Western game dev certainly seems to be in a bad place. I think there are probably a few factors explaining what is happening now:
1: Overhiring during the pandemic. There was a lot of money flowing into tech during the earlier days of the pandemic, and companies were hiring and expanding like crazy. The economy settled, and now companies are laying people off left and right. Not even limited to game dev, as we saw this occur for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and pretty much everywhere else in tech.
2: The knock-on effect. When big developers start to lay off staff in bulk, other companies may be incentivized to copy that behavior. It’s easier to justify firing a bunch of employees when everyone else is doing it, and then when you have a surplus of people in the market for a new job, you can selectively hire new talent for cheaper.
3: More attention in reporting. If it wasn’t a trend, a studio laying off 30 employees might not otherwise be newsworthy. A lot of studios actually make it an unfortunate common practice to lay off their contractors/temps right at the end of dev cycles so that they don’t get any sales bonuses. But there’s a lot of layoffs happening, so even smaller ones are generating buzz, and with a lot of workers’ rights/pro-union sentiments going around following the successful strikes in Hollywood and the automotive industry, people are starting to pay more attention when workers are being treated unfairly or being taken advantage of elsewhere.
Its also typical in game development, you dont need the ‘full team’ all the time, if your in preproduction you hardly need 100 programmers sitting around twiddling their thumbs
High interest rates make investing in risky projects like game development uninteresting. Why take risk if interest rates bring in high returns by themselves.
A lot of the games industry is backed by a constant flow of investment. Which has totally dried up. This company got 80 million in investment last year, this year can’t find more to keep paying the bills. Same is true for most of the announcements.
Then there is large companies like Microsoft, those layoffs are purely about paying shareholders extea money.
Ifrs 16 makes things complicated, I wouldn’t pay attention to that part unless you are interested in the specifics of the companies financials. The point is that revenue and profit were up
This year’s Unity story sums up my discontent with tech nicely. Impressive tech made by extremely talented people, botched by incompetent corporate parasites who care only about securing their millions.
“Reducing our office footprint” these ghouls are going to fire people who aren’t following the return to office decree because it will be an easy on paper excuse. Also “revenue came in within guidance” so they expected / planned for revenue to be low enough to justify firing even more people? They’ve already done two other mass firings morale is terrible right now. Lots of the best workers have been quitting to find better work and the drain is noticable. I just need stable insurance for another 6 months then I can leave too, I hope I don’t get fucked
Thank you, I’m honestly terrified. I spent my whole life so far trying to get into this industry, I finally pull it off in my early 30s and now all this. I spent 10 years roughing it and finally have been able to do things in the last two years like go to the doctor ever. I don’t have tech people wealth laying around I’ve spent so much basically doing damage control for having previously been paycheck to paycheck. I’m only just getting the ball rolling and I’m going to be so fucked if I lose this job.
I hate to say it but it might be worth looking for a job outside the games industry. It’s openly known that most gaming companies get away with terrible working conditions and employee treatment. They get away with it because there’s a revolving door of people willing to put up with shit treatment so they can say they got a job in the industry.
It’s fine if that matters to you, but you have to decide how much it matters and stick to your line in the sand. Personally I’d rather work something less interesting and have better pay and reasonable work/life balance.
Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.
This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne