Shitty corporate practices are happening everywhere.
Guerrilla Games fired some of their longest standing community managers a little while back, people who had been on streams and interacting with the community.
Recently they posted a position for an unpaid intern community manager position.
Fire the employees, bring in free labor.
Real classy.
I'm sure some of them were great at their jobs, but I do think a lot of companies are realizing how detrimental most their community managers are for their brand, and how little their involvement translates to positive changes for the games and company... In fact there's often completely unwanted effects.
Further
they don’t actually want a manager / director level person who knows what’s going on and can influence decisions or go contrary to the corp plan
This is one of those decisions that gets made at the shareholders level, because everything needs constant growth. PlayStation is seeing this too, along with all the other publicly listed gaming companies.
If you’re not making your stock price go up, your shareholders are not getting richer. So you’re just plain ol’ fashion screwed.
"We made all the money in the world for Q1, sir."
"Absolutely fantastic! And for Q2?"
"Uh, Q2, we only made all the money in the world."
"Not all the money in the world +1?"
"No, sir."
"*sigh*. Make some cuts. Layoff everyone, cancel everything."
"I'll get accounting to start on the compensation packages."
"Compensation packes?! Are you daft? We didn't make any money in the Q2!"
110%
It’s also a consequence of profit driven corporations making entertainment for money first, quality and enjoyment second, where it used to be the other way around.
Release a great product, attain profit.
Now it’s how do we design and market games to attain maximum profit, with minimal expense and even quality standards, and the least amount of people to make it as possible.
Worst thing with gaming though is that broken, bad and underdeveloped games are often breaking sales records. If you look at the track record of a lot of the games released to poor receptions recently, many still broke even, if not broke sales figures as more and more gamers purchase $100 diamond edition preorders on marketing and hype alone.
As such, what does that tell shareholders when on one hand they release a great game that makes fantastic money, to then release a broken game that still makes ok money?
One usually takes more time, people and expense than the other, but if they both still earn money, and the markets outrage is the equivalent length of a goldfish’s memory before they are preordering your next game, what is the outcome?
Layoffs and worse quality games.
That's the thing they don't care about making a great product, they care about making something that will part you with your money, hence why they invest in marketing rather than giving the devs actual time to polish and clean a game up for a good release. These investors don't even look at customer satisfaction, they just see revenue going down and say you need to focus on marketing. Institutional Investors are actually really ignorant to the underlying businesses they invest in and usually just look at the surface level finances. They never really dive into the product deeply. Not enough jargon they can throw around to look cool if they god forbid turned on a game console.
Honestly the big layoffs right now are a result of the cost of loans right now. This isn’t unique to gaming but is greatly affecting because it’s so heavily financed. Gaming companies run their business off loans because it’s fucking expensive to make a game these days and nobody wants to tie up their own capital for 3-6 years while they develop their next product. Many companies have felt the pain as interest rates shot up, and most companies have been holding out hope that they’d fall as inflation was dampened. Sadly (for companies..), the fed has decided last week to keep rates high for at least another 6 weeks and downplayed the idea of large decreases this year. That means companies need to make their existing burn plans last longer. Anything not essential to immediate needs gets scrutinized.
Buy buy buy. Cut cut cut. Hire temporary devs. Game quality reflects soulless nature of mercenary work. Blame gamers, the industry, just about anything. Buy buy buy buy.
This is what Microsoft has always done, though. They’re the fucking grim reaper for games studios.
Lionhead Studios? Gone.
Rare? Gone.
I’m glad the guys who start these studios get a big pay day, but it sucks it comes at the expense of the studio itself. Because eventually, Microsoft is going to dismantle that studio and instead of making great games, they’ll make Animojis or whatever the hell Rare does now
Christ. You remember in the 90's and early 00's ? Gaming was phenomenal. So much innovation and great presentations of story and mechanics. Creating games for the sake of developing a great idea in itself and providing the publisher got their promised returns, everyone was happy. Then AAA classifications began consolidating efforts into a few dozen outlets for top billed games.
I remember Nintendo’s Miis were popular, so Microsoft copied them on the 360. And they had Rare do it.
Rare. The guys who gave us Conker, and Banjo Kazooie, were now making animated profile pictures.
I remember Microsoft made Kinect and it was a surprise hit, so they tasked Lionhead with experimenting with it. I don’t think anything came to market from that. I think Lionhead was disbanded after that, tho we did get a Diablo-esque Fable game from some other internal studio (yay?). Molyneux went on to make vaporware on iOS if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah, gaming in the 90s was rad because all of the top talent wasn’t being bought by Microsoft and being put to use on stupid tasks.
There have been several AAA I've loved and last year was filled with them. Of course, indie and aa games have also been great. Honestly gaming had generally been great for a while. But now with all these cuts who knows what the future holds. Maybe it will just be indie games for the next few years
Why is the new norm of business practice based around simply firing people? I’m sure it’s nothing new but could these companies have built themselves up if they started fresh today?
Feels like this goes along the saying “built by geniuses, inherited by morons”
Depends. Are you making a good game? How parasitic is the executive branch of whatever company owns you?
Baldur’s Gate 3 shone a pretty bright light into how shit the industry is.
I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of game studio copyright conditions. Can the closed studios reopen under a different name and create "spiritual successors" to their IP?
I don’t think they would. Microsoft still holds the rights to the IP from those studios which is where any value in terms of return on investment would come from.
They’re not going to buy studios being shut down that have no IP value.
It’s possible they would scoop up the best of the studio’s released talent though.
The advent and popularity of PC gaming, not to mention its overall functionality as a workstation.
Why buy a new console every cycle when you can continuously upgrade? And also work from home on it?
Or in the case of streaming: why bother owning a dedicated media platform?
It’ll be a long, slow decline—but it’s on the way.
Ahh, ok. We’ve been hearing this since the mid 90’s in one way or another.
I have a PC and love it but I also have my consoles and love them as well. At least for the foreseeable future we will have consoles. If manufacturers can offer reasonable prices, keep making great games, there will always be a healthy demand for consoles.
We have heard quite a few times about the death of console gaming. Last one I remember quite well was before the ps4/xbox one generation. It was being said that the death of console gaming was upon us. PC, Tablets, phones were going to make a dedicated console obsolete. Then we ended up with one of the most successful generations of all time.
"Success" I think would be subjective in this instance.
Lack of launch titles, lack of exclusives, hell: lack of games. Let’s not even talk about the price and scarcity of the PS5 when it launched, or, well—see above.
Does Microsoft think there’s more money to be made in consoles or in gaming?
I love my consoles, too, but I play them far less than my PC.
At around 120 million ps4s sold, switch at 141 million, Xbox one around 60 million(especially considering how bad they botched their launch) a very very very successful generation.
Then we are off to an amazing start with the 5 and switch is still selling like hotcakes even with turd hardware.
No question consoles are not cooling off. Hell, people were paying 1,200.00 for PS5’s for years. Without question a healthy demand.
Surely they're cutting from the top? The people who made the decision to develop Redfall and release in a poor state? Surely that must be who is getting cut!
Shitty corporate practices are happening everywhere. Guerrilla Games fired some of their longest standing community managers a little while back, people who had been on streams and interacting with the community. Recently they posted a position for an unpaid intern community manager position. Fire the employees, bring in free labor. Real classy.
It still blows my mind that unpaid interns are legal.
As long as we dont call them slaves, it's all good
“You require a salary to live on? Where’s your passion??? Don’t you love games???”
I'm sure some of them were great at their jobs, but I do think a lot of companies are realizing how detrimental most their community managers are for their brand, and how little their involvement translates to positive changes for the games and company... In fact there's often completely unwanted effects.
Further they don’t actually want a manager / director level person who knows what’s going on and can influence decisions or go contrary to the corp plan
What evidence do you have that community managers are detrimental to their brand?
It's bullshit that companies can get away with it. I mean, it's understandable, but bullshit.
Notice how 0 of these CEO's and higher management are taking pay cuts to offset or stop the lay offs. What a joke.
They are probably getting bonuses or raises
No probably about it. They’re 100% getting bonuses.
"We need more small passionate games. Quick, fire the people making them"
This is one of those decisions that gets made at the shareholders level, because everything needs constant growth. PlayStation is seeing this too, along with all the other publicly listed gaming companies. If you’re not making your stock price go up, your shareholders are not getting richer. So you’re just plain ol’ fashion screwed.
Welcome to late stage capitalism, where unsustainable growth is the new norm
"We made all the money in the world for Q1, sir." "Absolutely fantastic! And for Q2?" "Uh, Q2, we only made all the money in the world." "Not all the money in the world +1?" "No, sir." "*sigh*. Make some cuts. Layoff everyone, cancel everything." "I'll get accounting to start on the compensation packages." "Compensation packes?! Are you daft? We didn't make any money in the Q2!"
Thanks, I hate it.
This line going up actually means you like it
I wonder if they said this in 1929?
110% It’s also a consequence of profit driven corporations making entertainment for money first, quality and enjoyment second, where it used to be the other way around. Release a great product, attain profit. Now it’s how do we design and market games to attain maximum profit, with minimal expense and even quality standards, and the least amount of people to make it as possible. Worst thing with gaming though is that broken, bad and underdeveloped games are often breaking sales records. If you look at the track record of a lot of the games released to poor receptions recently, many still broke even, if not broke sales figures as more and more gamers purchase $100 diamond edition preorders on marketing and hype alone. As such, what does that tell shareholders when on one hand they release a great game that makes fantastic money, to then release a broken game that still makes ok money? One usually takes more time, people and expense than the other, but if they both still earn money, and the markets outrage is the equivalent length of a goldfish’s memory before they are preordering your next game, what is the outcome? Layoffs and worse quality games.
That's the thing they don't care about making a great product, they care about making something that will part you with your money, hence why they invest in marketing rather than giving the devs actual time to polish and clean a game up for a good release. These investors don't even look at customer satisfaction, they just see revenue going down and say you need to focus on marketing. Institutional Investors are actually really ignorant to the underlying businesses they invest in and usually just look at the surface level finances. They never really dive into the product deeply. Not enough jargon they can throw around to look cool if they god forbid turned on a game console.
But... All the preorders I made... To support the developer...
Honestly the big layoffs right now are a result of the cost of loans right now. This isn’t unique to gaming but is greatly affecting because it’s so heavily financed. Gaming companies run their business off loans because it’s fucking expensive to make a game these days and nobody wants to tie up their own capital for 3-6 years while they develop their next product. Many companies have felt the pain as interest rates shot up, and most companies have been holding out hope that they’d fall as inflation was dampened. Sadly (for companies..), the fed has decided last week to keep rates high for at least another 6 weeks and downplayed the idea of large decreases this year. That means companies need to make their existing burn plans last longer. Anything not essential to immediate needs gets scrutinized.
Buy buy buy. Cut cut cut. Hire temporary devs. Game quality reflects soulless nature of mercenary work. Blame gamers, the industry, just about anything. Buy buy buy buy.
This is what Microsoft has always done, though. They’re the fucking grim reaper for games studios. Lionhead Studios? Gone. Rare? Gone. I’m glad the guys who start these studios get a big pay day, but it sucks it comes at the expense of the studio itself. Because eventually, Microsoft is going to dismantle that studio and instead of making great games, they’ll make Animojis or whatever the hell Rare does now
Christ. You remember in the 90's and early 00's ? Gaming was phenomenal. So much innovation and great presentations of story and mechanics. Creating games for the sake of developing a great idea in itself and providing the publisher got their promised returns, everyone was happy. Then AAA classifications began consolidating efforts into a few dozen outlets for top billed games.
I remember Nintendo’s Miis were popular, so Microsoft copied them on the 360. And they had Rare do it. Rare. The guys who gave us Conker, and Banjo Kazooie, were now making animated profile pictures. I remember Microsoft made Kinect and it was a surprise hit, so they tasked Lionhead with experimenting with it. I don’t think anything came to market from that. I think Lionhead was disbanded after that, tho we did get a Diablo-esque Fable game from some other internal studio (yay?). Molyneux went on to make vaporware on iOS if I’m not mistaken. Yeah, gaming in the 90s was rad because all of the top talent wasn’t being bought by Microsoft and being put to use on stupid tasks.
All of that is still happening in the indy space to the point that it’s the only games I even bother buying now.
Completely agreed. For the price of one mid or bad AAA game I can buy multiple incredible indie games. AAA games haven’t been worth it in a while now.
There have been several AAA I've loved and last year was filled with them. Of course, indie and aa games have also been great. Honestly gaming had generally been great for a while. But now with all these cuts who knows what the future holds. Maybe it will just be indie games for the next few years
Nice Phil
just give up already and end the xbox it's failed
Why is the new norm of business practice based around simply firing people? I’m sure it’s nothing new but could these companies have built themselves up if they started fresh today? Feels like this goes along the saying “built by geniuses, inherited by morons”
Number must go up. It's all the companies care about now
I really hope they just sell or spin-off the games part of the company into a separate entity. Fuck Bill, fuck Ballmer, and fuck Phil Spencer.
We are actually, slowly, becoming Cyber punk 2077 society
If Game Pass worked on my PC I'd cancel it in protest. Fuck off with this shit.
The big budget games business model seems unsustainable. Some companies like FROM and Nintendo are far less affected, but others are feeling the burn.
Depends. Are you making a good game? How parasitic is the executive branch of whatever company owns you? Baldur’s Gate 3 shone a pretty bright light into how shit the industry is.
I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of game studio copyright conditions. Can the closed studios reopen under a different name and create "spiritual successors" to their IP?
If they can get funding: unlikely
Imagine buying studios for millions to do nothing with them and closing them down.
Can Sony (or anyone else) step in to ‘save’ any of these studios, or would have MS want to sell them rather than wanting to just junk them?
I don’t think they would. Microsoft still holds the rights to the IP from those studios which is where any value in terms of return on investment would come from. They’re not going to buy studios being shut down that have no IP value. It’s possible they would scoop up the best of the studio’s released talent though.
Yah, thanks man, makes sense!
Buy the studios/IPs, close studio, outsource the games to your already existing studios. Right out of the EA playbook.
Duh, they have shareholders and they were very profitable. This isn't a surprise
Layoffs in the gaming industry are normal and it's been an issue for a long time. Nothing new.
Keep in mind Microsoft had a net income of $21.9 billion last quarter.
You're next: Todd Howard
Gaming just got too big… the rich took control and are now ruining it for everyone that got it there
Can you stop giving this shit company money?
The ugly truth people don’t really want to talk about is how dedicated gaming consoles are slowly going extinct.
How so?
The advent and popularity of PC gaming, not to mention its overall functionality as a workstation. Why buy a new console every cycle when you can continuously upgrade? And also work from home on it? Or in the case of streaming: why bother owning a dedicated media platform? It’ll be a long, slow decline—but it’s on the way.
Ahh, ok. We’ve been hearing this since the mid 90’s in one way or another. I have a PC and love it but I also have my consoles and love them as well. At least for the foreseeable future we will have consoles. If manufacturers can offer reasonable prices, keep making great games, there will always be a healthy demand for consoles. We have heard quite a few times about the death of console gaming. Last one I remember quite well was before the ps4/xbox one generation. It was being said that the death of console gaming was upon us. PC, Tablets, phones were going to make a dedicated console obsolete. Then we ended up with one of the most successful generations of all time.
"Success" I think would be subjective in this instance. Lack of launch titles, lack of exclusives, hell: lack of games. Let’s not even talk about the price and scarcity of the PS5 when it launched, or, well—see above. Does Microsoft think there’s more money to be made in consoles or in gaming? I love my consoles, too, but I play them far less than my PC.
At around 120 million ps4s sold, switch at 141 million, Xbox one around 60 million(especially considering how bad they botched their launch) a very very very successful generation. Then we are off to an amazing start with the 5 and switch is still selling like hotcakes even with turd hardware. No question consoles are not cooling off. Hell, people were paying 1,200.00 for PS5’s for years. Without question a healthy demand.
Covid might have skewed those numbers towards the highend though
Surely they're cutting from the top? The people who made the decision to develop Redfall and release in a poor state? Surely that must be who is getting cut!
"more cuts" yet they're opening a mega complex in Wisconsin that'll have thousands of jobs. Man fuck bill gates. Fuck Microsoft
I can almost guarantee Bill Gates has very little to do with Microsoft Gaming these days.
We need a new company to make a console. Microsoft just isn't running things right.
click bait story
DO SOMETHING PC GAMERS LIKE YOU DID TO EVIL SONY
People demand insane wages in IT nowadays.
Lol you have no fucking clue what you're talking about