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- cross-posted to:
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Don’t worry all the rage is outsourcing now, so they can lay an entire studio off and ideally that studio gets another contract somewhere else (most don’t).
Layoffs are a natural part of the corporate world. You hire masses of people to create the illusion of growth, and you fire masses of people to create the illusion of ruthless competence. Line go up no matter what.
All Hail The Line That Always Goes Up! /s
i think they’re onto something… oh wait!
Layoffs always lead to loss of tacit institutional knowledge. In other words, they end up firing the people who know how shit really works.
Games are creative projects, so this is even more of a problem. They fire people who made the first game and knew exactly why the game was made that way, and it comes as no surprise that the new hires end up making the sequel completely different way. The new people can see the big picture but not the reasoning behind the tiniest details.
Three Months Later
“Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI’s are in the toilet all of a sudden.”
MBA types have never experienced tacit instructional knowledge because they just sit in their offices all day misinterpreting numbers to make themselves look good.
spot on. these people’s salaries are chump change compared to rsu awards. They dont care about making their core product, they care about the stock spiking periodically so they can sell. It can creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much. They really just need a yearly surge in price to sell based on something that looks like strategic competence. They arent paid to consistently uplevel the stock so much as they are paid to enable a pump and dump on their own companys stock.
Funny because it’s true. Painfully true.
“We have the best game profits. Because of layoffs”
Men, you’re lucky men. Soon you’ll all be fighting for your planet. Many of you will be dying for your planet. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. They will be the luckiest of all.
Everywhere I look, problems are coming from rich assholes removed from actually doing work making decisions.
It’s called capitalism. This is the result
Only a single rule is needed. If mass layoffs need to happen, the top person responsible, the CEO, must also leave the company in the same fashion.
What about a trial by combat clause? CEO has to fight one representative of the workforce. In America this could be a whole new genre of reality tv! We could call it… Luigi’s Mansion.
Without a golden parachute.
…B…b.ut the yacht can stay. Right??
Some bilionare
Got free time for making memes? Guess what…
That’s a paddlin’
Fun fact if you replace the word “layoffs” with “bonus for executives” the meme still works.
It’s usually both.
yeah we have to stop working for these people.
Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition
Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It’s easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the last where basically every big game studio had their own engine).
Tldr:
Unreal is slop and enables this behaviour.
Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It’s easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I’ve heard it’s fallen off a lot since 5 but it’s still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.
It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.
I’m not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000’s.
Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.
- If you have a blockbuster product, layoffs improve your financials even more.
- Poor product? Layoffs make your financials not look terrible.
- Work productivity goes up too much (unit of work measured / hours of labor)? Well, that means you can do layoffs because you don’t need productivity that high. Plus, at least initially it will look even better since you lowered the denominator.
- Terrible productivity? Layoffs make it look better quickly.
Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only “hold off the wolves” so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don’t have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the “easy” solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don’t aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn’t require the best.
Ok let’s say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn’t make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you’ve done for them lately.
“I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter” gets rewarded, not “I’m leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we’ll be more successful in 7 years”
Because capitalism doesn’t seek perfection, and it’s far from a fair system
It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.
Replace gaming industry with any white collar work in general these days, I feel like we are all just training the AI models until they get good enough to replace us all these days
