The first few months of this year have seen the slow-burn layoff crisis that defined the video game industry's 2023 reach a boiling point. Last week, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:EA laid off 670 employees, roughly five percent of its total global workforce, and 🔯Sony lai💧d off 900 workers, closing an entire London-based studio. In January, following its successful acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft laid off 1900 employees. , 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Riot laid off 530, . On a smaller scale, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disco Elysium's ZA/UM and have both been hit by layoffs, too.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar recently announced that all employees will need to return to the office five days a week to prevent leaks and increase focus in the lead-up to the game's 2025 release — a move that will also, likely, lead to remote workers leaving the studio. Some developers also worry that it will mean the return of Rockstar's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:infamous crunch culture.
This Week's Game Industry Layoffs Prove It's Not About Performance At All
Many of the studios affected by layoffs this week 🍬are the most successful in the business. Not even this protected them.
Elsewhere, Crash 4 developer Toys for Bob has gone i♚ndependent after being hit by the Microsoft layoffs, and . 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Saber Interactive is also exiting Embracer.
In all, thousands of workers from the most successful and most acclaimed developers in the industry have lost their jobs. Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Eidos-Montreal, Sega — no one at any company seems to ♍be safe from the cuts. It seems borderline apocalyptic and as someone in journalism, a profession that has also been hit by frequent layoffs in recent years, I sympathize with the workers who have lost their jobs and empathize with the many who remain, wondering if they're next.
Much of this seems to stem from the increasing unsustainability of the games industry. O💜ver the past decade and change, games have been increasingly sorted into two categories. There are indies, made by individuals or small teams. And there are triple-A games produced by teams of hundreds of developers. There aren’t many double-A games being made anyꦏ more; the kind of game with a modest budget, modest team-size, and modest risk.
This tide seems to be turning somewhat a꧙s Helldivers 2 has found major success, and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden and Paci𒊎fic Drive have also kept the flame going for double-A in 2024.
Indie devs are often risking their livelihoods to get games made. Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, the brothers behind Cuphead, said that they s in order to get the game across the finish line. And triple-A games, increasingly, need to be massively successful to recoup their $100 million+ budgets, another kind of risk thaꦕt may affect hundreds of people instead of a few. The middle is largely gone, and with it, the games that didn’t cost that much to make, did decent business, and made sure everybody was happy. And, if they flopped, it was okay because they didn’t cost too m༒uch anyway.
This is the same model the film industry has contorted itself into in the last few decades, and 2023 was a year of reckoning for the studios writing the checks. Many big-budget tent poles — from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Flash and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Marvels to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Indiana Jones 5 and The Little Mermaid — flopped or underperformed. Steven Spielberg a decade ago that Hollywood’s overreliance on mega-budget would-be blockbusters would come back to bite it when several mega-movies flopped at the box office, and he turned out to be right. Though some expensive movies, like Oppenheimer, Barbie, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 turned out to be big hits🥂 in 2023, many more disappointed.
That overreliance on tent poles led to a dearth of mid-budget movies, and directors to make them, as indie filmmakers were often 🃏drafted immediately to the blockbuster tier after finding success with a small movie. Directors often had two choices: get an indie passion project off the ground with a tiny budget or helm a $200 million effects extravaganza. There was little in between. The genres that fell in the middle — comedies, rom coms, thrillers, family dramas — all fell out of favor, shunted to streaming or overextended into a doughy limited series, instead of being treated like events worthy of a theatrical release in their own right.
The success of Anyone But You, and to a lesser extent The Iron Claw and No Hard Feelings, suggests that this is shifting in the wake of the superhero movie crash. The games industry seems to be on the verge of a similar shift, and it has additional factors contributing to the need for a change. Unlike movies, video games take way longer to make than they did 20 years ago. In the early 2000s, a movie took a few weeks to a few months to shoot, and up to a year to get post-production finished. That timeline hasn't changed much (though MCU movies like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Marvels were plagued by reshoots and/or pandemic-related delays). Movies still take about that long to make. But games took a year or two to develop in the PS2 era, and now take four or five. So, while both mediums have increased financial pressure, only one has seen its production timeline significantly extended.
That increased timeline makes each game more risky. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rocksteady Games spent nearly a decade working on 168澳洲幸运5开🍎奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and had no other new sources of income during that time. The game has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:not been well-received, and has seen a sharp drop-off in players. Barring an act of God, it won't make its money back. That's one of many downsides to increased development time: a team spends a huge chunk of their lives trying to make something good, and if it doesn't do well, it's a massive amount of time and money down the drain with nothing to show. The Flash may have bombed, but it mostly cost money, not a decade of its creators' lives.
This added time pressure makes the likelihood of a sea change happening in games even more likely than it was in Hollywood. Developers seem to be sick of working on things for this long. And when we've seen a decade-in-the-making project with hundreds of millions invested in it bombed, it's tough to see how the risk is worth it for anyone involved.
After The Layoffs, The Industry Needs To Co𒐪urse Correct
Huge development costs have led to battle passes to recoup losses, but𒁏 lowering costs and development time is a more stable solution