Man, sympathies to everyone caught up in this. The hits keep on coming.
You know, monopoly commissions are always worried about how mergers will affect the market for consumers, but maybe they should also start asking how they affect the *job* market for staff…
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activision-blizzard-layoffs
The video game industry, for the last decade or so, has embraced the worst abuses and bad practices of capitalism. Each large company seems to think they are Goldman Sachs where they can drive their employees into the ground with crunch, and then lay them off whenever they want.
Then they'll turn around say the products you have bought from them aren't really yours, and can be withdrawn at any time.
@trabex @antonyjohnston programmer here – I am sort of under the impression that because a good chunk of us got into programming because of our love of video games, there's sort of an over-supply of programmers that want to work for video game studios. I mean, early on in my career, working somewhere like Blizzard was certainly appealing to me, for example, it just never worked out for me. This allows them to sort of take advantage of that and pay less, run them harder, etc, etc.
There have always been companies exploiting passion for profit. The video game industry is particularly bad at it.
One caveat: there's no way to know what the sales of your game will look like while you're in the middle of making it. You have an educated guesstimate, at best. For this reason, companies have good reason to keep costs low and bring the product out as soon as possible (even if it means a buggy, unfinished mess)
@trabex @antonyjohnston Yup; seems like a tough business.
Heh one man's "exploiting passion for profit" is another's "derive gains from trade".
@ech @antonyjohnston
It's become especially crowded with the democratization of development software in the form of Unity and Unreal Engine, both of which have been free (at least, until recently).
I once tried to program a retro RPG myself. About 200 hours into the development process, I had maybe 3 hours of gameplay to show for it.
Corporate profits are a problem, but it also really isn't that easy to balance expenditure and income when you make no income for a long time.