I wonder if after the midterms the incident rate of factory and warehouse fires will rise?

Surprised game devs aren't going all office space at this point.

I can never not think of that dude as anything but Android Wilson.

How is beating the shit out of a copy machine supposed to help? /s

Capitalism is messed up - ftfy

Yeah... game development layoffs are highly visible to us because game development is a high visibility, closely watched industry to obsessive nerds, but this is happening all the time in all kinds of industries.

Hey, listen to Michael Bolton, it really helps.

Today I found out people still buy these stupid games. Wtf?!

The big studios keep giving me reasons to never ever buy one of their games and not even pirate them.

Except here, the warehouse, is in cloud infrastructure with international redundancy. It would take a hell of a team of hackers to burn that down.

Financially BF6 was a smash hit.

Within a month of release it was a disaster. Player base plummeted because of the bait and switch they pulled, the bugs, and the lacklustre season passes, skins, and roadmap. One of the all time fumbles.

Make your own games Devs, only way to brake your chains

And yet, people bought it. I may sound like an old fart, but Battlefield hasn't been good since BF2/2142. BF3 was a bait and switch where they said it was a return to PC focused gaming and not just a console port (was a console port), and they've been doing it ever since.

Even if you disagree with me and enjoyed the midlife BF, you have to admit the last few have been dumpsters. EA is a dumpster company, we all know this. Why ever give them the benifit of the doubt?

The reason is people are stupid (on average) and the concept of an informed consumer base (or electorate) is a fallacy. For every 1 person who says fuck EA there are 3 people that don't care and 6 that aren't paying enough attention for an opinion on the subject to even cross their mind. Advertising is the only thing that matters in this reality and they know it.

I don't even know what I would do with that much money.

Retire?

I could retire twice over for that amount of money and I'd still have most of it left

That no talent ass clown?

I'd buy a house, set up a retirement fund and pay a bunch of politicians to support green energy.

seems gaming is fcked, especially people graduating from college trying to get in as a designer/dev too.

CEO that did fuck all gets a shit ton of money as a reward for doing fuck all and those that actually worked on the game with overtime and underpaid got the middle finger, makes perfect sense.

People need to stop working for these shitty "AAA" companies even if it's to have it on their resume and idiots need to stop buying these games just so they can say they played every game in the series.

https://overpaid.lol/

Why do these guys look more and more like movie villains? What's next? One will suddenly have a mustache that he will twirl? One will have an evil laugh? One will change his name to be Dr. John Evil?

I wish EA didn't buy so many studios...

So don’t support them.. Support indie devs that deserve rewarding

Better keep for yourself, genuinely. 28 million for green lobbying is a drop in the ocean against Big Oil lobbying.

They get 730 billion USD worldwide in government subsidies ONLY. Nevermind them also, like, having awesome profit margins.

I am all for climate action, but not throwing away 28m into the abyss.

Dr John Evil only changed his surname from Balatro because he flirts with Evil

The only bit that matters is the first sentence. Games are here to make money now, same as everything else.

They're publically traded - they now only exist to generate profit, and that's the only metric that matters to them. It's the same in any industry, unfortunately.

indies should be able to create much more advanced games now. indies might just replace those aaa titles

I've misread and thought you'd buy a horse. I'd support both decisions.

Boycotts don't stop EA money. They have superbowl ad money. The market of consumers that really just don't give a shit about this is way too large, and they will go with what's advertised to them constantly.

I'm not saying don't boycott them. I have for decades. I've preached that for decades. It doesn't work, the AAA dev is going to still have the main stage during every gaming convention and there will still be some weird ass overnight line to be the first one to buy corporate slop game 2026.

Capitalism is truly messed up... let's get rid of it.

All you can really do is not buy their shit, or if you must, buy it second-hand so EA, Nintendo, or whoever don't profit directly.

I think the mustache twirl ceo of the year is Ammon McNeff of bricks and mini figs, no doubt some gaming CEO will adopt the look at some point, but few of the big ones really adopt more than a milquetoast fit so as to not fully give themselves away.

How are devs supposed to live while making an indie game?

Also the added issue of not being able to market indie games effectively given the ocean of AI trash and asset flipping.

Also, using France as an example, gaming industry job offers declining by 71% since 2022.
https://emploi.afjv.com/observatoire/metiers.php

It’s a hard world out there.

Ammon McNeff

Googled him, first thought he was just looking like a normal bearded guy, then I noticed his mustache.

Because you have it backwards. Movie villains look like these guys.

This will/has become the norm. Finish a project, lay off 60% of the team, skeleton crew keeps crunching fixes, pay the suits the profit and wages saved.

And it would stop immediately if those workers had solidarity and refused to work on the project without the full team.

This basically describes society as a whole. The lowest denominators of society, at least 60% of the population , dictate how all of us live and die. That's why things like Facebook exist. That's why we let billionaires exist. That's how people like Trump become leaders of the free world. That's why we allow the "lobby" to make laws that only benefit a small group. Eradicate the idiots to solve all the worlds problems 😆

Not paying the CEO a 38 million dollar bonus and instead keeping the devs on board to create future products for way less than 38 million dollars is more profitable.

Capitalism disassociates value from the labour that creates it and we.all just keep playing along.

Yeah but that probably won't impact the share price that much, for some reason.

sounds like quitter talk to me. you can work and make your own game on the side.

like a union. almost as if unions were created to protect the working class in the first place from these fat cats doing excatly this

So to be a game dev you have to not be a game dev? Which is it?

Maybe one day programmers, artists, ... will understand that the best way is cooperative, not having a CEO.

This is why we can't have nice things and then somehow you are a toxic left extremist when you want billionaire shareholders to be uninstalled.

Maybe we shouldn't defend vaccines and public health and the problem will sort itself out.