spot on. these people's salaries are chump change compared to rsu awards. They dont care about making their core product, they care about the stock spiking periodically so they can sell. The stock price can even creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much to them. They really just need a yearly surge in price to sell based on something that looks like strategic competence. They arent paid to consistently uplevel the stock so much as they are paid to enable a pump and dump on their own companys stock. I work in one of these places now and have worked for several. They are believers in getting paid.

Replace gaming industry with any white collar work in general these days, I feel like we are all just training the AI models until they get good enough to replace us all these days

Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition

Because capitalism doesn't seek perfection, and it's far from a fair system

On the other end of this, Pokemon is still being developed by guys who can't develop in a modern engine and are just coasting on the popularity of the franchise. I have Scarlett and I got about an hour in before shelving it for other better games, and I was so into Pokemon I've played through about a dozen ROM hacks.

It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.

Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you've done for them lately.

"I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter" gets rewarded, not "I'm leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we'll be more successful in 7 years"

TBF undercooked chicken would deserve a layoff.

Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don't aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn't require the best.

Pokemon is not developed by Nintendo though. They are only the publisher.

Yes, I'm taking about the lifetime employment part.

It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.

Won't someone think of the shareholders

Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It's easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the past where basically every big game studio had their own engine).

Tldr:

Unreal is slop and enables this behaviour.

Pretty soon the whole video games industry will rely on one unpaid intern.

If it's not "spreadsheet-able" it doesn't exist. -- typical MBA.

dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.

You may want to take the same advice. 'Usually full of C-Suite douchebags' shows how out of touch you are with reality. The majority of companies in the US don't even have a C-Suite and are mom and pop shops. Even those that do have a proper corporate structure, you can remove every ounce of salary and benefits from the C-Suite and still wouldn't lower prices significantly.

Management makes bad decisions? So do workers. Everyone does, that's humans, no one is perfect. Do workers more often get kicked to the curb over management? Sure, that's reality. If you move yourself into management, and workers make errors that cost the company, who do you get rid of?

Perhaps it's a giant combination of factors and not just some sucker with 'C' in their title.

Ok let's say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn't make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.

Gamedev along with Startups has always been a highly abusive work environment of longs hours and death marches were they just hire and use until they're burned by the job whilst paying them less than similar jobs outside the industry, an endless parade of bright eyed young people.

They're part of what I call "Prestige Industries" - alongside things like Modelling and Theatre, they are industries which attract tons of young people who, knowing only the externally visible side of that Industry, think that it must be incredible to work doing those things. With such an unending supply of eager and naive young people, such industries invariably end up (at least within the largest companies) being places with a very young workforce, highly exploitative (sometimes in more ways than just low salaries and long hours) which burn out their workforce or throw them out when they get older and wise enough to want better pay and work conditions.

This they're now doing looks to me like just doing more openly and on a schedule that's more convenient to them something they already did individually and on an ad-hoc basis (often on timings that were more convenient to workers, for example when people chose to quit after realizing they were being paid shit to work stupid hours).

The general problem of "Prestige Industries" has always been that they basically throw away most of the expertise they're building training people on the job for a couple of years, having basically an ocean of juniors, pretty much no mid-level types and then at best a handful of top experts. This IMHO is why both gamedev and Startups produce much buggier software than the rest of IT.

Leadership makes the decisions and gets to keep the profits, so they should be held to a higher standard of accountability. Small businesses that don't literally have "CEOs" still have leaders. These people took responsibility, and should be treated like it.

If you're a ship captain, and your sailors make errors that cause the ship to sink, you're still ultimately responsible because it's your ship, and who hired those sailors?

Someone has to copy and paste the slop.

I'm not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000's.

Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.

• If you have a blockbuster product, layoffs improve your financials even more.
• Poor product? Layoffs make your financials not look terrible.
• Work productivity goes up too much (unit of work measured / hours of labor)? Well, that means you can do layoffs because you don't need productivity that high. Plus, at least initially it will look even better since you lowered the denominator.
• Terrible productivity? Layoffs make it look better quickly.

Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only "hold off the wolves" so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don't have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the "easy" solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.

Nobody but Indies are hiring 30 year old game developers.

I can tell you from experience that most of what you learn developing games is not really applicable in broader Software Development, not just the libraries (and often languages) being different but also the design principles often being different and the software architectures definitely being different - gamedev tend to create systems oriented to visuals and driven by human actions and by timed events, operating both on insanely tight timings that push towards overoptimization (the rendering layer) and on very lax timings (stuff reacting to human actions) plus data integrity isn't much of a concern, whilst most stuff out there is data-driven, often operating at machine-talk speeds (faster than user driven, slower than game screen rendering speeds) and data integrity is often of paramount importance (especially in corporate systems dealing with valuable info, money or things that cost money to do).

So at least in Software Development having "5 years at Blizzard" isn't all that impressive, at least not for the typical hiring manager who tends to be in his or her 30s or older.

Part of the issue is also scope and budget. Games are becoming needlessly massive and overly complicated, overshooting estimated budgets. It’s unrealistic for these games to make meaningful bottom line.

So why don’t we reduce scope and go back in making simpler and fun games? Cause layoffs is the easy short term solution.

Because it isn't. You recruit people when you need workforce, and you reduce employment when there's no work to be done.

Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It's easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I've heard it's fallen off a lot since 5 but it's still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.

They don't, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don't want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don't need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.

no! every game must be hyper realistic and break graphical boundaries ! it's the only way we can sell our game ! (seriously we're out of ideas)

/s

Fun fact if you replace the word "layoffs" with "bonus for executives" the meme still works.

It's usually both.

Every time you do that, you lose institutional knowledge.

Ahh, so realistically you want one person to take blame, but not have the reward. Makes sense.

Close a company because you have to keep everyone regardless, or get rid of people to ensure those who are left stay employed. The realistic decision made every day. When a government decision raises your costs overnight by 50% and customers don't pay for it, tell us, who is at fault? Guess it's the manager because they didn't anticipate that right?

Probably part of it, but games are also more difficult to test automatically (which also means fast, often and predictable).

"Given these entities, make sure the price is correctly calculated as XY" is way easier than "make sure this game object doesn't clip into the ground", especially with the indeterministic physics systems that are often used.