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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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Gaming
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This guy makes several key mistakes, and doesn't understand the relationship between (or difference between, for that matter) developers and publishers / executives. He pivots in one sentence from talking about number of layoffs to talking about failed games, but those are not direct corollaries. Big publishers and large studios laid off teams with games that performed incredibly well. Lots of teams that were mid-development were killed. Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn't have any flops? That was completely laid off? It had nothing to do with their games, and was entirely about Xbox forcing its 1P studios to release on Game Pass, which doomed their sales. It was bad executive management at MS, not bad games, choosing to buy Bethesda and Activision at the expense of budgets for its existing studios. Obviously Redfall and Concord were huge flops, but they were a tiny fraction of the layoffs across the industry.
He correctly points out that Gaming is a subset of the software industry, and that the trends and decisions being made by executives across the industry are the same, but just sort of hand-waves that away by saying it's not just gaming, and that "people are facing economic challenges right now" in general. Yeah! And guess that those challenges are? Short-term P&L gains via mass layoffs, in order to claw back money from acquisitions, stock buybacks, and executive pay-gouging. But it's not developers doing that, it's publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, "I've decided to make live-service schlock". But they're the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.
"What is unique in gaming, is that this is largely self-inflicted." (6:40) My brother in Christ... stahhhhhp.
He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs, as though they're... supposed to only report on things happening uniquely in gaming, and not also in other industries, even if it's also happening in gaming? The narrative that "if a studio is laid off, it was their fault, or just the economy forcing them to be laid off", is the false narrative of the publishers, and this guy is (whether he realizes it or not) helping bolster that narrative.
Lastly, this dude is dropping right-wing dogwhistles left-and-right. Listing "ideological soapboxes" alongside "bloated projects" and "garbage games" for failing games tells me everything I need to know. And if you check the comments, his fans definitely heard the whistle too.
Here's his brilliant take on thousands of line-level developers being laid off for decisions made above their heads by millionaires:
"As a customer I'm going to be honest, I just don't care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through." (7:10 in the video)
Big "stop picketing and deliver my Amazon package I paid money for" energy right here.
He pointed that out as an exception. But, it's been mostly the AAA studios that produced massive, massive high-budget flops, and then they laid off a bunch of their staff.
No, but when developers and the rest of the teams see that it's "live-service schlock", they should start looking at their resumes, instead of thinking "well, my job is safe because it's a large corporation".
Why would anybody working on Concord think that it's a good game with a good concept that is going to succeed? Or Kill the Justice League? Or Multiverse? You think all of those microtransactions and attempts at catching some unoriginal idea are going to be well-received?
Just look at it for what it is, and realize it's going to fail. And then plan accordingly.
No, look at what they did before they talked about the layoffs. Sure, calling out the layoffs is justified and it's worth reporting.
What's not worth reporting is what Twitter is saying about any of this, and then going on some soapbox trying to counter it. Thus, promoting this idea that the general public gives a shit about whatever fight this is, when in reality, they don't even know it exists. He's literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being "too woke" and tries to counter that.
Fuck Twitter. Stop reporting on Twitter. It's a shit platform that is a tiny, tiny microverse of actual people doing actual things that don't see any of that. Obviously, nobody looked at a game and thought "oh, well, that's too woke, so I'm not going to buy it". They didn't buy it because it was a shit game with shitty microtransactions.
I checked the comments. I read the comments on most YouTube videos. I saw nothing of the sort. Most of them are praising him for what he's saying.
Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games "journalists" push on a daily basis. It's manufactured bullshit that gets echoed only because they report on whatever some dude on Twitter said. I don't know why you would mistake that as some dog whistle.
Right, instead of talking about the discussion as a whole, let's take some out-of-context quote he said in the video and use that as evidence that he doesn't care about the industry.
You didn't even quote the entire sentence: "...especially when it's mismanagement to blame." I guess that bit didn't fit your narrative?
Those are still failures on the publisher's part. This isn't 30 years ago. Most game studios are not independent, they're owned by the publishers, and the publishers have immense creative control.
Really easy to say, but, believe it or not, during a time where the tech industry is actively shedding 10s of thousands of jobs, looking at your resume doesn't actually do anything for you.
Honestly, you seem to be saying "it's developers fault because I refuse to understand power dynamics". You may as well just scream "bootstraps" over and over.
Are you just proving his point by saying that the whole industry is laying people off, instead of it being specifically a gaming industry problem?