I spoke to over 40 game developers whose companies had been impacted by layoffs in the last year. They shared with me the explanations companies gave them for what was causing the sudden loss of their livelihood, but they also told me why those explanations didn’t always seem to match reality.
My take is that there was too much competition for a limited resource - our attention span, that studios collectively spent billions trying to capitalize on but failing.
There were the smash hit successes this past year, Lethal Company, Palworld, Helldivers 2, Armour 6, Baldur’s Gate 3 to name some.
The space of games that failed were trying to be like Fortnite: get a generation of kids’ whole lives hooked so that Epic would be flush with “recurring revenue” enough to put random IPs into the game.
Big budgets promising a big payoff because of live-service participation didn’t ultimately payout enough to survive the high-interest rate environment.
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My take is that there was too much competition for a limited resource - our attention span, that studios collectively spent billions trying to capitalize on but failing.
There were the smash hit successes this past year, Lethal Company, Palworld, Helldivers 2, Armour 6, Baldur’s Gate 3 to name some.
The space of games that failed were trying to be like Fortnite: get a generation of kids’ whole lives hooked so that Epic would be flush with “recurring revenue” enough to put random IPs into the game.
Big budgets promising a big payoff because of live-service participation didn’t ultimately payout enough to survive the high-interest rate environment.
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