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It’s estimated that 9,000 games industry jobs have been lost this year
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Isn't the video game industry booming? What's up with the layoffs? Is this the work of ChatGPT?
Edit: typo
Unreasonable expectations: every game must be the next cod or Fortnite otherwise it's a failure
How else are you going to support the salaries of so many useless hangers-on who don't actually contribute to the product!
Corporate bonuses gotta come from somewhere
Also gamers dont help. "This game wasnt exactly what I wanted and had a few minor day 1 bugs they patched within a week... utter trash"
Nah, the game is utter trash not the bugs. Let's look at 3 games very hyped :
Redfall : game had game breaking bugs and performance issues at launch. Gameplay was bad. No one played it.
Gollum : game had game breaking bugs and performance issues at launch. Gameplay was destroyed due to bugs. The studio closed their gaming branch.
Starfield : very hiped, bought by a lot of people, the game looks like 2010-15 game with some little 2023 enhancements...
Redfall and Gollum were failures. High budget failures. They most likely layed off people.
Starfield : Microsoft layed off people at the start of the year https://www.polygon.com/23561210/microsoft-layoffs-xbox-bethesda-halo-infinite-343-industries for who knows why. The game got delayed, and then it gets out very mixed due to bad exploration gameplay and no love put into population design (population characters look like 2010 or even worse).
All of these 3 games have been very hyped, with a high price, but none of their failure have anything to do with gamers "fault" and "opinion". It's all on the studios fault on not delivering something good.
Yeah, the 3 biggest flops universally panned by reviewers and gamers alike made by studios that should have known better... not what I'm talking about.
Im talking about games that were just "ok" like IMO Diablo 4 It was what it said on the tin, by and large it worked and despite me not thinking it was worth launch pricing, I'd agree with its 6 stars on Steam. I exchanged some money and I got some game. Now go and read the sheer vitriol in the negative reviews... you would think Diablo 4 killed their nan and made them watch.
The games industry is shrinking post COVID boom, companies expanded massively to try to capitalise on that and now the money isn't there anymore. The games industry is always bad for layoffs, with staff being seen as an unnecessary expense post project in many cases. Additionally the tech sector is experiencing a unheard of levels of bad year (something like a 700%+ percent increase in layoffs according to at least one research group) which is contributing.