I hate how this is phrased as “redundancies”. IGN literally JUST bought these outlets, they haven’t had time to dig into and examine the organizations they acquired; it’s just straight into the Corpo playbook of “lay people off and let the dust settle where it may”.
These are people, not “redundancies”. They contributed in the old organization, and they could contribute in the new, but they never even got the chance.
It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
Read the guys comment again though. They say their issue is with calling them “redundancies” in a language sense. But it’s not sugar coating it or anything, that’s the legitimate term for what happened.
You generally don’t buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.
What should happen is not always what does happen. There are tons of examples of brain dead companies and rich people buying companies they dont understand and then ruining them because of that.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
I dunno. Math asks me to just accept it’s normal to have 60 watermelons and is trying move bulk orders of melons on a regular car. The goal is to figure out the problem and not accept that the person who is a wholesale watermelon dealer in denial is commiting tax evasion.
Or to discover that the melon seller has a regular job in ag and gets a bunch of melons on the side from the field and sells the harvest at cost to make up the part of their paycheck that was paid in perishable food.
Should we shame the seller for breaking the law or sympathize for being forced into that situation? People don’t have the energy to care; they just came for a maths question.
but… this is not the math you see at STEM, this is the math you see at high school at best. There’s no deeper meaning in actual STEM math problems, they are way too abstract or specific. There’s no watermelons, it’s just some a, b, n1, nk… maybe some physics formulas that apply to velocity, mass… I read 0 problems in my uni math and physics courses where they used real world examples.
I see your point but that’s for high schoolers, not STEM students or alumnus.
It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.
Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.
Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.
So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.
This is what bothered me in the original discussion, making it seem like being in STEM somehow doesn’t prepare you at all for critical thinking in general. On the contrary, I believe too there are people who develop it in part because of the S in there. It’s not necessary, but it’s an important tool.
Hopefully people don’t need a college degree in literature to understand basic subtext. We ask kindergarteners to do that with Dr Seuss.
While I still “subscribe” to Humble, I don’t recall the last time I actually unpaused a month. Maybe this is the push I needed. Their offerings have been mostly subpar after they bought Humble. Not knocking the indie devs, I think my gaming tastes have changes over the years. Also, I don’t need coupons for DLC, please and thank you.
I had been a Humble Monthly subscriber since they first started it. 6 months ago my husband and I both canceled our subscriptions. Used to be some really good bundles, but now it’s just shovelware and DLC coupons.
Has there been any good bundles in the last 10 years? According to my email history the last time I bought something from them was at the end of 2014, and even before then I’d been complaining about it’s quality.
I’ve had choice since it was monthly, I’ll probably end it this year (I pay yearly) cause eh so much filler. I’d say I get my moneys worth but 🤷♂️ I’m getting old anyway haha
These giant corporations don’t even have to be quiet about it anymore, there’s just no consequences. They couldn’t care less about you, me, their customers, or their employees.
They care about being able to hire labor, which we provide, and they care about revenue and profit, which we also provide. Not defending any behavior, but the consequences in a healthy economy would largely come from customers, potential and current employees. Failing that, large issues would be overcome by regulations, or at least enforcing existing ones (codified rules against monopolies, for examples, are just words if not enforced).
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect. Nevermind companies are rewarded by shareholder and investor support based more on profits than.how those profits were made, especially when many of those shareholders feel forced to turn to the stock market to fund their retirement, as pensions are so increasingly a rare option.
Would voting for fresh representatives possibly increase instability in out daily lives? Is that instability a possibly necessary cost of maintaining effective regulation of the investor class that has captured our legislative system to their own benefit?
There are systemic problems at play here- not to downplay the choices this individual company made, but the focus could be on the larger forces at work. If your first reaction is that boycotts and choices by consumers and employees, no matter how organized and widespread, do not work, then I ask you, dear reader, to consider what might work to make the necessary systemic changes, and what, if anything, you can do to help make them happen.
The investor class has made it clear what their playbook is, as they have time and time again thru history: explotation, and as much of it as they can get away with. The question then becomes what us, the ever-increasingly exploited, are going to do about it.
no war but class war.
ed:I hope that didnt come off as disagreement- just trying to voice frustration with a side of “everyone who agrees with you please take a moment to think about the big picture, and what you can do about it” because I’m also tired of this slide into an increasingly boring dystopia
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect.
I think consumers have spoken, at least in part. What money can be made doing this job is more easily made on YouTube.
Which sucks due to the innate near-inability of a Youtube video to carry an argument without a visual component well.
It’s why podcasts can be decent for some topics, but youtube is just someone talking a podcast into the camera for 45 minutes, and all of it would be ~5 minutes reading a single paragraph at most if it were in written form but you really really realy got to chase those ad-impressions.
Non-textual forms for textual content have really been their own destructive blight on internet content. :'(
I get my gaming news from YouTube podcasts, mostly; at least those two do employ people actually doing some of that same type of work. It doesn’t really matter how good Schreier is at his job when I’m not going pay for a Bloomberg subscription and someone else can more cheaply copy the same content and tell me what it said. The video format gives me more of a dialogue with the person who did the work. Plus ads are much more easily defeated on a web page than on YouTube, though they are still partially defeated.
I find myself immediately opening the video transcript for many videos. creating a well made video that offers more than a few paragraphs of text is often a challenge
As someone who always thought about getting into gaming as a career, i’m so glad i didn’t… it’s a shame that game developers are having to suffer through such a toxic industry, and that there aren’t more protections in place for these people that create the amazing experiences that we all love so much.
I hope that they are able to find new and better places of employment.
Sorry you’re getting downvoted for being correct. I went to school for game design and decided to change career paths when I found out everything is contract work. Once a game is finished, you’re out of a job and need to search for another studio to work for.
If it was all contract work it'd be better, probably. Devs would have representation, like actors or film directors, and they'd sign up for a project at a premium in the understanding that they're getting paid for the downtime after the project ends.
The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That's the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it's... kinda expensive and self-defeating.
It is true that the layoffs get reported but the hires do not, so a lot of devs get rehired fairly quickly or start new projects and studios, so it always seems like there are devs getting kicked to the curb when there's a baseline of churn and cycling. That said, 2023 has been a very, very, very shitty year for the games industry for a number of reasons. Which sucks, because it's been a great year for games themselves.
The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That’s the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it’s… kinda expensive and self-defeating.
Something like 60% of EA employees live outside the U.S.A.
That’s simply not true, projects are usually done in stages. You got pre-production, production, testing, launch, post-production, …
So take an employee who mainly works in pre-production. Based on what you said they’d be laid off after everything is done and production starts, right? But that’s not how it works. Those people immediately start with the pre-production work of either the next project, or the DLCs for the current one.
There’s always more to do, after launch of a game you can’t have your developers sit around idle, you need the next project already prepared and ready to go. That’s why game DLCs sometimes release only months after launch, they have been worked on for a while.
What has that to do with this argument? The lay-offs in the last six months were mostly due to massive overhiring while money lending was cheap. Now interest rates are up and those companies are trying to keep their profits up (or become profitable in the first place).
And the thing is: They hired so many people, even with the lay-offs the headcount is still higher than it was a few years ago.
Unions. If we want to stop the suffering of exploited game developers while the gaming industry rakes in more money than the movie- and music industry combined, we should push hard for unions to protect the well being on creative potential of these workers. Idgaf if EA loses 10-25 million a year to additional wages. That money belongs to the workers in the first place.
It’s probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it’s still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they’re a, “we’re doing something” but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.
According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.
And what was the board's compensation in comparison? No, making games costs what it costs. What is expensive is the marketing stupidity and the corruption and self serving in upper management.
Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.
But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.
For the people that don't want to read the article, this seems especially relevant:
But much has changed since 2022: Embracer, which owns Gearbox, bet the house on a $2 billion deal with a Saudi investment group that fell through in 2023. Ever since, its many, many properties have been hit by layoffs on a near-monthly basis.
Yep, Embracer bought a LOT of studios expecting this deal to work out, and then it didn’t, so many of those studios are now effectively as good as dead in the water or on their way there. It amazes me how so many people and companies always forget the basic financial idea of “don’t spend money you don’t have”.
So I assume the leadership, which gets paid the big bucks due to their decisions making much larger impacts on the company, will take responsibility for the action and will be fired due to their salary being based on the level of personal responsibility to their company’s success/failure.
Oh wait, no. Once again we wipe out the bottom rung workforce, expect the remaining employees to do twice the work with no extra pay in the face of increasing cost of housing and living, meanwhile their professional gambler CEO either gets off scott free or snags a golden parachute on the way out the door to their next job.
Firing the people that do the work to make the company money is just good business! They're a dime a dozen, just hire another 2 managers and a couple marketing execs and soon you'll be printing money! /s [these companies are freaking dumb]
It's crazy what you can get away with when you have some money and no sense!
The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.
Yeah, unfortunately many people seem to default to complaining about things while continuing to consume what they are fed. And not change anything, of course.
Because content distributors haven't thought of another way to get money. The only other thing they came up with is subscriptions. Some have thought of donations, but they haven't banded together to come up with an alternative. It's weak and totally mid.
Outside of straight cash and ads, off the top of my head a user could give a website data, content, or computing power. Which, as I kept writing this, I’ve found aren’t perfect alternatives.
Personal data collection seems compelling, since the data can be sold to hungry data brokers looking to optimise their ads, but tech-savvy users want to keep their data safe, either by using plugins to block ads and tracking, or by not using your website. And you’d also have to have no soul to do this.
User generated content gives users a reason to engage and return, and it also means you could save money that you’d have otherwise used to pay someone to make content. If you rely on this too much though, ethical concerns become apparent - last I checked, Reddit mods are unpaid.
Volunteer computing could maybe lower costs by offloading some server calculations onto volunteer’s computers when idle, but I don’t know if it could even be used for that. It’s probably a non-starter for websites, too; to a user it would seem like your site was asking them to install a crypto miner.
… this comment is getting too long and doesn’t really have a point. But I can’t let the 45 minutes I spent writing it go to waste so easily. Hm… what if I combined all 3 ideas?
Yes, a website that asks you to volunteer idle computer time to train an algorithm that can both be outsourced to other companies and used to analyse your personal data, which itself can be given to other companies and used to reccomend you posts you are more likely to comment on, adding value to the website! Surely this has none of the flaws that I described before.
Bro $4,000 OLED TVs are riddled with rows of home screen ads. What are you talking about that paid content has no ads? ALL CONTENT HAS FUCKING ADS. This has gotten absurd. Fuck ads.
Man…you said the issue with all of this is people not willing to pay to remove ads. I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads. So ads are everywhere, regardless of whether you pay or use free products. The entire business model is fucked. That’s what I’m saying. I’m not sure what it causing the confusion here.
I was saying that people will run an ad-blocker, but also refuse to pay directly for content.
And then complain that nobody makes good content.
I’m saying that even when you buy expensive products, you still have ads.
Sure, but that’s not really related to the topic. “Why are there ads in the products I pay for?” is a different issue than "Why are there ads in the products I don’t pay for?
Yea. Separate but related issues I suppose. I just feel like even when we pay tons of money for expensive products, we will get ads. Even modern cars are collecting an obscene amount of data even though we pay a shit ton of money for them. It’s completely out of control.
This is the big one. people have grown accustomed to an unsustainable system, problem is wages are still so stagnanted so nobody has money for 10 subs to things.
I’ll be honest, I am quite surprised they had 180 workers left there after the continuous stream of tepid stuff they’ve put out over time.
Still, sucks for the people working there, becuase I bet a lot of them at least started really driven and motivated before corporate ground their will down.
Another example of under funded giant corporate projects and then shocked Pikachu that they aren’t wildly profitable. They’ll never understand you can make a wildly profitable game, but it requires investment
Or just y’know: provide a service, make a profit, provide people with stable jobs, keep on going. I know it sounds crazy, but you don’t have to have all the money…
It does require some actual inspiration as well. Companies are setting up production lines and wondering why solid gold doesn’t just plop out the end when they switch it on.
At this point they should just hold on to all the updates they want to add, and make it a sequel. I love all the things that they’ve added and it’s clearly a piece of passion, but at some point they’re going to need to publish something else
I never thought about it like that. If he makes an average of just $0.50 per sale after all the storefront fees and taxes and stuff, he would still have enough money to pay himself $200,000 a year for an entire lifetime, just from the sales he’s already made. No wonder he’s so chill about keeping the game updated for free. What an awesome guy
I thought $0.50 was low for this math to work out, but turns out 30 million copies of Stardew Valley have been sold, so that’s $15 million, which over 60 years is $250k/year.
Still though I have no clue if $0.50 is normal take home per copy sold for a self published game (it seems low), but I’m very happy he’s doing well for himself and hopes he makes more per copy sold. I’ve bought the game 4 times, so I’m doing my part!
Yeah, I chose $0.50 as an absurdly low assumption, because while the game nominally sells for $15, I don’t know anything about costs involved. A quick google search says his net worth is somewhere around 30-45 million dollars, which is about twice what I estimated. Which most people would use as an excuse to sell the game to Microsoft and retire forever, but Eric Barone is too good for that. I just realized I only own the game on mobile and xbox. Reckon I might buy it on PC next paycheck
Read a book that goes over the development of Stardew written by Jason Schreier and covered Eric a good bit.
The dude was was worth multi millions shortly after Stardew had launched and it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy a new car. Jason hung out with him and watched him climb over the seat to get into the drivers seat of his car because the door was broken. Then at some point Jason asked him how it felt to be a famous developer and Eric basically just said he didn’t care about the fame and actually didn’t want it. He just wanted people to enjoy what he made.
Saying Stardew Valley is a passion for Eric is an understatement. By the time he finished the game, he basically hated working on it. And ever since its launch, he’s worked on it for no reason other than to make a better game.
Eric Barone is a shining light in an industry of constant shame.
He has hired a few contractors to help build out features like co-op, (though the first few versions were entirely him on his own). That would eat into profits a bit, but even if he paid each of them $100k for their work there are few enough for it to be a drop in the bucket
This reminds me of the new game Andrew Gower and his brothers have been working on, Brighter Shores. It’s a pure passion project based on a from scratch game engine that was created to make programming (even massively) multiplayer online games much easier.
The goal isn’t profit but rather, to have fun, and make a cool enjoyable game. He’s said they’ve made more than enough money from the sale of Jagex and RuneScape back in the day (which FWIW, he regrets that sale and a lot of what has happened at Jagex/to RuneScape).
I love to see game developers (and people in general that … “make it” and then go “you know what, I do have enough”).
aesthetics. people will perceive the aesthetics more than anything else.
startship troopers is a good example: it satirizes fascism but has the aesthetics of fascism, so thats what people perceive.
the boys was the same when conservatives liked homelander. he is the good looking blue eyed aryan with an epic powerful portrayal and those are usually the heroes.
the ‘good guys’ go in murderous rampages all the time in movies. its just usually framed as a good thing. ‘oh those they killed were evil!’, ‘oh the city they destroyed was for the greater good!’
real life isnt so black and white but they do that same framing irl with varying levels of success.
Tbf I’ve read that they missed their third deadline for an early access release. I was interested in the game but if what you have after like 5 years still isn’t enough for even early gameplay scrutiny, maaaaybe some major mistakes were made. And then never addressed. For half a decade.
I’ll hate on big companies and executives alllllll day, but I’m an equal opportunity hater whenever it’s warranted.
It’s all on the executives right? All responsibility lays with them. The workers just do their job. If the product fails, it’s the executives responsibility.
In another post you also say that executive pay is too high.
I’m tired of these super generalized polarizing comments. “These bad guys up there” and all of that. Just stop that bs, there is no Karma here.
True for most screw-ups in gaming, yes, but not this time. The studio in question, Paradox Tectonic missed three Early Access deadlines. It sounds like Tectonic bit off more than they could chew. I like bashing execs as much as the next guy, but if you miss three deadlines at any job, you’re probably getting the axe.
At RPS we like Alices. When somebody comes along with the name “Alice” you don’t just say “oh hi” like some insolent rube. You nod with solemn respect and you say, “Alice”. An Alice is someone you should not take lightly, nor take for granted, nor leave unmonitored. For they will destroy worlds and build better ones while you are not looking. This is dangerous and exciting. Alices are a force to be reckoned with. To treat an Alice poorly is to invite shame, dishonour, and contempt. Here are some of the best Alices in video games!
But that’s it, readers. That’s literally ALL the Alices we can possibly think of. What about you? Can you think of any Alices who deserve to be celebrated?
Guys job will probably fall off a window after this, but God he probably felt awesome when publishing
Small, weak people need an excuse for why they feel so small. One that deflects the blame from where it truly belongs–on them, for lacking the strength and courage to be better than they are. For lacking the spine to take a more difficult, more noble road.
So just believe it’s not your fault, it’s some mighty shadowy conspiracy thing of great darkness. Not just you being a coward and weakling. Much more preferable.
Looking at an unfinished game is the equivalent of looking at an unfinished painting, your seeing the first brush strokes maybe some sketches but you have no realistic idea what the end result will be like.
Looking at leaks is a pontless waste of time, the fact they included personal information just makes the “hackers” scummy
aftermath.site
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