That must be so difficult for them to “get through”. Surviving for a few months, maybe a year (if non-compete clauses are enforced, which they probably aren’t for CEOs) on just tens of millions, which forces them to buy only one yacht instead of three until they can get back into another well-paid CEO gig. The greatest tragedy of our age. Won’t anybody think of the CEOs?!
I’ve just been through a recent round of layoffs, though I luckily avoided sacking, and let me tell you the collective hurt that layoffs cause, even among those who remain, makes me think that each person leaving should get to punch each deciding executive once.
The tech industry is the ultimate sheep following sheep industry. Other tech companies laying people off? I better do it too! The Fear-Of-Looking-Stupid.
I was literally told once that they were no longer hiring for the role I applied for because Facebook had slowed hiring and they were slowing hiring too in response.
The company I was applying to isn’t even in the same industry as Facebook, other than both being tech companies.
I work for an educational tech company that boomed during lockdowns. Parents, teachers, schools, and entire districts started using our product to help manage assignments during at-home learning.
It was during this time that they got a bunch of VC funding, rapidly expanded management and the executive, and then began the process of tripling the head count of individual contributors while simultaneously laying off their entire school outreach and liason department.
Oh, and of course, they set new growth targets.
Then schools reopened, and business, understandably, rapidly declined.
Except no one in management seemed to understand why it was declining? And no one wanted to listen to any explanations that lay outside of the end product or the tech stack underpinning it.
And the best part was, if anyone ever raised the point that it seemed like management expected the company to perform the same after lockdowns as during, every single person would parrot the line “yeah, but all of the tech companies did, it wasn’t just us”.
They’re all just jumping off cliffs because their friends are doing it, too.
Had a very similar thing. Company I worked for had their best year by a long mile in 2020. Hired like crazy and talked big about all these deals in the pipeline with massive companies. Didn’t understand why deals started to fall through once lockdown ended, scrambled to try and fix things but just made themselves look directionless.
CEOs are fricking pests/viruses. They don’t know what they do or what the companies values are but get bonus payments even when they are running a company into the ground. then they just move on to another company and do the same again.
You know if anyone needs to be let go maybe it's the management who were spending like there was no tomorrow and are now throwing everyone overboard to stop the ship from sinking. Or, you know, just keep cancelling games and shuttering studios. I'm sure that'll work out eventually.
If the company has to lose people to remain profitable, that sounds like the executive leadership didnt know what they were doing and should be replaced.
I've been with a company that when things were down, they didn't layoff anyone but just stopped hiring and higher management took pay cuts. I've also been with a company that would do a round of layoffs almost every time they were in the red. Guess which company I enjoyed working for more and had more positive morale overall.
Nordic Games is talking a lot of shit for a company that fired a lot of their employees and killed their underling studios before the entire firing craze of 2023 and 2024. Hey, hows that deal with the Saudis going again? Oh, right, it fucking isn’t because you staked your entire companies future on it and they decided they wanted out.
I didn’t enjoy the first one, I am enjoying the second one a lot more. It’s not perfect, but the stories are generally better and things feel more polished. It’s still an old-school JRPG though.
I haven’t played the first to really compare them, but as someone who hasn’t really been into the old school Squaresoft style RPG for a long time: It’s fantastic.
(edit: crash course for the uninitiated: Fortnite was a great game, until it launched it’s Battle Royale mode - Fortnite then effectively became this game mode, whereas the base game was left to die as Save The World.)
It’s a mode that people paid money for, and Epic treat it as a second rate game even though without it, there wouldn’t even be this behemoth that Fortnite has become.
Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Epic have come a long way from Epic MegaGames, and it isn’t always a fairytale story I suppose.
Someone here on Lemmy highlighted that quite nicely when Valve dropped their Half Life documentary. Valve embraces their past. They cherish it. They still maintain their old games to honor their success.
Epic on the other hand completely wiped old Unreal titles from the relevant stores and don’t give a fuck about supporting any of them. Which is a shame. Also I admire the tech behind of modern Unreal engines, so there are still geniuses at work who are likely passionate. Too bad they essentially only ride the Fortnite train outside their engine development.
That’s a shame. I can sort of understand taking Unreal and RtNP from the storefronts from a financial perspective as a remaster is rumoured to be in the works, but UT99 - along with Quake III Arena - was probably influential in taking online multiplayer from the discrete deathmatch or capture the flag maps into what would be eSports and games as a service… as much as that makes me almost barf to say.
I’ve always quite liked Sweeney for being “old school” in his approach to game design and company direction, even if I didn’t necessarily like how he went about it, but it has really pulled a hair out of my arse how he’s gone off the rails in the last 6-12 months - complaining about needing more linux devs one month, and binning off hundreds off staff a few weeks later even though they’re proper rinsing the Fortnite cash cow.
Great nod to the Valve documentary though, I enjoyed that far more than I should have.
Just in response to your edit, Fortnite was interesting on release but was likely never going to see vast popularity. The release of BR was really the only reason sales picked up, and at that point it makes sense to focus on the mode that’s vastly more popular.
I get that it sucks, but if it wasn’t for the pivot to BR full time, STW would likely still be where it is now, only in a dying game.
I’m still jealous about the content, support and update they get
I know what you mean. I play rocket league and they sidelined our devs from working on updates for a whole year (without communication) which left the community thinking it was a UE5 sequel in the works… and then it turned out they were just making a kart style racing game to add to fortnite.
In the mean time, smurfs and bugs are rampant and they’ve started removing game modes and other features like item trading. -_-
But hey, at least I can make my car look like the mandalorian… if I pay for it.
I don't even know which specific part MT went on to do. All I know is Epic decided to nuke nearly 3/4 of our levels because they couldn't fix playstation bugs or something (proceeds to fire 3/4 of mediatonic, including the guy who made the acclaimed promotional renders) and then canceled seasons. at least they're still working on creative and cosmetics
Iirc they did make changes to the engine, which would have required paying an external developer to port it again. It’s sad to see but it’s the reality of native games without a Linux dev in-house.
What I’m more angry about is how they didn’t make the proton version default, instead they kept the useless offline Linux native port. I’ve read too many comments thinking Rocket League online doesn’t work on Linux.
Yes, but especially for 3D games this often leads to worse performance and bugs, since the developer still has to be able to test the build. The big reason proton is so great is that Valve is responsible for fixing games on proton, while the dev just has to support a single (Windows) build.
Obviously some devs also fix a bug only found with proton, but it’s something they optionally do, without taking responsibility for fixing all bugs.
If it was so simple for a game studio to release on all platforms, we’d have macOS x86 & macOS ARM builds too.
I get your point but at the same time it would also be easy for Epic to turn on AntiCheat support for Linux in Fortnite but they still don’t for whatever reason
Iirc they also use BattleEye in addition to EAC, so depending on their implementation it might not be as simple (unless they put in some work).
Epic talks about anti-cheat on Linux not being good enough for them since they aren’t kernel level. Which might be fair since Fortnite is big, altough most people probably won’t change their OS while cheats are also available on Windows anyway. At the end of the day Fortnite is only one of many games which don’t support anti cheat on Linux for whatever reason.
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