly 20 years when the opportunity to be “laid off” was presented to me. Didn’t bother with interviews at all. I do everything as contracts and consulting. I can pick and choose what I want to bid on, who I want to work for, and what I’m in the mood to do. I took a month off because I had just done a big job and got paid enough that I figured why not. Now I’m looking into subbing some menial tasks to family and friends. I’m training some teenagers to do some of it. They get good pay, I get to help the future of white men. All of the “benefits” can be bought. If you need health insurance go buy it, retirement do it yourself. Who needs stock awards when you control the income.
Yeah I was well connected from years of doing good work etc, but someone who was at Rockstar that long should be as well.
"Why are you seeking stable pay? Just gamble your entire life away on something doomed to fail on arrival. "
Do you just go around and bitch at anyone and anything that’s done anything at all positive? Maybe if you’d get off your ass and try something your life wouldn’t be such shit.
Nothing I do ever works out or benefits me, why bother? It's why I fucking hate all you faggots telling people like me to kill ourselves gambling on starting a business that's doomed for failure.
If your answer is I’m never going to do anything because I will fail then you are a self fulfilling prophecy.
everything I've tried has lead to failure
Nice. Do you use any kind of lead generation or are your clients just from networking at this point?
It's all just networking for me. Sort of the benefit of developing friendships from work, everyone knows everyone else. Started out just talking to guys after I was out of corporate and it was "oh hey you can help me with this I'm working on." My former company and all it's peers contract out so much of what employees used to do, but most of it is on a pay-per-job not hourly basis so many won't test the uncertainty. I do a little of both depending on the task. For sake of context it's basically the industrial side of tech, so let's just call it utilities versus software an IT. I'm not sure it would work in software and IT because it's so infiltrated by Indians. But for a good game dev, use that severance I'm sure he got, get with your friends that were also gone, make a game and put it on sale.
Great, now where do the tens of millions of dollars needed to fund it come from?
You overestimate what you need for this. The only thing you truly need to succeed at what cccp is suggesting is networking. This is a lot easier said then done, but if you have it (and said Rockstar dev damn well should with a resume of working there for so long), that really is the biggest and hardest fight already solved. The next part is just applying it properly
Networking is useful for getting hired, it's worthless when it comes to selling a product to consumers.
Oh no! Anyways I fixed your X link
Devs need to stop begging at the feet of rotting gaming giants, they will only get laid off again. the industry is too bloated in collapsing under its weight, especially with the younger generation more into social media than they are into games. if they still want to be in the game industry, they need to go indie and build a company from the ground up.
The only devs getting hired are DEI freaks. They don't have the talent to make their own games which is why they're destroying existing franchises. The ones with actual talent already have their own indie studios.
I want to know how many devs getting hired are gamers or have even a residue of game development talent. It sounds like many who get the job think that Candy Crush is peak gaming, that gamedev is a "9-to-5 job so I don't have to do manual labor," that games should be political tools, or that it's a grift on western companies willing to pay through the nose. I don't want those kind of people making games that I play. That goes for the C-levels too; too many bean counters and hard-nosed business types who don't even like games are holding the reigns and even impose 100 hour weeks on their teams.
I think we'll see a quality uptick if such people get flushed out of the industry.
We still have 2/3 left to go then.
I want to believe
I fully support them on this endeavor. Anything that will hasten the death of the AAA industry is fine with me. There is no fixing the industry until every one of these people is removed from it.
At first I was mad
Then I was happy.
Unions are a complete scam. They don't do anything
They help the boomers at the top rake in big salaries while getting slave labor from the new gens. Blue collar has run this way for a while.
In my experience, it rather just makes it harder to fire the useless bad apples you don't want. It's the bottom of the barrel who needs the union's support, not the rock star cornerstone of your team.
Unions can be beneficial but it is sadly rare.
The biggest issue is that every union will outlive its usefulness though. If only there was a way to get rid of them after they actually do the useful thing they set out for.
Western game dev is being purged of DEI hires and activists. It just so happens that half the people working in western game dev fall into these dead weight categories, so it looks like "industry wide" layoffs. Asian and eastern European dev are not experiencing the same firings.
The barrier for entry to make games is very low. The really good devs can still make games and release them independently. The shitty ones are the ones that ruined our games so they can go back to India where appropriate and the rest probably got hired quickly to go agitate ICE.
Doesn't matter what the barrier to entry is, the barrier to success is industry connections and tens of millions spent on marketing
What is the usual churn? Don't a lot of them usually get laid off after the project is done?
1/3 does seem very high, I just wanna know if it's up from a natural 25%, or a natural 10%
Is it standard practice to lay off devs after shipping a project? First I've heard of that. Contracts with freelancers would end, of course, but that's different than laying off staff.
It's been a bit of longstanding theme in the industry yeah.
https://www.egdcollective.org/post/layoffs-and-closures-the-unpredictability-of-the-game-industry
Hmm, OK. We need to know the churn rate then.
When your games have become so run of the mill boring and preachy, and you lose the target audience to chase a different audience. The one doesn't care enough to actually buy the thing they claim to enjoy, then this is what you get.
Attentions are elsewhere, and the financial maps prove it. The harder you push a message at the cost of the game, the worse you do financially.
But please, keep it up. Companies that no longer care about the game enough to let it happen to this degree, no longer deserve my money anyway, no matter how much they change to entice me back.
I am not a battered spouse who thinks that the company has changed at the first sign of not beating me for a few days.
You fucked around.
Now you're finding out.
I strongly doubt that. Good US game programmers are rare and in high-demand.
By "game developers" they probably mean "DEI enforcment managemt manager" or some other BS like that
They just get re-hired, the rats and roaches move from one crumbling domicile to the next, the leeches find a new host, the grifters flip their script over and start anew.
When someone's been fired multiple times (see how some of the Highguard devs bragged they were also Concord devs) that isn't "1/3rd of devs", you're stacking debuffs onto someone already downed, but who keeps getting rezzed.
Chasing pieces of a shrinking pie
i'm going to assume they were all useless tranny diversity hires?
It's the fact that video gaming rapidly went downhill around 2016 (Mafia 3, Battlefield 1, etc.) that got me away from it, which was a net positive.
I remember writing an essay around early 2017 noting that video games tended to be less degenerate than film. I couldn't write that today, because I no longer observe any difference. Later games like Cyberpunk 2077 are absolutely degenerate to the extreme, said game portrays a grossly artificial, technologized hellscape: a fertile ground for mental illness.
Then you had The Last of Us 2 or whatever with its trans playable characters, and, look, the rest of it is just hazy to me, because most of what I read about video gaming is just from you people, and so much of what is posted here is comical and incredulous.
Part of me is glad that video gaming has succumbed to the total degeneration that earlier fully claimed Western (and plenty of non-Western) film. Having last played a video game over a year ago, and going for a whole year (2023?) without playing any either, it really becomes obvious that it's like a drug in hindsight.
'What did you achieve with all that?' Other than a few YouTube videos with more views than I expected, nothing. I don't even remember most of it.
Finally, if AI is taking away the jobs of bad people who profit from producing filth... who cares!? Let's get those numbers up!