Games

It's not that we're not making profit, it's that we're not making ENOUGH profit.

pure corporate greed.

i think its the stock market. it creates this false reality where things need to keep climbing.

if you have a company where everyone gets paid, and the customer is very satisfied and you have no profit you are somehow a complete failure. because we all just cant be.

the stock market is humanities downfall... human greed distilled, authorized and removed from all responsibility.

There's some off-base comments here that ignore why the industry is being hit particularly hard. Note that when it comes to companies like Microsoft, you're right it's pure greed. They don't need to shed those jobs, but that will make shareholders money, so bye-bye livelihood. Fuck Microsoft in particular on this round of layoffs, money for a 65 billion purchase but nothing else, pricks.

But for most of the job losses, it really comes down to high interest rates. High interest rates disincentivizes investing. And the past decade or so has been highly investment based.

A lot of the traditional big publishers like EA and Activision went entirely in-house, so any studio outside of those big ones needed to find funding somewhere. They turned to investment companies.

This works whilst investing is cheap, but when it's hard to come by, suddenly you have to make payroll and can't. This is why Embracer has failed, for example.

Plenty of profit to go around. The issue is shareholders expect infinite growth, which is impossible.

Capitalism (when it works best) basically requires occasional market crashes that can "reset" the wealth distribution. But for obvious reasons, nobody wants that.

So every year, shareholders get richer and expect bigger growth next year, but eventually the profits will plateau. And one can only guess what happens then.

I had a shower thought this morning:

At a certain point in capitalism, a wealthy person can get enough money to live comfortably the rest of your life. If you decide to continue to grow your wealth from there, you're essentially not just making money for yourself, but so others can't have it.

I have a feeling that number is well below a billion, but I'm no economist.

Line need go up more

The line went up but not as high as expected so now Riot games owner of the most popular videogame League of Legends need to fire 500 people.

…because capitalism.

Might sound like a bit of a conspiracy theorist here, but if all of the big tech companies lay off people at the same time, why could they not hire their recently laid off competitors for a fraction of the cost?

Obviously it drives down the cost of the salaries and lowers the average hiring rate. Huge wins for all these massive companies.

And to prove that they all did this "together" when they all did it a few weeks apart will be rather difficult too.

Maybe that's just me thinking from both corporations and employees side at the same time, though...

Because they would like to be the $360bn games industry.

Greed

Capitalism.

Greed.

Same reason as every other tech company

Because lethal company is a much more fun game than anything the big guys are putting out and it only costs 10 bucks

Pursuit of bigger numbers.

Industry figures indicate employment in IT is still above pre-covid levels. Companies over-hired and are normalising. We’re not seeing this labour activity in most other sectors. There’s no reason to panic.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 … barely a week passed without some blockbuster hit or independent gem.

Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, one of the most successful titles of the decade, laid off 830 employees; Electronic Arts shed 6% of its workforce, amounting to approximately 780 jobs.

The effect was twofold: strong sales for titles such as Animal Crossing and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare boosted revenue and sent share prices soaring, thereby attracting the attention of external investors who flooded the industry with funds.

For publishers looking to cut development costs, expanding the use of AI in production (already a limited element in the process) may be a tempting prospect, especially in areas such as quality assurance and performance capture.

In January, the Sag-Aftra union was criticised for reaching an agreement with an AI company that would allow it to create digital likenesses of actors’ voices, prompting furious responses on social media.

Starfield and Mortal Kombat actor Sunil Malhotra wrote on X: “I sacrificed to strike half of last yr to keep my profession alive, not shop around my AI replica.”

The original article contains 1,217 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Greed

Because it's about greed, not culture. And anything having to do with culture has itself been traditionally appropriated by greed anyway.

Maybe they overhired when we had "cheap" money in 2021.

Why is it that in my own experience Atlus and Nintendo are the only two companies that provide fun games that run with little to no issues and meanwhile every single other triple A company doesn't anymore? Look at both of them, Persona 3 Reload, Mario Wonder hell even indie games like Palworld are more fun to play. Wtf is wrong with the gaming industry nowadays?

Mergers.