I was reading that sometimes these big announced layoffs are a bit performative. The market/shareholders actually react positively to them as it makes you look like you are maximizing profits. So what happens is they announce these big changes/layoffs but the numbers include people normally leaving like retirements.
I think it’s a bit of a mistake to view game development jobs like “lifetime in one place” type jobs. It’s more like movies, you move from project to project. Once a game is released that job is mostly gone and you have to get hired onto the next job. A game cancellation after 7 years just means you are on to the next project, not much different than if the game released. That’s why a lot of game development is centered around certain cities. It’s all the same people rotating around making different games. It’s also why it’s stupid to insult developers for bad games when it’s likely the same exact people making the good ones.
The big worry shouldn’t be Microsoft, we should be worried about the reports of reduced spending on gaming overall. This means there will be less projects in the works for these developers to shift over to. Of course eliminating projects looks bad, but how about not starting new ones? I understand the optics and perception of it, but is it okay to bring out the torches and pitchforks because Xbox bit off too much and employed people for 7 years, when the alternative would have been to never hire them at all (start the project at all)? Sony may not be firing the same amount of people, but they just never hired them in the first place.
Maybe MS realized it’s cheaper and less financially risky to just outsource games like we are seeing with the remaster of THOS3+4 as well as Ninja Gaiden 4 for example. Just pay for the job and you can still include it in Gamepass and keep it there forever, but it’s one and done and you don’t need to pay for insurance/pensions and the likes.
They say they have 40 projects in the works, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more and more being done by 3rd parties. They also seem to be using a lot more support studios from outside the organization as before, and I think we’ll see that become the new trend if they do indeed scale down even more. The switch to UE5 across all studios makes it even easier to do as well.
There’s a lot of truth in this post. I’d say almost the entirety of this drama is performative. All of it. From Jason Schreier gunning for his own Pulitzer prize in investigative journalism to all the baiting threads with dramatized headlines about “shuttered” or “xyz team is no more”. It feeds the rage machine and warring.
Meanwhile in the real world there’s a constant revolving door in game studios. People come, people go. Whether it’s contractors or outsourced work. The difference here is it’s part of a company wide realignment but the hiring and firing is literally just a fact of life here. No one working on a Marvel movie has a job for life either for what it’s worth. I think anyone working in the creative field knows this. Forza Motorsport (for example) has pretty much reached the end of its tether. Its existence as a AAA title is no longer justified because there just isn’t the market for console simcades anymore. It’s just the way it is.
I’m not even playing at being the devil’s advocate here either but there’s this sort of moralist foundation that all these layoff meltdowns rely upon and that’s the insinuation everyone laid off is headed straight for the soup kitchen. I think on that front if a certain Bloomberg journalist wanted to venture into some real ‘outside the box’ journalism he’d investigate what happened to all those who’ve been laid off in this industry in previous years and see where they landed. Take Visceral games for example, i.e. what happened to everyone who worked there? It would be an interesting conversation. Is there a brain drain or is it just musical chairs with people moving around between gigs? Are they leaving game dev and moving into other lines of work? So many unanswered questions because very few of the people raging right now actually care about the people involved to the point they’ll actually look into that sort of stuff.
Honestly I sincerely hope that’s true but I think you guys may be a little too optimistic. It’s going to be tough out there for a lot of the laid off people. The job market sucks right now. And there were whole teams and studios shut down, this was a lot more than normal attrition by a different name.
The “reporting on layoffs” craze really took off with the advent of social media. I have absolutely no memory prior to around 2007/2008 of mass meltdowns when a company restructured and let devs go. And I choose those words carefully as well because it’s all part of the same conversation, i.e. spin is a fact of life and one decision can either be ‘restructuring and being let go’ or ‘shuttered, is no more, defunct, fired, cancelled’ etc. words carry weight. Schreier and his friends are masters of that.
The magnitude here is simply because of consolidation. It means there’s one company doing the restructuring and making it public knowledge instead of dozens of independent companies downsizing after a series of unsuccessful ventures.
The problem is the whole industry is in a downturn, so yeah the outlook isn’t so good. This isn’t the fault of Xbox though. I don’t want to brush off Xbox cancelling games and eliminating jobs, but at least they were working on stuff in the first place. The problem I have is all of the clamoring about MS is evil and they should just leave the games market, because of course firing even more people and removing one of the biggest employers in game development is going to make everything better. Sony is mostly coasting by not doing much so of course they aren’t shutting down projects that never existed. That isn’t a dig at Sony really, it’s just a matter of fact that the more people you employ the more people there are to fire. Do we consider the of hiring people mismanagement too?
A curious experiment would be to do a background check on the profiles of users on ree screaming about the layoffs 24/7 and calling MS ghouls and all sorts of names whilst painting themselves as defenders of workers right… and seeing how many of them have cr*pped on Xbox games over the years, thus contributing to the poor reception of titles like Forza.
We all know the types of conversations, i.e. constantly comparing Forza to Gran Turismo and finding all sorts of faults with the former. Or the Craig meme years ago with Halo Infinite. Everyone on ree is a super champion of the proletariat… until a game on a certain rival green platform releases, at which point let’s sh*t all over it and the devs who made it.
Something that was speculated here too. I suppose that means Forza Motorsports is the last Motorsports that will be made, and either it will be considered done and get no more updates. Or Microsoft is going to find a 3rd party studio to keep updating it for a bit longer.
We have the layoffs and people saying it’s all about greed, just like the price hike of outer worlds 2 to 80$ or 80 euros.
Well, if you have a look at the thread in the other place, someone complained that the MGS3 remake is 80 euros and you get a thread full of people defending the price, saying it’s the cost of AAA development and that OP is wrong for not supporting it.
Like, this is beyond confirmation bias to be honest, that site has become a joke of itself!
I think we need to start a “renew your Gamepass” thread or campaign just to go against what they do there.
It’s priced at £69.99 in the UK including VAT, same price as Death Stranding 2 which is 79.99 Euros on PSN.
Surely they’re not asking for another 10 Euros over the UK (we both usually get screwed compared to the US) above the current RRP prices?
EDIT: Checking most news sites now (rather than Reddit which seemed to be all over the place) I can see most are correct at 80 - but are slamming it anyway despite this clearly being a bigger, more polished game than the first and easily worth as much to me as Death Stranding 2 or Mario Kart (which is 10 more!)
Yeah I just swapped the Xbox store to France and it’s showing as 80 Euros.
Where did the 90 Euro thing come from, I’ve seen it repeated all over the place - I initially thought people were being facetious as the Premium version gives 5 days early access but that’s 100 Euros (or £90).
I’ll definitely be getting the Game Pass Premium upgrade for £29.99 though, a steal as I love the DLCs from Obsidian
