I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.
But if I were to buy one, I’d like that every worker at the factory who assembled it got paid some percentage of the factories profits, and had some amount of input on the leadership of the company as a whole, not just an hourly wage.
Does it generally work like that? No, but doesn’t mean I don’t think that’s a better way to do things.
Unless the company is an ESOP, has some sort of profit sharing mechanism or is a co-op, they do not, they only get paid an hourly wage or a salary. If the company becomes more profitable, they do not see a consummate increase In their compensation. And they have no say on if the company is sold, and they are not compensated in anyway for the company they’ve contributed to being sold.
Where do you think the wages materialize? They get paid out of the product sold. Literally every time you buy something the company uses that money to compensate their workers for their time and skill.
Profit is revenue minus expenses. Wages are part of expenses.
Wages are used to ensure that people working there are able to keep working there, covering day day expenses of the workers.
Wages rarely reflect the real value of the effort put in by the people working at the company. They reflect the cost to the worker of choosing to work at the company.
I think that workers at a company should be payed some percentage of the profit of the company, with financiers and investors receiving some percentage of the profit in turn.
I agree, wages should be distributed more evenly with the bare minimum wage being so that fuckhead todd who never does anything and only works part time could still afford paying morgage/rent, food and transportation. Id also like managers and ceos be held responsible for any big fuckups of the company. How nestle is still allowed to exist is beyond me.
The problem in most big companies (and organisations or countries) is that leaders promote people who think like themselves or at least are very agreeable. And as time passes they end up surrounding themselves with yes-people; every bad idea is cheered on, because all the critics have been fired or are way down in the hierarchy.
And in that environment, everyone who actually understands how things work quits or gets quit. It’s my understanding that there are large sections of code bases that MS just doesn’t touch, because everyone who understood how they function is gone. Continuity of institutional knowledge is difficult in the best cases and impossible under leaders that discourage dissenting perspectives.
/gestures about wildly
Regrettably…they kinda do. At least for studios like Obsidian and Double Fine, the landscape has become very grim. They are studios of a size that is very difficult to keep afloat in this environment. Investor funding in the gaming segment has dried up post-COVID, and these kinds of mid-level (or higher) devs were very reliant on that kind of funding. In light of that, these studios may have seen Microsoft as something of a safe harbor. They knew these layoffs were always a possibility, but I think it was better for them than the alternative. Or at least, it was the best choice for the people leading these studios prior to their respective Microsoft acquisitions. The devs that are being laid off are not the same people that signed off on the acquisition.
There is basically no good AAA studio left save for maybe bohemia, rockstar and cd project red. Meanwhile indies have risen up and overthrown the corpos by making fun games that set trends.
A big studio hasnt set a single trend in like over a decade now. AAA gaming has been dead for a while.
Smaller studios have been consistently putting out good games as of late anyway. Indy and AA studios have the freedom to make fun things instead of having to check every box on a spreadsheet.
From Crosspoint I heard that they even cancelled and shut down the studio making a game (forget the name off the top of my head) that Phil Spencer himself was said to have liked so much, they had to force him to quit playing their demo in a meeting about it. Not to mention the absolute waste of time and money on nearly finished projects that were probably going to sell well.
The modern American dream - figure out how to get paid tens of millions to spend someone else’s tens of billions chasing my own tail. No, I don’t create a fucking thing. I get rich by dismantling shit that used to have value!
News of Everwild’s cancellation arrives amid more layoffs at Microsoft; the company is reportedly slashing nearly 9,000 jobs as part of new cuts at Microsoft.
Wow. It was rumored to be a big layoff, but 9,000 is way over any forecast. And this is what? The third so far since Covid? Is there anyone left working for them, at this point? Or is it all seasonal contractors?
EDIT: turns out that they gutted The Initiative (the supposedly AAAA studio that never released anything), cancelled Everwild, cut 50% of Turn10, 10% of King, and cancelled an unknown number of unannounced games, including one MMO title developed by the TES Online devs.
What a bloodbath. But hey, at least Phil is safe.
Contractors never count in layoff numbers, so this number would be much, much worse if you included them. The actual job losses could easily be more than doubled.
Considering that it skipped the last showcase despite reportedly releasing next year, I don’t have high hopes for that one.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was built on the backs of seasonal contractors. Seems like that’s the strategy they have chosen for their other big IPs as well (Forza Motorsport 8 and Halo Infinite).
It’s incredible that the clowns in charge of the gaming division and responsible for dragging it through the mud for all these years get to keep their job and will probably see an increase in their salaries as well, while the people that lost their jobs because of their incompetence will get nothing but a sad press release from Uncle Phil the HR department.
I don’t think we get granular info on this stuff, all we know is this latest round of cuts involves sales too as they are moving to outsource some of that work. And that Microsoft’s total head count has been mostly level since they added a ton of people with acquisitions and hires in 2022.
There’s a logic to a smaller team being more “agile” than a larger team, but yeah these companies aren’t turning them into smaller studios. They’re expecting fewer people to do the work of a larger studio. The problems are obviously except to execs who are literally too stupid to think.
More bad news from Xbox, I was hoping they'd cut Phil Spencer lose instead...They need a brand-new lead to make Xbox awesome again. I can't say that I am surprised, though, as this game has been in dev for 7 years. However, there should've been something that could be salvaged and made into a viable game.
polygon.com
Aktywne