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It’s a mix of that, but also they have to make good on all these “AI investments” that “boost productivity” and allow employees to do more. I’m a principal engineer so it was part of my job to assess how much these tools actually boost productivity and they don’t at all. They change where the mental power goes, but it’s not really faster and is more mistake prone. If I had to make a comparison, it’s a bit like a concorde plane, it’s technically faster airspeed, but then you spend all your time trying to make a thing that can shove air out of the way faster than it wants to move (supersonic) and that’s just a lot more effort in other areas. Notice concord planes are nowhere to be seen despite existing for decades and being objectively faster. Not worth, but in the AI craze who cares.
They also took advantage of taxpayer funds to boost their profits during the pandemic, and that money is gone now, so if you aren’t cutting a big part of your staff, either you didn’t take advantage of the pandemic, or you did and you have dead weight. It’s important to note that most big tech companies made record profits during that time.
If you were a tech company and you weren’t killing off a chunk of your staff, it was a signal something was wrong with your business in some way. It’s entirely a speculative stock market thing, which is all that matters these days. They can invent other reasons why they aren’t meeting targets.
TLDR; those losses are on another spreadsheet
Yep, and in many cases people got let go, then rehired 2 days later when things got cleared up, and kept their severance. The layoffs were mostly rushed. One guy was going to be a speaker at an event for the company, and as everyone sat down waiting for him to hop on stage, they hadn’t realized he was let go. Absolute waste just to make the numbers look good on paper, but a huge loss of investment.
Imagine youre a senior engineer with 2000 stock units with accelerated vesting (was about 32$ at the time), severance at least in canada was over 20 weeks of pay lump sum given the collective dismissal + vacations. They were dropping 100k(before tx) to engineers to make them go away, and hire them back the week after.
Worst company I’ve ever worked for, but I did make a pretty penny that week. Luckily I got hired a month later somewhere else.
Saw videos/articles online that this was the “end of gamedev” or whatever.
While patents for games are shit, theyve been around a long time and are hard to enforce. Palworld made it incredibly easy for one of the most ruthless companies to go after them. I expected they waited to see the final game before taking action, and until palworld made a ridiculous amount of money.
I’ve worked on Pokemon clones that are commercially available, and while they didn’t sell as much as palworld, they took a bit more care designing around stuff
That’s why these things are always “so close” to being done. You hear the milestone is near, and then it disappears. I have a theory Nintendo waits for as long as they can so people invest a lot, then they send the papers. In a way it discourages people from even starting imo.
Edit: why is this being downvoted. Nintendo slowrolling developers is just like, my opinion man. It’s not controversial
You’d be right on the money imo.
I’ve been a AAA developer for almost 2 decades, and there is no way in hell they did not explicitly sign to have the sony account linking. I didn’t like the way he acted on twitter acting like the poor indy dev getting wrecked by the tyrant, when he was hoping it would fly.
He thought it would be okay to sell your data for his chance at making a game. When it backfired due to popularity, he didn’t take any responsibility and let sony look bad. I bet there’s a lot of people at Sony who didn’t like that.
It’s simple. Game companies made a killing during the pandemic with money meant to sustain the economy. Now the economy isn’t so good and debt is expensive, so it’s time to cut headcount as fast as possible to book record profits. Same for most tech companies, hell companies in general.
Then they’ll start whining it’s hard to make money these days and they need a tax payer backed boost to get people working again “for the benefit of the economy”. They are holding it hostage, and the politicians are playing into it for personal gain.
Needless to say it’s not getting better any time soon.
Steam doesn’t push changelists from developer accounts, and don’t push it themselves without making a major announcement. This is why all the reporting on this has been clear AH/Sony delisted it. There are countless articles confirming this days ago.
Sony made the strange decision to delist Helldivers 2 from over 150 different countries in which the PlayStation Network isn’t supported, though we’re still not quite sure for what reason.
There’s been confirmation for 7 days.
This is steamdb change list for HD2. This is a developer update.
The “speculation” was just clickbait. There are multiple articles confirming it over the last week.
Unless there’s evidence that AH got a special deal, there’s no chance they didn’t know this was an eventual requirement.
I’ve been an engineer in the AA/AAA games industry for almost 2 decades, my job often involves assessing the technical feasibility of games that big publishers like Sony want to invest in/ acquire.
Someone somewhere at AW agreed to shove PSN sign-in requirements in the deal, hoping it would blow over like many games before. (e.g rocket league / epic account debacle). Now the devs are sorry it’s not working out and say “their hands are tied”, but they must have known this was coming. There are way too many legal ramifications for this to be a random power-move by Sony.
Edit: sony apparently lifted the requirement today
What does it matter if the game “launches successfully” if it doesn’t sustain itself? They knew theyd likely lose their players but they were hoping theyd be special - this game is not successful in the end.
Your entire argument boils down to: they wouldn’t have been able to cheat us into thinking this was a good game without sony. If theyre going to take my money and kill the game anyway, it would have been better to not make it at all. That’s what thousands of indie devs have to contend with every day.
The worlds video game industry*.
They got really buffed on investments during the pandemic like we were going to stay in our house for the rest of our lives.
Now interest is high and investors aren’t as excited. It wouldn’t hurt for the industry to crash and get rid of these moneygrabbers who are in for a short peak, we’d have better games
Depending on which employer you move to, you can still be sued regardless of non-competes, happens all the time where non-competes don’t exist (California). You can still receive a cease and desist depending on what you have worked on and where you are working now based on the IP regulations and non-disclosures, so this does nothing (and nobody in the industry is actually celebrating this except a few executives where the was enforceable).
I’ve signed dozens of these contracts, I know how they affect people, I know what they mean and how they are used.
That’s the whole joke. Nobody here actually gets the article or case. It helps only those who have garden leaves and extra money in their contract not to go anywhere. Today they call them “fractional executives”.
Downvote all you want, at the end of the day the cease and desist they received would still happen even after this is passed, because slap suits and IP are still a thing.
So because slap suits for ridiculous reasons exists we can use them as examples for any other case?
It’s funny you disregard that each argument I made is also made in the argument, and his little story is not part of the actual case, so its authenticity is irrelevant and doesn’t make your point.
You’ve been familiar with the story for an hour, give yourself a chance.
And this story wasn’t written when it happened, if it actually happened the way he describes it (there’s no source).
I know the issues in the industry, I’m in it, and this is why the article has plenty of:
Digging up stories of developers being directly impacted by noncompetes was a little tricky. Plenty of folks had seen the language in contracts, but not many had had them actually enforced.
The story he describes as a kid is more akin to a slap suit. The IPs we build and the techs we make are still not protected by this, and the same cease and desist could be sent to a company where they think.you are using their tech.
Your quote makes my point:
- he’s an executive
- one of the few to who this has ever happened
- they aren’t retaining the talent at the company, just its ability to go somewhere else. (They are still paid)
That’s exactly what I said in my comment. They’re thrown out for regular joes because it’s too aggressive, we don’t take money from multiple companies while not working there. Execs take garden leave that can keep going for years, they tend to want to keep them locked in during that time.
You still don’t have the right to work or unions, but we’re going to extend executive’s ability to make money from multiple companies at the same time? This is only passing because it affects mostly the wealthy. It never held power for the average employee.
Because it’s not just about money, that’s why you hear about the number of copies sold more than gross revenue, it represents number of interested people that can buy another product at X dollars. Every now and then exec put up big sales, pump the numbers up before the big reports.
That’s also why Nintendo games neeever go on sale.