This Week's Game Industry Layoffs Prove It's Not About Performance At All

The last few days of layoff news have left many in the game industry feeling very angry and anxious. From February 26 to February 29, we’ve seen Until Dawn developer Supermassive Games fire about 90 workers, Sony Interactive Entertainment fire arou𒈔nd 900 workers globally, Life Is Strange: True Colors developer Deck Nine fire 30 people, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Electronic Arts fire about 670 people, and indie studio 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Die Gute Fabrik shutter completely.

That’s around 1700 jobs ꧟lost in the span of three days, impacting employees all across the world. In the last two months, we’ve seen over 8,000 game industry workers lose their jobs, from people in huge studios like Riot to those in smaller, independent companies like ZA/UM. Countless projects have been cancelled, and the people working on them left in the lurch. We are watching the industry crash in real time after the pandemic boom, and it has been increasingly painful to see more and more developers lose their jobs and realise there simply aren’t enough open positions for ꦦall of them.

estimates that 11,250 game industry workers lost thei✅r jobs in 2023. We are already almost three quarters of the way there this year, and it’s only February.

This week’s layoffs have been particularly shocking because of the studios affected. Every time layoffs happen, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:executives tell us the same old story: it was so difficult for them to do, but they had to do it to the people responsible for their company’s success because the industry is changing and previous management decisions turned out to be unsustainable. It’s not their fault, though! It’s not like they bought up too many studios, hired with no regard for sustainable grow๊th, and prioritised profits over retaining෴ talent. It’s the economy’s fault!

Of course, the implication here is that the studios aren’t doing good enough work or making enough money to justify what they cost, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be culled. That’s simply not true. These latest layoffs have proved that no matter how well-reviewed your games are and how much money they make, you are disposable. Sony’s layoffs affected a number of first-party studios including Insomniac Games, Guerrilla, and Naughty Dog. We also know that EA has cancelled Respawn’s unannounced Star Wars FPS, rumoured to be a Mandalorian game 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:that I was actually very excited for.

Thankfully, it seems that Motive Studio’s upcoming Iron Man gﷺame and Cliffhanger’sꦓ Black Panther game are safe from cancellation, as is the finale in Respawn’s Jedi trilogy.

Let&rsqu✱o;s break these specific examples down. Insomniac released Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 in October last year, and it sold over 2.5 million units within 24 hours. It was PlayStation’s fastest selling first-party title ever, and is among the best-selling PS5 games of all time. It has a score of 90 on Metacritic. Guerrilla Games made the Horizon games, which have sold over 32 million copies worldwide across two mainline games and a VR spin-off. Horizon Forbidden West, the second in the mainline series, is rated 88 on Metacritic. It also has a live-action television series in the works.

Naughty Dog, of course, is a PlayStation darling and one of the best known studios in the world. Its most recent games, The Last of Us Part 1 and The Last of Us Part 2, are considered to be some of the greatest video games ever made. The franchise has spawned a very successful HBO series. An outdated December 2022 statistic says the franchise has sold over 37 million games worldwide – the number has definitely increased after the release of yet another remaster. And Respawn Entertainment’s Jedi games, especially 2023’s Jedi: Survivor, were well received critically. There aren’t any concrete figures on how many copies were sold, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Survivor outsold 🐻Fallen Order by a huge margin and the game did well enough that a third game in the series was confirꩲmed in September 2023, five months after Survivor’s release.

Nobody Is Safe, Everybody Is Disposable

For a lot of people, working at these studios is a dꦇream come true. They make high-performing, culture-shifting, money-making games – to say that any of these studios are unsuccessful would be dishonest. And yet they were all impacted ꩵby layoffs this week, despite their cultural impact and in some cases, record-breaking sales figures. In so many cases, people getting laid off wonder, why them? Did they not do enough? Did they not work hard enough?

These layoffs prove unequivocally that a studio can be at the top of its game, but an executive will look at high performance and thin🐈k: I want this, but cheaper. They will want the same work, with the same quality, but with fewer people to do it. When it comes to corporate greed, nobody is safe, not even the studios that seem to do everything right. It turns out that not even helping make some of the best games in the world can convince someone that you deserve to keep your job, and that’s very difficult to swallow.