You’ve probably heard a lot about the layoffs in gaming recently. It’s hard not to, when they 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:appear by the hundreds each week. But it’s worth digging below the surface of why these layoffs are happening, rather tha💯n just saying they suck and moving on with ou⭕r lives. When we look at the reasons for these layoffs, there’s a much bigger pattern emerging than just poor budgeting.

The two high profile cancellations from Sony’s recent round of layoffs were a fantasy co-op PvE game with cartoon🌞ish graphics from London Studio and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a Twisted Metal live-service game. And all I could think was ‘who was ever going to want to play those?’. I don’t mean to be cruel, and I’m certainly not glad the devs were laid off, but so many games being made these days seem to entirely disregard the fact that nobody wants these games in pursuit of eternal, Fortnite-sized profits.

This is not a direct criticism of the devs, nor an attempt to explain why they de💛serve to be laid off in droves. Instead, it’s an extension of why these layoffs are happening in the first place - poor management.

What Is Causing Gaming’s Layoffs?

There was recently a flare up around 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Jus🅺tice League, and how &♈lsquo;woke’ developers had taken the game away from the gamer public by meddling where they weren’t needed or wanted. But that was not the r𒀰eason Suicide Squad fel🌳t so alienating. Money has always talked✱ in gaming, but now it is screeching li𝄹ke a baboon, drowning out everything else.

Nobody, not even the people making it, wanted Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to be a l☂ive-service game. A short campaign full of repetitive missions that feed into battle pass upgrades so you can kill the same boss over and over again through seasonal multiverse shenanigans is nobody’s idea of a good time. But it is a profitable time, or at least it can be if you get enough players to come back. This is how the industry works these days - not the best idea, not the most interesting or enjoyable game, but what can make the most money with the least amount of effort.

Again, this is not lamb🌞asting the devs for being lazy or suggesting that if they worked harder, they’d still have a job. It’s not that kind of effort I mean. It’s the big picture effort - no risks, no new ideas, nothing that hasn’t been proven to work a dozen times befℱore has a snowball’s chance in development hell.

Executives push for games an algorithm tells them will be popular, but hamstring the devs at ♐every turn from♒ injecting anything audiences might find appealing in the name of focus group tested safety. Then these games launch, no one likes them, and the devs who have been saying that the whole time get laid off.

What we have right now is a lot of teams making their own Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, except with a bunch of characters they just made up. Remember 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Destruction All-Stars? Hyenas? 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Babylon’s Fall? 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Knockout City? Lawbreakers? CrossfireX? Yeah, me neither.

We Need To Put Creatives Back In Charge

Devs still work hard on these failed games, and it still sucks that there are layoffs by the thousands. If you think your🅷 general workaday devs ‘deserve’ to be fired ❀because a game was disappointing, you are misunderstanding how these games are made in the first place.

It’s not necessarily as simple as all this. In EA’s recent layoffs, Respawn cancelled a single-playe🅰r Mandalorian game, and🎉 that does sound like exactly the so𒁃rt of game many people want.

I’m not trying to say that these layoffs are all completely fine and the games would have sucked anyway. But there is a trend of studios pushing hard for live-service games loaded with battle passes to recoup development costs,ꦺ then making greater losses because no one bought these stale cash grabbing games to begin with, let alone cared enough to stick around.

The silver lining, and I have to believe there is one, is that hopefully fewer of these games make it off the flip chart from now on. Live-service games can be done well, but everyone is chasing that rainbow and few have pots of gold at the end - most just have a canyon where money and jobs can be thrown into. We need shorter, more focused games that can be made cheaper and therefore have fewer costs to recoup, and the best way to do that is to let devs bring more of their own ideas to the table, not just ‘168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends but with our characters’.

These layoffs are a scourge on the industry and the ones most responsible for this dead end💜 gaming finds itself in are insulated from their impact, while the hardest working and longest suffering devs are hit worst. Even if the executives don’t feel the pinch of these mistakes, hopefully they do realise they’re mistakes and go 🔴back to letting the creatives create rather than forcing through their bad ideas and firing the people who couldn’t stop them.