The Great Developer Massacre of 2023-2024 (and onwards?)

[Dcubed]

Figured we were overdue a thread to discuss the ongoing layoffs that are currently tearing the western video game industry apart.  It's a depressing topic yes, but it is still an important one (and I don't want to keep bogging down the Playstation 5 thread with this stuff! No, really, I swear I don't!).

Anywho... here's the latest one.  This time from EA (again...)

For those not keeping track, here's a website that is keeping track... 

https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2024

... what a bloody bloodbath.  Jesus... Makes you wonder who will even be left in one piece this time next year...

Still.  Interesting to see EA moving away from licensed games at a strategic level either way.

Edited February 28 by Dcubed

[Julius]

Thanks for the thread @Dcubed, definitely think it's warranted at this point. 

To comment on probably the smallest aspect of this first (and the least to do with the layoffs), the Star Wars FPS by Respawn cancellation kind of sucks considering, well, it's Respawn and they haven't made a new console-based FPS in...forever, at this point? Despite clearly having the talent to do so. There were also some expecting/hoping for it to be a Republic Commando spiritual (or actual) successor, so yeah, bummer as a Star Wars fan. More importantly it reads like a lot more layoffs are going to be heading their way. 

As for the layoffs overall, I don't really have much to add in terms of the current conversation around current development cycles and goals being unsustainable and unnecessarily costly, but this is just the point we've got to. Gaming appears to have ended up in a similar place to where films were about a decade ago where, despite a healthy-ish indie scene by comparison, sequels/remakes/reboots completely rule the roost simply because it is the safest and most cost effective ROI for these big companies. I've got to hand it to Shawn Layden here, he was very transparent about where this was clearly all going and saw the writing on the wall; it's not hard to see why PlayStation no longer wanted him around. 

Obviously I wish the best for everyone being laid off, but, selfishly, following the industry and these rounds of layoffs these past few years makes me feel like I dodged a massive bullet by not following my evident passion for the medium and trying to find a way in, which is something I'd personally been toying with as an idea for a while – and I can't help but wonder how much this news being so front and centre might impact future waves of potential developers, and just how many others it might've put off already. It sounds like a horrible industry to be in, whether it be the crunch, the lack of job security, the constant acquisitions (furthering the lack of job security), the rampant power struggles and corporate schlock as well as some fairly heinous things being done and said in certain corners...you have thousands of some of the smartest and most talented creative minds in the world, in the most lucrative entertainment industry, being laid off year after year. Bloated budgets and investments from COVID are definitely partly to blame for all of this, but I also think it is clearly a cultural issue, too: loyalty and hard work are rarely rewarded, and, if anything, actually seem pretty foolish traits in terms of furthering a career in the space as things stand. Especially early on. 

And I touched on the indie scene before, but well, this is exactly why it's oversaturated. There is too much talent and not enough jobs going around with the stability needed to support it all. Someone needs to compare the 70s push of indie films to what we've seen in the games industry over the last decade, because while in film it seemingly came from wanting more creative freedom in order to break the mold and pattern of the big studios of the time, in gaming lately going independent genuinely seems like a move being made out of a search for some solid ground under people's feet, and for the more experienced folk around it seems the wiser move, even if it is an incredibly risky one. 

It honestly saddens me to see what the industry has morphed into even in just the short time I've been around actively following it. Games are better than ever, the industry is making more money than ever (obviously with a huge COVID bump it might be down relatively in some spots), and yet thousands of jobs are being lost because..? Oh, because it's not those same creative minds - or the minds of people who respect creativity - at the top anymore, like it might have been a decade ago. It's Business Grad Joe remorselessly maximising profits and reducing costs in the name of his shepherds, the shareholders. 

Edited February 28 by Julius

[Dcubed]

13 minutes ago, Julius said:

And I touched on the indie scene before, but well, this is exactly why it's oversaturated. There is too much talent and not enough jobs going around with the stability needed to support it all. Someone needs to compare the 70s push of indie films to what we've seen in the games industry over the last decade, because while in film it seemingly came from wanting more creative freedom in order to break the mold and pattern of the big studios of the time, in gaming lately going independent genuinely seems like a move being made out of a search for some solid ground under people's feet, and for the more experienced folk around it seems the wiser move, even if it is an incredibly risky one. 

That's an interesting point there.  In some respects, yeah, you're right.  The Indie scene is looking rather saturated because so many developers have decided that they'd rather go it alone than roll the dice on an unstable industry that doesn't value creative freedom.

And while going Indie is a huge risk in of itself, in many ways it's actually potentially more stable for developers than choosing to work in the AAA sector for a larger publisher.

I don't see the problem of Indie saturation getting any better though, it's only gonna get worse as more and more developers get pushed out of the AAA sector and that ocean grows ever increasingly red.

Ultimately, what this industry needs to do is to find new audiences to target.  There are only so many 10-25 year old males to target who play video games; why are you not trying to target women, young children or older adults instead!?

Edited February 28 by Dcubed

[Julius]

8 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

There are only so many 10-25 year old males to target who play video games; why are you not trying to target women, young children or older adults instead!?

Agreed with much of the rest of your post, but my fingers are itching to type an answer to this one. 

Because boys and young men from ages 10-25 are statistically the most vulnerable audience when it comes to what this industry preys on: free time, escapism, and disposable income. This isn't to say that women or younger children or older folk can't have addictions, or any other myriad of problems, at all, but there have been a LOT of growing trends over the last decade which more and more papers have been published about and has research has been completed on, and it's so scarily obvious why this industry targets this particular demographic.

It's late so I'm not going to go for the most relevant or up-to-date findings, just what I can find relatively quickly:

Here's an old graph from 2020 showing just how many more women are attending university than men.

Here's an article on men's mental health which suggests a bunch of reasons why male:female ratios of depression and suicide are probably inaccurate, and it's largely down to men being more likely to avoid reporting or trying to find a solution to the problem, and being more likely to look for some form of escape.

Here's a piece on men being nearly twice as likely to form an addiction than women, and being more likely to abuse that addiction. 

Men are more likely to be competitive than women. 

Again, to be clear, I'm not highlighting these articles to say that one side has it worse than the other or what have you, but to highlight that men - and young, developing men, for obvious reasons - are a prime audience to aim your products at if you're a game publisher. More likely to have free, unstructured time (relatively fewer men in and graduating from university)? More likely to become addicted? More likely to be competitive (and thus spend said aforementioned free, unstructured time getting better at something)? More likely to look for an escape than to tackle a problem?

It all forms this horrible cycle which makes a certain male demographic a hotbed of potential whales for these companies. This is before we even get into the systems at play (mechanically) in and around (microtransactions) gaming which rewards the players (sweet monkey lizard brain dopamine) in ways which makes certain games so difficult to move on from. There's also now an additional element these days of compulsion and FOMO as games are very regularly updated with new and exciting challenges on an increasingly regular basis.

League of Legends, Call of Duty, Fortnite, FIFA, and so on and so forth, there's a reason that they're all as big as they are, and large swathes of the rest of the industry (AAA obviously in particular) is at best guilty of following suit by following their lead and going for the same demographic with the same tactics, or at worst, recognising the vulnerabilities of this demographic and launching at them full force. In most AAA cases, it's probably a bit of both. 

I simply don't think there's as much money to be made from targeting a female or older audience in particular, and so much of what a younger audience can access is determined by their parents or guardians. I think of it as being similar to how Nintendo marketed the Switch completely right: their ads include older teens and young adults, not children or older adults, because there's that "they're cool, I want to be like them" factor to it (obviously it's an ad and it's effect differs from person to person, but that's absolutely their strategy with their marketing). For the female demo? It's often either a case that girls are included in the ads or there's an air of "I can do that, too. And maybe even better" if they're not, which can persist because of the way in which young women have been raised over the last decade or two in a world with a huge increase in feminist movements, causes and efforts – you don't even really need to target a female audience in some ways (and I don't think you'll win a new-to-gaming female demo over for countless reasons, the first of which being your ad probably won't even get on their radar to begin with). Unless the game is targeted directly at a female demo (which often, unfortunately, falls into some sort of stereotyping), I don't think women care nearly as much about a game not being aimed at them as men might (this is anecdotal, obviously). 

I've gone on long enough, but basically, well, they're just preying on the statistically more vulnerable demographic. It's disgusting but, well, shareholders mean this kind of has to be the aim for most these days 

[Dcubed]

To be honest, I think that the answer to the question I proposed isn't as sinister as what @Julius is implying, but is probably every bit as damning...

... most publishers simply just don't know how to make anything else, and have no interest in making anything that doesn't target that traditional audience of 12-25 year old males.

And on the developer side? At least 90% of them are male, and grew up playing games that were targetted towards that very same audience.  They simply just want to make the kinds of games that interest themselves, and have little interest in trying to make different kinds of games... which means that you end up with a whole lot of homogonisation.

Even as the traditional gaming audience continues to stagnate, die off and shrink, these publishers continue to cling to what they know because they're terrified of the prospect of having to learn how to target anyone else.  It's the big reason why almost every single 3rd party fell completely flat on their faces on the Wii, and why they didn't even try to capitalise on that vast new audience that Nintendo handed them on a silver platter.

Combine that with a roughly 40 year old history of women being ostracised and pushed out of the video game industry (and the wider tech industry as a whole), and this is the situation you end up in.  The "gene pool" no longer has enough diversity to sustain itself.

It's a multiple decade long ouroboros that is now eating its own tail.

Edited February 29 by Dcubed

[Dcubed]

Looks like Velan Studios are the next to be hit.

Real shame.  Hopefully they've got another contract lined up with Nintendo.

[Hero-of-Time]

Swen Vincke (BG3 director) mentioned the industry layoffs when picking up an award at GDC.

Quote

"Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long, since I started," Vincke said, while collecting the GDCA Best Narrative award for Baldur's Gate 3. "I've been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over.

"It's always the quarterly profits," he continued, "the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say 'shit I'm out of developers' and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it's just broken...

"You don't have to," Vincke went on. "You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don't lose the institutional knowledge that's been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off."

Full thing can be read over at Eurogamer.

https://www.eurogamer.net/baldurs-gate-3-boss-blasts-publisher-greed-behind-layoffs

What a guy. 

[Ashley]

Honestly I swear a lot of things would be better if they didn't originate from America. 

The money-focused culture did help them get to where they are of course, but my god if it doesn't ruin a lot of things in the process. 

[Dcubed]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sega-sells-relic-and-will-cut-240-jobs-across-uk-studios
 

Another 240 jobs lost as SEGA sells Relic.

[Hero-of-Time]

Didn't take long for Take Two to make some cuts from Gearbox

Quote

Along with countless others, I've just been informed I've been laid off at Gearbox," former PR manager Jennifer Locke posted on Twitter. "It really was a dream come true working on this team, and I'm incredibly grateful for my time here."

Senior User Research Investigator also posted on the platform saying, "I just lost my job."

"Following the exciting news of the Take-Two Interactive & Gearbox Entertainment merger last night, I, like many others, received the unfortunate news this morning that my position will no longer be required," former director of online engagement Chris Harada posted on LinkedIn.

"After three incredible years at Gearbox, my journey with the company has concluded." Another former PR staff member, Steve Prince, also confirmed on LinkedIn that he was among the cuts.

This industry needs a massive reset. It's an absolute mess at the moment.

[Hero-of-Time]

More people added to the pile.

Quote

April 16 (Reuters) - Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO.O), opens new tab will lay off about 5% of its workforce, the publisher of the "Grand Theft Auto" franchise said on Tuesday, as the gaming industry extends its job cuts from the past two years into 2024.
The company said it would also scrap several projects that are in development as part of a cost-reduction plan, which is expected to lead to total charges of $160 million to $200 million.

The plan is expected to be largely complete by Dec. 31, 2024, it added.

According to Era, that equates to around 550-600 jobs being cut. Here's the amount of profit TT have been pulling in over the past few years.

• Take-Two Interactive Software annual gross profit for 2023 was $2.285B, a 16.04% increase from 2022.
• Take-Two Interactive Software annual gross profit for 2022 was $1.969B, a 7.17% increase from 2021.
• Take-Two Interactive Software annual gross profit for 2021 was $1.838B, a 18.83% increase from 2020.

Absolutely ridiculous that these types of profits are being pulled in and yet people are still being given the boot.