IDK why i thought in France, this type of behavior would be looked down upon a lot more than in the US. With that in mind, I’m surprised with what these people are accused with. Hope these guys get what they deserve (which doesn’t look good for them).
seriously, you’d think with the holiday season coming up studios would be crunching to get their games ready in time, but since unity shit the bed and epic took their lead it’s been nothing but bad news in the AA and AAA space
Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.
One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”
And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.
And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.
Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.
Departments ranging from art to production were impacted, but the majority of those laid off worked in quality assurance testing. The sources said at least 25 developers were part of the downsizing. Full-time staff do not appear to have been part of the cuts.
Sources tell Kotaku that no severance is being offered for those currently laid off, and that impacted developers as well as remaining employees are being pressured to keep the news quiet. Their contracts won’t be officially terminated until the end of October and they’ll be expected to work through the rest of the month.
If I’m understanding right it sounds like only part-time contractors are getting cut. Do part-time employees usually get offered severance packages or is this (kinda ghoulish) business as usual? I wonder how much work those people will get done for the rest of the month
Part time usually doesn’t receive any benefits. Contractors never receive benefits unless stated in the contract, severance is usually not included in said package but an early buyout might be.
Do part-time employees usually get offered severance packages or is this (kinda ghoulish) business as usual?
by design part-time employment usually does not confer the benefits of full employment, no. that’s part of why so many unions seek to either upgrade part-time workers to full time workers or limit the number of part-time/subcontracted workers that a company is employing–otherwise you basically have an underclass of people who can get totally fucked at any time.
That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure if the game industry had different standards to other fields for that kinda stuff. Sacking a bunch of QA agents does not sound promising for the games they’re working on…
Not a lot, but such incidents are a clear indication that we are slowly seeing the Covid effect wearing off at its entirety. Offices and companies are way too eager to get back to the pre-covid grind. Their long held products are now being released.
I am also working in a IT industry and them slowly cutting off our Work-from-home days under the guise of low productivity is disheartening to say the least.
… what? Does lemmy have karma bots that just fire off pre-written feel good comments? … Does lemmy have karma?
What does that have to do with any of this. Where is the “long held product”? Hell, the sister article is even “Yeah… that MP mode is never coming out”
Again, what does that have to do with anything here?
Naughty Dog have not launched anything since the TLOU remake a year or two back. And WFH is not mentioned at all. So I have no idea where you are pulling your random ass talking points out of.
Because this is a pretty bog standard “We have had a troubled development cycle and our publisher/parent company is cutting their losses”
strange, seems to be a country related thing. Working as an UI designer in germany and tech companies here are doubling down on “work wherever the fuck you want”…
My company has offered it from the beginning of covid and did not change it at all and my latest job offers included a 100% work from home option and also a few startet to offer a 4 days week with the compensation of 5 days.
I am from India. My cousin’s job is entirely WFH, and as you said they’ve doubled down on it. India is also infamous for ‘meatshop’-esque IT industry and the biggest of them have forced people to office again, even though they could work from home. I am somewhere in the middle and they are slowly reducing WFH days, I can still work at the least 10 days from home a month, but that’s not a lot.
one curious sidenote to these cuts is the TLOU multiplayer game, which seems pretty much dead at this point:
Despite hit ratings for the recent HBO adaptation of The Last Of Us, a multiplayer spin-off for the zombie shooter based on the first game’s Factions mode has struggled in development. Bloomberg reported in June that Sony had diverted resources away from the project following a negative internal review by Bungie, the recently acquired live-service powerhouse behind Destiny 2. One source now tells Kotaku that the multiplayer game, while not completely canceled, is basically on ice at this point.
:( very sad to hear that. Naughty Dog has made 3 of my favorite online games of all time (Uncharted 3, Uncharted 4, TLOU) and so I was really excited for the announcement of a new multiplayer game. I feel like historically Naughty Dog has done a good job of finding the parts of a gameplay loop that feels “sticky” and give it some grease to make it feel better in subsequent games. There were a few parts of TLOU that could have used improvements; Clans representing some really interesting and incredibly infuriating ideas in multiplayer games, for example. I expected it would still be a niche game, but sad to hear it is probably going to die in development hell after years of me getting excited for it.
The last multiplayer mode for The Last of Us was designed to keep you playing long enough to not trade the game in. This one is aiming to be a game that has no ceiling on how much you play or spend. I'm not convinced we need another live service game that's inevitably going to get shut down and disappear off the face of the earth in just a few years. This definitely sucks for the people losing their livelihoods, but hopefully this is indicative of the live service model no longer making financial sense.
So, Microsofts suggestion for the problem of studios beating old IP to death isn’t to support smaller indie projects that are developing new IP.
Doesn’t gamepass make this problem worse? It makes it affordable and incentivizes people to try many of those big AAA games so studios still get paid (maybe less than if it’s bought outright, but still i imagine it’s still compensated).
Superstonk mods have been compromised for a long time, silencing discussion of various topics and derailing discourse. Not to mention thousands of bot accounts manipulating what gets seen. The original members have partially moved to other forums and lemmy
Yes, and he’ll do the old “force austerity to temporarily drive up profit margins for a quarter or two, then once it’s clear the next quarter will be crap, sell all of the stock that was awarded (auspiciously with a very short vesting window, if not just given outright)”
Typical bs, probably worth shorting this stock over the next year or so
He has 0 salary, he isn’t getting paid for any of this. Hence the end of the letter. You obviously didn’t even read it.
I expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and work hard. I’m not getting paid, so I’m either going down with the ship or turning the company around. I much prefer the latter.
No shit, he’s an activist that bought in and turned the company around when it was being run into the ground by consultants working for short sellers. He owns about 15%
Now compare that to executives with no personal stake in their company, making millions in salary and not giving a fuck about anyone else
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