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.
Yeah. Rebecca Ford (Creative Director of Warframe at Digital Extremes) recently did a follow up interview with NoClip where she outright said she was done with video games once Warframe was over. It has basically been her entire adult life to work at DE but she is under no illusions over how messed up the industry is and is basically just sticking on because she loves what she makes and who she makes it with.
And from talking to a few friends who went the game dev route after college? That is more or less where they are at. Layoffs are inevitable and you can look forward to endless abuse if you get noticed before that. So the ones who still love the games they are making put up with it. The rest either already left or are actively putting out feelers for other jobs. Because it isn’t like any of them are getting paid what they are worth.
Quick query to chatgpt says that video games generated 187.7 billion USD in 2023 vs film which was 87.4.
And the vast majority of companies doing mass layoffs (like Microsoft) are still turning profits. They just want to turn larger profits or throw some labor on the sword to protect whoever thought it was a good idea to make Marathon of all IPs into an extraction shooter.
And the rest? It is studios like Strange Scaffold who are actually doing everything right (complete games at launch, no DLC, innovative gameplay, cool narrative and art style) but can’t secure any publisher funding and are basically constantly on the verge of ruin.
There are going to be massive knock on effects when the only major releases are the massive tentpole games and everything else is “janky indie games”. At which point we’ll have even more Gamers talking about how we should fire anyone who worked on The Last Of Us 3 and spend more money making those quirky B games like HiFi Rush.
But hey. Tell me more about how all these mass layoffs are actually a good thing.
How many releases is a very different number than how much profit. Only a few of Microsoft’s releases likely account for a sizable percentage of the entire industry’s profits in a given year. The fact is that investors saw dollar signs, and the industry expanded to a level that the market doesn’t actually sustain. How many metroidvanias do you want to play in a given year? And given that Animal Well and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown came out this year, how likely are you to play Tales of Kenzera: Zau after you’ve bought and played those? Mass layoffs are not a good thing, but it’s a mathematical consequence of how much companies are permitted to expand relative to what people actually buy.
So because a studio’s first game didn’t outperform the latest in a 30-ish year old franchise that came out to rave reviews, everyone should be fired? Keeping in mind that Kenzera Zau had an EXCELLENT showing in press events (sad game about losing a father from a popular actor) and basically every major outlet said “This is fine but nothing special. But I would love to see what they make next”.
That is exactly how so many of the major publishers got into this mess. It used to be that we could get something very much “this exists” like Sly Cooper and Infamous that eventually leads to a critical and sales darling like Ghost of Tsushima. Now? Infamous didn’t outsell GTA5? Hope you mother fuckers like soup lines.
Or Naughty Dog. I mean, Crash 1 is kind of a bad game with a LOT of jank. It wasn’t until Crash 2 (and especially 3) where they were actually fun to play. And that studio eventually became the folk who made Uncharted and The Last Of Us.
Yes, there are studios that have consistently underperformed for publishers that are struggling and, while it sucks… we get it. But most of what we have seen are major publishers/platform holders just wanting to juice up some Q3 numbers by doing mass firings or the giant mess that was Embracer where they just overspent and never let any studios finish making anything. And then you have bullshit like Phil Spencer having the gall to talk about how Microsoft needs to make more games like Hi-Fi Rush the week they fucking shut down the studio that made it.
But hey, you took ECON 101 so you obviously know better.
If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.
The point of a publisher is to have a whole company. It doesn’t matter if Game A sold because Game B sold. EA used to live on this where games like Mirror’s Edge could be “experimental” because The Sims and Madden made CoD money every year.
The problem is what we saw with stuff like (Let’s say it is “THQ”. My brain can’t remember the specific publisher I was thinking of and the name has probably been reused a dozen times by Embracer et al). Where they are over-leveraging themselves by wanting to make multiple AA or even AAA games and going under because critically acclaimed games just didn’t sell well enough.
But, again, that is not what has been happening for the past year or two (aside from Embracer which is a different kind of evil). It is not “Oh, you made bad games and we need to fire you to save the company”. It isn’t even “Profits are down all over”. It is “Well, we are actually doing great. But you finished your game and don’t have one immediately in the pipeline and the shareholders want to see bigger profits for Q3 so… get fucked?”
Which is why I once again cite fucking Phil Spencer talking about what a great game Hi-Fi Rush is the week Microsoft fucking canned Tango. That was not even “Look, everyone loved The Evil Within but didn’t buy it so…”. That was “Everyone loved Hi-Fi and it sold okay even with the Gamepass hit and our other games sold well but…”
But apparently you are in full bootstraps mode where you think like a CEO who wants to buy an extra porsche so…
I don’t know how you got from A to B on the Porsche. Embracer was funded largely by debt that they were expecting to get bailed out of by an investment that didn’t happen; the classic leveraged investment gone wrong. Microsoft absolutely could stomach whatever losses they face, especially since that was the whole idea a few years back when they started Game Pass, so them deciding to not follow through on that and tighten their belts now is a situation unique to them. At large, across the industry, are tons of companies making big bets like Suicide Squad or Concord or Warhaven that follow a live service template that’s been tapped out of customers and don’t work out, and even smaller companies following the traditional publisher model like Mimimi are so exhausted hunting for funding for their next game, just barely making it by on copies sold, that they decide instead to close up shop. That’ll happen when customer dollars are spread out around more games.
Yeah you can’t tell anybody on this site that you pulled some data from AI. Even if you followed the link and found the actual report and the numbers matched up you’ll still get down voted into oblivion.
The mass layoffs are definitely pure greed. At one point they served a purpose of ebb and flow and separating the wheat from the chaff, but things aren’t that healthy anymore.
Crunch time was great when it came with the bonuses and liberal vacation.
But now, anything that’s worth a damn gets bought up into large public companies who need to satisfy shareholders. Even the private stuff is still subject to the whims of the executives. There are still some good places to land out there but they’re slowly getting trashed over time.
Meh. I would rather trick people into showing their asses over the most trivial of things. Bonus points for actually pseudo-sourcing data.
And yeah. Just depressing that everyone becomes an 80s movie caricature the moment someone is criticizing THE VIDEO GAMEZ!!! Fuck labor if it gets us The Last Of Us 3, right?
I’m going to agree with you, but only in the sense they hired more people than they should’ve, not that they should be firing people.
I really blame Telltale Games as one studio that demonstrated this issue in a microcosm. They had some successful games. Then they hired enough extra hands that they MUST make excellent games. Their next few games were not excellent. Then, everybody gets fired.
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.
Even ignoring the workers’ solidarity aspect of it:
It is actually a really good practice to break those login/usage streaks with ALL services. I read a lot of ebooks and I generally will have a “streak” of even two or three years with amazon kindle since I try to read for at least 20 minutes every night. Over the past year or so I’ve started to migrate out of the amazon ecosystem to better support authors and… I definitely find myself hesitating when picking my next book because I COULD read this non-kindle book or… I could read this other book I have via kindle (the prices ARE good) and make number go up. And Amazon realized that we don’t always have an internet connection so they’ll log that to prevent the old streak breaking that came from not bothering to connect to the hotel wifi.
And the same happens with games. I dip my toe into ESO once or twice a year and it always amuses me how much of that is geared up to make you log-in every single day for a month.
It’s garbage for learning a language but it’s phenomenal for memorizing and gameifying learning nouns and verbs. I’ve been going through the Japanese lessons one jump at a time and it’s been great to brush up on all the words I’ve forgotten.
Yeah, half-heartedly doing French in Duolingo for a few years meant that I knew a bunch of words and could read stuff okay, but communicating and thinking in French was incredibly difficult. I took a couple of classes IRL to fill in those other skills, so now I can actually get by as long as people are a bit patient with me. It was easier for me to learn that stuff than other people in my classes because I had Duolingo experience, but Duolingo definitely isn’t enough on its own.
I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)… And I’m surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.
Why?
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I’m way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.
They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I’m surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.
And I’m not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.
This article was written by Luke Plunkett, who used to work at Kotaku. Some of his past articles include real whiz-bangers like: “Oh No, There Are Women In Battlefield”, and “There Is No Saving Cyberpunk 2077.” That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Sensationalist e-begging for clicks with ragebait articles. Nothing new from a former Kotaku employee.
And our site was like the opposite. Uh… let’s just say many Lemmy users wouldn’t like its editor, but he did not hold back gut punches, and refused to watch his site turn into a clickbait farm.
Hey man, I was a Hardforum user for as long as I can Remember and Kyle was a straight shooter. Even when he jumped to Intel, nobody gave a second thought about his honesty! The problem is that for every Kyle, we have 10 Ryan Shrouts. He was (unlike kyle) one of these writers that was consistently on a high horse talking down to the peasants. Kyle had a short fuse but you always knew where he was coming from. I don’t think lemmy users would dislike Kyle at all.
Off topic: Kyle was one of the few CPU testers besides Ian of Anandtech (much later) that recognized the Utility of running benches at 720p to remove GPU bottlenecks. HardOCP is missed to this day.
Off topic: Kyle was one of the few CPU testers besides Ian of Anandtech (much later) that recognized the Utility of running benches at 720p to remove GPU bottlenecks. HardOCP is missed to this day.
This sounds so logical today it’s mind boggling that others didn’t come to this conclusion.
only casually read stuff on hardocp around the sandy/ivy bridge generation. but yes a good chunk of it died to video coverage of the content. its why for example Gamers Nexus has the reverse approach where the video content is their main priority (and audience) and they maintain their own website because thats what they wanted to do.
From the reader’s experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I’ll still reviews if they didn’t annoy me too much on my way there. I’ll still read Schreier when it isn’t paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.
You can tune out and do something passive while the ad plays, and eventually the information you wanted will appear, as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read. Perhaps this is all just a matter of perspective though.
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?
Few layers to that.
SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren’t looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.
The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.
Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very “lean” org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a “cohort” on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.
And, to clarify, I don’t have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (… also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).’
But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on “reaction” content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt’s work. And… they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven’t heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).
And… on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And… at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.
So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans “vibe” with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.
Are you sure about Giant Bomb? AFAIK Jess, Jason, and Bailey were all laid off by Fandom. The GB crew even spoke about being caught off-guard both times, and how bad they thought those layoff decisions were.
So yes. Giant Bomb laid off two staff and replaced them with contractors.
The various editors at the blog sites generally don’t want to do mass layoffs either. But the end result is the same. People lose their jobs so someone can get paid much less and have no benefits do that job instead.
Damn I actually like the firearms series, and the “douchebag” who rants about armor. I really like when they have Dave Rawlings (the sword guy) and the armor guy together and they’re just needing out over their passions.
Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.
For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the “Okay, this wouldn’t work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ”. Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn’t historically accurate.
And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.
For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.
the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
This phrase doesn’t work though. Unless you’re some body builder type, and can throw them really really far.
But even that doesn’t make sense either. Because if you said
“I only trust this guy 18 feet…”
the other person would say
“…18 feet? What? What does THAT mean???”
And you would say “What??? You think you can throw a man 19 feet??? Ok. Go grab him. Go. Go grab that man, and throw him 19 feet. Show me.”
At about this time I think they would just call the cops, assuming you have mental problems, and violent tendancies.
Which to be fair…yeah. You’re over here talking about how far you can pick another man up against their will, and how far you can throw them.
Although, how have we never made that an olympic event? You get a bunch of fat guys in a bar, and some body builder muscleheads, and see who wins. If the fat guy can escape, his time to escape is measured. Fastest fat guy gets the medal. Or, if he gets thrown, farthest throw distance wins the medal.
That read exactly as a footnote on a Terry Pratchett book, if you have never read Discworld you should, it has the same sense of humor that you do. For example another popular saying being bastardized:
Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life."
aftermath.site
Ważne