as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]
The older games are not “overperforming”. The newer games are underperforming.
Large studios are “struggling to drive sales” because customers take cost and benefit into account.
The success of those solo devs and small teams is not “outsized”, it’s deserved because they get it right.
What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.
More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.
Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.
And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”
Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.
Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.
Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.
I’d add that it’s not that larger studios want more impressive graphics that’s the problem but that their games are often monetized to hell and designed by committee to be as marketable as possible instead of being someone’s vision brought to fruition.
And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.
You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.
In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. “This shit isn’t fun, I’m reworking it” here, “wow this mechanic actually works! I’ll expand it further” there.
Yeah corpos love their metrics - even though as soon as you measure them they cease to be useful as people will be gaming them. Not to mention they can only show a small part of what is actually happening.
Their piece of shit CEO, Lars Wingefors, was in discussion with a gulf national fund on a huge $2 billion investment.
He never got anything legally binding, but before securing the investment he went on a massive spending spree.
The national fund got cold feet and Wingefors had to cut up all of Embracer to account for his mistake.
You would think such a childish error would result in immediate dismissal and essentially a permanent blacklisting from executive positions (not only in the gaming industry).
Nothing like that happened, I believe the Embracer board is full of his friends and family. He just went with it.
This is the kind of stuff that shows that polemics around hard works and meritocracy are at least partially propaganda to keep the plebs in line.
Embracer is also splitting into three separate companies to shed the tainted Embracer name, all still owned and run by Wingefors of course.
Asmodee Group (for board games) and Coffee Stain Publishing (for indie games) are the only two with official names last I heard. The unnamed third is the big one and Embracer’s direct successor, but I guess they’re delaying naming it to minimize bad press associated with the new name.
Not a surprise. Anything this company touches is sinking. These giant gaming conglomerates don’t make an iota of business sense. The whole point of a conglomerate buying a whole bunch of similar businesses, aka horizontal integration, is so these businesses can share the same knowledge, infrastructure and supply lines and benefit from economies of scale to lower costs. Like an oil conglomerate using their own tankers to transport oil for all their subsidiaries. But in the gaming industry there is barely any overlap between two studios where synergy can happen. Except for the business admin, promotion and advertising side. But that is a tiny fraction of the costs of big budget production. The biggest cost is on the production side and every studio needs their own set of directors, producers, designers, artists, programmers etc. Another goal of horizontal integration is capturing market share, but with games you run the risk of cannibalizing your own sales especially how Embracer is doing it since most studios in their portfolio are from the same region in the world making games for similar markets.
EA and Ubisoft tried this before and failed miserably and they sold or shuttered almost every studio they bought. The only one who does a good job at it is Sony, but even they don’t have as many studios as Embracer and they rely on Chinese digital asset sweatshops.
There’s no need for Unity anymore. Godot is excellent for at least 2D games the same way Unity used to be. Unreal is easy to pick up for 3D. GameMaker Studio is going strong.
Unreal Engine 1.5 - yeah, maybe. Definitely not UE5. It’s one of the most complicated, convoluted and heavyweight systems in existence. Just engine itself is 100gb+ download, opening it the first time takes 30m to compile shaders. Just reading briefly through gtlf import dialog took me like 10minutes.
UE is a beast to run (and has incredibly shitty linux support if you want to use the marketplace or any plugins…). But basically everything you listed is a one time cost or just an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato.
Honestly? For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king. Godot is awesome but a lot of the core loops and flows are very much geared with 2D first and the performance of 3D games is a hotly contested issue. I would still say that Godot’s 3D “performance” is better than Unreal’s 2D but… that is an incredibly low bar.
And in terms of workflows? UE is more than a bit convoluted but with stuff like blueprints it is probably the most consistent tool out there (so long as you never try to do a 2D game). Unity is a distant second. And Godot is great but it also reeks of an open source project that is being designed and redesigned in real time (just look at how file IDs are handled…). Not the end of the world if you understand the core concepts but also not something people are generally going to learn without a lot of trips to the forums (or watching youtubes of people who did said trips for them).
Maybe stuff like shaders compiling isn’t a big deal in the long run, but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much. If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer. Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release, killing performance even on the most top-notch hardware that most gamers could never afford.
an indicator that you probably shouldn’t be developing medium fidelity 3d games on a potato
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
For “hobbyist” 3d games, Unity is still the king.
I’m doing a hobbyist 3d game and I’m using UPBGE. It’s terrible in a lot of ways, depsgraph kills performance, but it’s very convenient to just hit P and play during 3d modelling of the scene. This is what I would call an engine for “hobbyist”. Unity is a decent engine for professionals, for indies, for AAA, for AA, for a lot of things. At least, technically it’s there. Its management is a big issue though.
but one-time cost in terms of learning may be too much
If a slow startup of the editor the first time you start it is enough to end your career in game dev: you never had one.
And any good tutorial resource will do something like “Okay. Now start up that engine. Yes, do it now. Okay. It might look like it is unresponsive but that is because it is compiling shaders. Just leave that running and let’s start talking about some core concepts…”
If you’re going to use 5% of its features, having to go through the rest 95% when learning how to do things is a big distraction and productivity killer
It is a philosophical difference. But the reason I still suggest folk “learn with” UE is that it is, mostly, consistent between all the different kinds of games you may want to make. Which… is a leading cause of said performance issues when you start pushing things but more on that in…
Also, there is a surge of AAA games made in UE5 that have critical performance issues that developers struggle to fix for extended periods of time after release
Now. First and foremost: That means nothing for a hobbyist learning and making a game with their kids or spending a few hours a week for a few months until they give up.
As for the A-AA space (AAA means something, god damn it): That is not something that an individual developer is going to have any say in. That is going to be a corporate decision and it is almost exclusively going to be that company’s engine (ha, Frostbite) or Unreal because UE is the industry standard and there is a lot of value in being able to rapidly onboard a new hire or a contractor.
As for performance for those corporate games? That is really no concern for the hobbyist scale and is a much more complicated question related to allocating resources and time. But if there being poorly performant games made with an engine disqualified that engine: NO engines would exist.
Why though? Just use other engine and you’re good.
This gets back to the optimization side of things. You should not need to go through and migrate the critical path from gdscript to c# or even c++ just to test out your game. You want your development system to be significantly beefier than your target system so that you can rapidly iterate and debug. Get it working, profile it, and then optimize it. And… get a new respect for all the devs with “Unreal Engine games run like shit” games because you now realize that the optimization step might be months or even years of your life and you ain’t got time for that.
Other engines may or may not be more performant for debugging a specific “level” of fidelity. If you are at the point where your engine’s editor’s system requirements are limiting your ability to develop: You and your users are going to have a very bad time.
Arguing about UE5 feels just as bloated and convoluted as using the engine itself! Sorry, I couldn’t resist 😅
If a slow startup of the editor the first time
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want. Yes, it’s also a one-time cost, but it’s not one-time cost most developers want to pay unless they really need all that compexity.
It is a philosophical difference.
It’s a personal productivity difference. If you are able to allocate N hours to make a game and you don’t need most of those features, you will be much more likely to finish that game in time in a simpler engine.
By “one-time learning cost” I meant that to learn how to do a thing in UE5 you will have to spend 95% of time learning things you won’t ever need to understand that 5% that you actually want.
That is learning anything that isn’t just “ChatGPT, how do I do X?”. Also, once you learn how to use blueprints you know how to do basically anything a hobbyist game dev would want.
Which is not dissimilar to Unity or Godot. You learn the basic concepts and then it is mostly a matter of experimenting or looking up how to do isometric camera angles or whatever.
But honestly? it sounds like you don’t want a game engine. You want a framework. In that case, RPG Maker is great for making a top down square style JRPG. Unreal is great for an FPS. And so forth.
Don’t underestimate what hobbyists want in their games. It’s actually AAA games that don’t want to risk and do fairly standard stuff while indies/hobbyists like to experiment and implement unorthodox mechanics and visuals. I think that, for example, writing your own 3rd person character controller (with stuff like snappy raw input movement, walljumps and also properly handling moving/rotating platforms) and cartoonish NPR rendering requires going through a lot more irrelevant systems in UE5 than doing the same in many other engines including Unity, Godot, and UPBGE. In Unity there actually is a similar kind of bloat (like URP), but it’s optional and you can just hack “good old” built-in render pipeline (also has tons of ready-to-use snippets and shaders open-sourced by community through years). In other words for me UE5 vs other engines is more like Java EE vs Python (or NodeJS) than Java EE vs Wordpress. UE5’s complexity is more of too many abstraction layers and lengthy workflows rather than being too low-level and flexible. Lightweight and flexible engines are great for hobbyists, game constructors are fine too for those who really want something very basic.
I am a big supporter of godot but… it is incredibly tacky to run into a thread about layoffs and basically say “Good, they shouldn’t have jobs. Use this instead”
Bevy is damn impressive. I can understand why it’s not suitable for large projects yet but for anyone tinkering or projects willing to adapt to a rapidly iterate ecosystem is well worth a look.
I’m very sorry man, I’ve been through that, and I have friends that have been cut at unity before. They treat their workers terribly.
Focus on getting better first, just process it for a bit. When you’re ready to start looking, the market is warm right now. I’m more than happy to help review resumes.
Ah I think my comment made in haste was ambiguous. Fortunately I was not cut this time around, I’ve somehow skated by all the firings. I’m actually just clinging on for a few more months then I’m off to Sweden to go back to school. Hoping to actually finish my game dev degree this time around! I do have some school application stuff I would love to have people see though I’ll keep you in mind for that if you are up for it (for a work sample primarily, to get into higher rates schools)
Good then, glad you’ve made it through, but obviously stay frosty. Those execs will cut every engineer as long as they still look good. Be ready for anything
“That being said, I want to call out the way Unity chose to communicate these layoffs. Receiving a 5am email from ‘noreply@unity’ informing me that my role was being ‘eliminated’ and that I’d lose system access by the end of the day felt completely abrupt and impersonal. Unity must do better in how they treat their workers in hard times like this.”
Oh the irony, they are almost there. Trying to appeal to empathy and humanity of a corporation in the same breath that they acknowledge the lack of it.
There is no humane nature intrinsic in corporations. People need to stop humanizing it. Treat it like It is, know that you are being taken advantage of, you are being squeased, extracted of every value you can give and then discarted.
It’s very sad. We’re going lose a lot of great employees with tons of experience. This is going to cost to taxpayers in the form of poor services and contractors down the road filling in for more money and with less experience.
These buffoons understand very little, and neither do they understand the value of hard work and what it’s like needing to earn a living. This grandstanding is reckless.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne