If their main concern is layoffs – which it sounds like, at least from the article text, though I don’t know if that’s just the author’s take or not – I doubt that the union is going to have much leverage. CDPR isn’t laying people off for fun; the whole industry is seeing a major decline in investment at the moment.
Video Game VC Funding Slumps as Publishers Battle Covid Hangover
Funding opportunities dry up with game companies cutting jobs
Total peaked when people were still indoors because of Covid
VC groups invested $700.3 million in gaming in the third quarter, the lowest total since the second quarter of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. The industry attracted more than $2 billion in every quarter for two years ending in mid-2022.
The past few weeks have been marked by layoffs and studio closures by game companies. Epic cut 830 jobs, while Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog and Worms maker Team17 have also let go dozens of workers.
The Swedish video-game holding company Embracer Group AB, which bought up dozens of gaming companies starting in 2020, is now canceling games, eliminating jobs and closing studios. The company is looking to sell Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend.
That’s how employment works. Calling them slaves is ignoring the fact that they have agency and compensation, unlike actual slaves.
No job is permemnent, it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise, but it varies between industries. Gaming is a low-frequency project-based industry, you know there will be lots of work while in development, and once that’s over, there’s not going to be as much work to do.
I believe this sentiment is taken not because of the actuals of the situation, such as waning work and ended employment, but because at the end of the day when everything is done and packed up it seems like the “boots on the ground” made just enough to scrape by, while the ceos/x suites fly away in private jets to jump out and golden parachute to their mansion.
Single employee doesn't have much negotiating power and shit flows down hill.
Shit industry practices are management's poor planning and workers have to take it.
If they got royalty share for their work like pre streaming TV shows staff did, this system would make some sense. Currently worker is getting a shit deal for the "privilege"
If they (the boss) knew the job was temporary, then they (the workers) should have known that going in and had been given proper compensation to make up for the looming layoff with plenty of heads up time to prep for the next job hunt.
The formation of a union tells you that the boss did not share that tidbit with the worker. Thus the problem, as the money keeps rolling in for the fatcat for the next decade, the workers who actually did anything of value are starting from scratch at a new job after losing insurance, healthcare, rent and food money, any chance at a raise, etc etc etc.
How else should it work? Almost any other way, is how. With honesty and respect for the people who actually did anything of value, is how.
I mean, what are their salaries? I genuinely don’t know, one would assume that a specialised job like that would command a pretty solid salary, and the assumption would be that working on a project like this would get them to the top of the list for applications to other companies.
I don’t know how the job was advertised, but seeing how the industry works from the outside, I would never assume a job for life at a game studio, but you could still count on security after working on a project like this.
I work a steady job, it’s hard, and the pay is okay for me, I suspect a game dev will earn several times what I do, part of which is due to the short term, or at least risky nature of the roles, the rest would be down to the specialist skills.
I don’t really think that forming a union signifies that at all, I’d say it’s more likely down to the ongoing working conditions.
Because you can always go and get a warehousing job or similar, it’s steady, but kinda boring and lower pay.
The money may keep rolling in for those who invested the most and took the largest risks. But that’s irrelevant IMO. You take a job for the pay that’s offered, and it lasts as long as it does, how long that is depends on the kind of role.
I’m making assumptions, but I think everyone here is too. But I do particularly resent the ‘slaves’ comment as it is disrespectful of the employees, and diminishes actual slavery which is bigger than ever.
Your first paragraph is so wrong its funny, then hurts, then wraps back around to being funny again.
Game development is pretty infamous for being paid like shit, where management gets you to do it as a passion project or dream job. They likely did not make much more than you do, with almost guaranteed worse hours given how normal crunch time is in the gaming industry.
A lot of game developers abandon game design, even after making massively successful titles that are beloved for decades, because they literally cannot afford to keep the job.
I know everyone says it, but FUCK they should let Obsidian do the writing, and they need to drop that ancient game engine. Microsoft has probably killed this company.
Fallout: New Vegas had some of their best story telling. The Outer Worlds had awesome lore too. I’m really surprised they didn’t bring them along.
Not sure why some people are blaming Microsoft for this, they’ve got nothing to do with it. Their amazing backwards compatibility allowed people to play RDR on their consoles for years at 4K already, but rockstar are the ones that chose to not release the port on Xbox.
I’m not suprised. On one hand, there wasn’t exactly a lot of marketing around it. I didn’t even know it was announced until last week, and I follow gaming news and some VR news. On top of this, its an expensive, casual device - the sort of thing a kid will ask for after seeing someone else using it, not something people are lining up day-one to buy. At least something like the Valve Index, for all its disadvantages, very clearly targets enthusiasts who will go out of their way to seek out newer or better products. If Valve decided to release a Valve Index 2 (or for a more direct comparison, a Valve Index Pro) I’d be willing to bet their day-one numbers would look better, even if their overall market is much smaller.
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
Yes. As much as I have loved this game from day 1 (yes, day 1), the lack of 3rd person option did irk me quite a bit.
Honestly I probably would have played 1st person the majority of the time, but the option to zoom out the camera and just watch my badass highly customizable character move around and interact with Night City would have been a very very nice addition to the game.
Ultimately, I think they just had to scrap to focus on other (probably less technically challenging) aspects of the game’s development.
The fact that they made an exception for this with the vehicles (now with combat as of version 2.0) points to the high probability they knew that 1st person throughout the entire game was probably gonna lose them some fanfare, so at least in the vehicles (especially the motorcycles), you can zoom out and see your customized V in all their glory.
I think something like what modern Deus Ex games had is a perfect balance of 1st and 3rd person camera. Most of the exploration, sneaking and shooting is first person but whenever you enter cover or shimmy along the walls, you get a 3rd person camera so you can see and aim better. It's both practical and immersive IMHO. Takedowns were kinda bad since it took you into a basically cutscene every time but if done differently, more seamlessly, i'd be a good fit for cp2077.
Also I wouldn't mind 1st person camera in vehicles at all if it was actually good, but it feels like I'm driving from the back seat, FOV was just terrible. And that's coming from someone who enjoyed doing GTAV heists in first person mode...
They went bankrupt ages ago, got recently picked up by another company and revived, and now it seems like they’re going under again. Nobody really knows what’s happening behind the scenes but as the tweet says, seems like they’re all under NDA.
After the revival they just re-released the Batman games, announced a sequel to The Wolf Among Us and then nothing for 4 years? It is sad to see Telltale gone, but at the same time I am not surprised.
They never got revived. A third party bought their titles and company title when they went bankrupt.
The new company renamed a division of itself to Telltale and offered the old devs jobs as temporary contract workers.
None of the previous workers took the job. They did end up hiring Adhoc Studios (real former TellTale members) to work on TWAU2 after development stalled.
It should be no surprise that the company is laying off people. They did nothing with the IPs for 4 years besides sit on royalties.
Not sure how a dev can change fast-paced gameplay without seriously altering the nature of the game, but remappable controls should be the norm, and flashing lights have been known to cause issues for so damn long that it’s baffling that they keep doing it.
Unreadable text is something I know a bit about though. I’ve done some accessibility work for web UIs in the past and I can offer some guidance. Text should have good contrast with the background, said background should be static or even one solid color, text should be large and comfortable to read, and use normal fonts rather than dumb or fancy shit.
UI elements and text should be made to be resizeable and customizable wherever possible. I don’t care if it becomes an ugly blocky mess so long as I can read it.
Personally I have excellent vision but I’m colorblind and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m missing lol.
Yeah, the number of games that list epilepsy warnings is way too high, devs should just not do it. I am not sensitive to flashing lights yet I still hate it.
So devs, if you feel like you need to put a warning, just fix the game to not do that.
As a fan of total war warhammer this is so sad but also so cathartic. Its sad that this is how CA and Sega executives treated their employees and their IPs, but cathartic because it proves that the community was right and we were being gaslit. Pour one out for the community managers who the execs used as disposable flak vests for all their shitty decisions.
Damn that’s crazy. I thought TF2 was one of those games you can’t play anymore, because they had people abusing bugs to crash servers or whatever. But it got fixed and you can genuinely play it like… 7+ years after release? Titanfall 2 also used to use the “we need you to buy mtx to keep the servers open” strategy, lmao. I also think the artists behind TF and TF2 are leading passion for the project and a few have just made more art in the same vein in their free time, as well as more collabs and promotions after release. But again this is years ago.
It was definitely love/hate playing GOTG, it frustrated me to no end. The gameplay was so bad in places I couldn’t complete various sections without referencing player guides.
But I was compelled to complete it because of how well the story was told. I did enjoyed it, but I’m never going to replay it again, which is a shame.
I loved it and immediately went for plat after I finished the first time. The combat was a little rough at times but not really all that challenging. Way better than the movies by far. The characters, story, and acting were all phenomenal
I don’t remember having any issues with gameplay in GotG. The battles got slightly repetitive, but I didn’t have much trouble beating it in hard mode (and loved it). Weren’t that many battles I had to try more than once or twice.
I agree the gameplay turned meh pretty fast for me; it devolved to just cycling through all the teammates' powers as they came up, while holding a direction to circle strafe most of everything with the occasional dodge.
and I'm not a fan of using a specific weapon for a specific enemy just because it was hardcoded to work (e.g. the western DmC: Devil May Cry before the rework). I much prefer weapons being suited for specific enemies because their functionality counters specific behaviors, such as their movement patterns
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