unfortunately most of this thread is off the rails and just not salvageable whatsoever in terms of discussion, so this is going to be a lock and remove. maybe we can try this thread again down the road but for now, no.
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.
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.
when they bought out Mediatonic they acquired the publishing rights, which is allegedly when he stopped getting royalty payments here. it also changed what platforms you can get the game on–previously it was available on a few other platforms–but these days you can only get the game on Epic or Steam
i’m pretty sure this is because of two things: 1) they actually host the wikis and the administrators of them simply steward them; and 2) everything is licensed under CC-BY-SA anyways, so you don’t retain the right to revoke things you contribute or the right to move the wiki.
they’ll revert that and ban you for “vandalism” (i assume they have automated sensors for checking this), and/or turn your wiki over to new administrators.
a core issue for moving wikis is that Fandom refuses to delete the old wiki so you 1) have to fight an SEO war against them; and 2) have to contend with directing everyone to the right place or else you have two competing wikis (one of which will gradually lapse out of date). it’s very irritating.
Unfortunately for them, it’s too little too late. Community trust in Unity has already been obliterated.
yeah, i’d be shocked if they’ll ever put the genie back in the bottle. seems pretty clear that anybody who wants stability and isn’t contractually obligated to stick with Unity should finish their current project and jump ship before they do this again in the future.
Would you be interested in supporting an outlet financially? Would you even if all content was available freely, eg. public media as opposed to “premium access.”
if you think you’ll be doing this for a long time, i think “should this be paid or free” is more a question for yourself to determine and not the hypothetical audience you think you’re writing for. at least for now, there is room in the medium for both paid gaming journalism and unpaid gaming journalism.
“average person” i’m afraid lacks a certain it factor–probably the ironic steeping in terminally online culture implied by even speaking it–that’s implied by using normie. i find in many of these circumstances it just seems out of place also. in a semantic sense i’m not sure “average person” maps to “normal person” either, which is another thing
it’s definitely a weird term but in more than a few contexts (mostly very online contexts) i’ve found it to be the only suitable terminology because there’s just nothing else which most of the people i talk to will “get” otherwise–it’d be nice to have something a little bit less embarrassing to work with, to be honest lol