It’s not unique but the games industry is worse than most.
There’s a natural cycle to the development of a video game that’s very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you’ve been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that’s what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.
followed by (unless you’ve been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future
It amazes me these game companies putting out game after game don’t simply reassign these people to a future game. These are your seasoned veterans, they know how to do their job. Laying them off and picking up newbies just sets you up for a rocky future.
The problem is that there isn’t that much to do for these armies of people during the early stages, when it’s mostly a handful of programmers and designers fleshing out the core concept. Then, during the late stages, you need tons of QA people, grunt workers to create tons of art and fiddly little bits of implementation, localization and bug fixing, and whatever else. But, if you haven’t planned ahead so that there is another game perfectly in the pipeline to transition all the grunt-workers over to when the first one ships, they’ll all literally just be standing around doing nothing until the next game gets in shape that it’s ready for them, and usually the solution is to fire all the people who just made millions of dollars for you pouring their heart into something. It’s upsetting.
There are many things that game companies do consistently very very wrong, but this is one thing that isn’t completely “their fault.” It is possible to moderate the impacts but it’s very hard and it doesn’t really completely go away even if you work hard at it (which most of them don’t care enough to even try to.)
Unionization is also super uncommon at these game development companies. Would definitely help prevent layoffs. True for every industry again, but they are underrepresented here.
I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that unionization NEVER prevents or at least helps to prevent spurious mass layoffs, since that would make you a total imbecile about how labor relations in general and collective bargaining in particular works or at best an otherwise rational victim of gaslighting disinformation campaigns carried out on behalf of the people doing the layoffs.
Yes, but the game industry has faced severe layoffs the last couple years while profits soar ever higher and higher and executives get bigger boats. So it’s relevant.
It shouldn’t be legal to report high earnings and lay off a large portion of your staff, that feels like something a poorly performing company would do
That‘s how it is in Germany. You can only get laid off without a negotiated severance package, when the employer is in financial trouble. Even then you need start laying people off the employer needs to do it according to the social contract (e.g. single mothers last). Both is really hard to proof (in court) so usually everyone gets a severance package anyway.
This means when you hear about big layoffs in Germany usually all of them get a severance package or agree to something else. These layoffs are not comparable to the USA.
This is the shortened and positive descriptions of the process, but of course there are also (justifiable) downsides of doing it this way.
how i see it, pcgamer sometimes has high effort posts like this and other times has some really low effort posts, sometimes almost cyclical as they often use the same image pool over several topics (e.g its a meme that anything witcher related, pcgamer will use geralt in a tub as a header image)
because of the less serious posts, it kinda blots out the more serious ones.
Hank Green actually posted a video relevant to this yesterday. He was reading a Fox News article about a machine that can turn C02 into fuel that an internal combustion engine can use.
He then scrolled to the comments and saw all the posts talking about climate change being a hoax. He says it would be very easy to assume the average Fox News reader is a climate change denier. If you were to ask him how many people in the US deny climate change is real, he’d guess around 50%. However, surveys have consistently shown it is less than 10%. It is a minority of people. His point was that people leaving stupid comments are not the average person, they’re just really vocal, and try not to assume stupid comments are reflective of the average person’s beliefs.
The average vocal PC gamer also tends to have the top of the line components, so I just tend to think it’s not the gaming part that makes them entitled little assholes; it’s being rich.
Very true. I vaguely recall someone on another thread saying a game is “unplayable” if it’s not running 4k resolution and that PC gamers with 4k monitors are the majority
I regularly hear similar things about refresh rates, like “once you try a 144hz monitor you can’t go back” — meanwhile, I power-limit my GPU to get ~50fps when the summer gets too hot
I some discussion about Nvidia somebody what complaining how they were used to 200 fps at 4K but some graphics cards couldn’t do it with raytracing on without using DLSS.
As somebody else in that thread said, it’s masturbatory fps numbers.
You guys are helping my hardware inferiority complex (caused by the vocal ones always having systems that cost more than a decent used car) a lot! Thanks! 😁
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Almost none of this is unique to the gaming industry; it’s all symptoms of under-regulated capitalism.
It’s not unique but the games industry is worse than most.
There’s a natural cycle to the development of a video game that’s very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you’ve been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that’s what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.
It amazes me these game companies putting out game after game don’t simply reassign these people to a future game. These are your seasoned veterans, they know how to do their job. Laying them off and picking up newbies just sets you up for a rocky future.
The problem is that there isn’t that much to do for these armies of people during the early stages, when it’s mostly a handful of programmers and designers fleshing out the core concept. Then, during the late stages, you need tons of QA people, grunt workers to create tons of art and fiddly little bits of implementation, localization and bug fixing, and whatever else. But, if you haven’t planned ahead so that there is another game perfectly in the pipeline to transition all the grunt-workers over to when the first one ships, they’ll all literally just be standing around doing nothing until the next game gets in shape that it’s ready for them, and usually the solution is to fire all the people who just made millions of dollars for you pouring their heart into something. It’s upsetting.
There are many things that game companies do consistently very very wrong, but this is one thing that isn’t completely “their fault.” It is possible to moderate the impacts but it’s very hard and it doesn’t really completely go away even if you work hard at it (which most of them don’t care enough to even try to.)
Unionization is also super uncommon at these game development companies. Would definitely help prevent layoffs. True for every industry again, but they are underrepresented here.
Unionization doesn’t prevent layoffs. It’s clear you have never been in a union.
It does not but the game industry has a lot of parallel to the movie industry l where some parts are very unionized.
Unions are important for gig/contract work or else workers get abused and its a race to the bottom.
It doesn’t always, but it can. I have been in a union. But thanks for assuming you know anything about me douchebag.
Their name is Teddie K. They’re a fascist who at best might have an eco in front.
Fixed that for you.
I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that unionization NEVER prevents or at least helps to prevent spurious mass layoffs, since that would make you a total imbecile about how labor relations in general and collective bargaining in particular works or at best an otherwise rational victim of gaslighting disinformation campaigns carried out on behalf of the people doing the layoffs.
Yes, but the game industry has faced severe layoffs the last couple years while profits soar ever higher and higher and executives get bigger boats. So it’s relevant.
How is this not a just a symptom of under-regulated capitalism?
It currently applies most to the game and tech industries
It absolutely is. I’m not denying that.
I feel that perhaps “jab” is understating it!
More like a haymaker.
I have a dream of making a game of my own one day, and I have already decided to self-publish it. It’s the safest move.
It’s pretty easy on PC, with Steam itself and itch.io being pretty good for indies. Earning enough money from your game is a different story…
Worked on a personal game for 7 years nearly every day. Signed with a publisher and gave up on the project the following year.
So basically incompetent leadership falling ass backwards in tons of cash from your successes.
Yeah, I just knew Blizzard had to be on the list
It shouldn’t be legal to report high earnings and lay off a large portion of your staff, that feels like something a poorly performing company would do
That‘s how it is in Germany. You can only get laid off without a negotiated severance package, when the employer is in financial trouble. Even then you need start laying people off the employer needs to do it according to the social contract (e.g. single mothers last). Both is really hard to proof (in court) so usually everyone gets a severance package anyway. This means when you hear about big layoffs in Germany usually all of them get a severance package or agree to something else. These layoffs are not comparable to the USA. This is the shortened and positive descriptions of the process, but of course there are also (justifiable) downsides of doing it this way.
What would be some of the downsides? Just curious.
Some examples
Come to Germany and see for yourself :)
No!!! Put down the beer and pretzels!!! Come to America and grab a Fresh™ slice of the Original™ FreeMarket® System©
We have all those same downsides, and many MORE!!! Now with 80% less upside to compensate!!!
Yeah, I would get dinged for all three on that second point.
Wow there. We can’t go around regulating things. What do you think we are COMMUNISTS?!?
PC Gamer usually posts good takes, shame about the comment section sometimes
how i see it, pcgamer sometimes has high effort posts like this and other times has some really low effort posts, sometimes almost cyclical as they often use the same image pool over several topics (e.g its a meme that anything witcher related, pcgamer will use geralt in a tub as a header image)
because of the less serious posts, it kinda blots out the more serious ones.
I’ve noticed as well. Why does it seem like so many people hate PC Gamer?
I have no idea but if I had to guess, I’d say the audience of PC Gamer is PC gamers, and the average PC gamer fucking sucks
Hank Green actually posted a video relevant to this yesterday. He was reading a Fox News article about a machine that can turn C02 into fuel that an internal combustion engine can use.
He then scrolled to the comments and saw all the posts talking about climate change being a hoax. He says it would be very easy to assume the average Fox News reader is a climate change denier. If you were to ask him how many people in the US deny climate change is real, he’d guess around 50%. However, surveys have consistently shown it is less than 10%. It is a minority of people. His point was that people leaving stupid comments are not the average person, they’re just really vocal, and try not to assume stupid comments are reflective of the average person’s beliefs.
You can’t even assume those people are people. There’s a lot of bot powered disinformation out there.
I doubt that the average PC gamer is commenting on those articles.
Fixed it for you.
Those assholes don’t represent the average PC gamer any more accurately than the Gamergate troglodytes represent all gamers.
The average vocal PC gamer also tends to have the top of the line components, so I just tend to think it’s not the gaming part that makes them entitled little assholes; it’s being rich.
Very true. I vaguely recall someone on another thread saying a game is “unplayable” if it’s not running 4k resolution and that PC gamers with 4k monitors are the majority
I regularly hear similar things about refresh rates, like “once you try a 144hz monitor you can’t go back” — meanwhile, I power-limit my GPU to get ~50fps when the summer gets too hot
I some discussion about Nvidia somebody what complaining how they were used to 200 fps at 4K but some graphics cards couldn’t do it with raytracing on without using DLSS.
As somebody else in that thread said, it’s masturbatory fps numbers.
You guys are helping my hardware inferiority complex (caused by the vocal ones always having systems that cost more than a decent used car) a lot! Thanks! 😁