i think it's very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we'll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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This is true across tech workers. Having a nice salary kept unionization at bay, but there are no assurances during hard times.
These coordinated layoffs are almost certainly intended drive down labor costs in the long run by flooding the labor pool. Sure in a year we'll get "not enough developers" stories forgetting to mention the drastically smaller salary...
Yeah and without that the crunch time practices will never change.
God I hope we don't go through a phase of crappy games designed and developed using AI.
Oh we are, I'm afraid.
I wonder if 2023 will go down as one of the last good years for gaming (and even that only works if you ignore all the layoffs that already happened).
Nah, video games are and will always be at their best when a small team is bringing a new and unique, or a fresh and refined, perspective on something.
Rimworld, Kenshi, Stardew Valley, Grim Dawn, Project Zomboid, Palworld... none of those needed big budgets and large parent companies. My Steam wishlist has over 100 games on it currently, and maybe 5 of those are AAA titles. There's plenty of great stuff still coming.
Gaming, like all software development, becomes plagued by popularized anti-patterns every so often. Remember back in like 2010 and every. single. fucking. game. had unskippable, frustratingly difficult, often instantly fatal should you fail them, quicktime events? Because I fucking remember. And now those are nowhere, because they're terrible. And, yes, the use of AI is not a game design pattern so much as it is a development tool that will be used to fastforward development and decrease costs around, presumably, asset generation, but to some extent that was always going to happen. Any time a tool comes about that fundamentally reduces human labor, it always sees widespread adoption. Eventually it'll be industry standard, and it'll be...fine. It'll suck for people with aspirations around graphic design and 3D modeling, but those are just the first places there will be cuts. Eventually you'll have the physics engines, game systems, state management, etc. and other core components of game design automated via AI processes, which will kill a shitload of dev jobs. And eventually the people who make these AI game engines will, instead of selling to a studio who will parameterize the AI with prompts, will automate the prompting process with AI itself, so instead of selling to studios, they'll just have an AI service that will take your description for a game that you want, run it through a bunch of canned AI subroutines and it'll crap out a boutique game of your design that they technically own and have full copyright over and which is just incredibly derivative of a ton of other IP - imagine every single game being Palworld, "like X crossed with Y with a bit of A and B thrown in." That's right: eventually the end user will design the games themselves. A world in which you never have to consume any game, or probably eventually any media of any kind, beyond the one you already liked and wanted. You'll never have to be challenged more than you would like or experiment with different forms of media. It'll be a brave new world, filled with brave new games.
Cyberpunk is literally full of what amount to dialogue based quicktime events.
Yeah, and people fucking hate it. It's a blemish on an otherwise okay game.
Yeah, finding fucking timed dialogue events made me wanna chuck the disc out the damned window
Here's two wildly different dialog options, that might have vastly different consequences. You have three seconds to decide. Fuck that shit.
Well, for some realism I do understand you can't think forever. Imagine someone asking you a question and you stay frozen for 1 minute. That would be weird 🤭
But the time in CyberPunk 2077 is too short yes.
PS: I wish I could reload my save game in real life 😂
i didn't think it was a big problem but i could see how some people are slower to react and pressure gets to them
but i also think it's weird when npcs wait forever for player input. but we're not there yet
You should try roleplaying.
Yeah like the clip shows in the 80/90s TV series. Yuck.
Seems like a good time to go indie. Big game companies are bloated and unhealthy. Specialization is so niche that there clearly isn't the kind of interdepartmental communication there ought to be, and it's pretty obvious that the money people have their hands in way too much.
That doesn't seem to me like an environment that's conducive to art.
BG3 came in like a wrecking ball. Sucks for all the actual devs though.
Baldur's Gate 3? What does that have to do with it? I don't really understand :)
How much good attention it's gotten. No microtransactions, season passes etc. It's called a ton of attention to all the AAA enshitification since it's released.
So, I'd imagine those studios are scrambling to shift gears.
Ah ok I understand. Thanks! I didn't realise that, the fantasy genre isn't really for me so I hadn't followed much of the news.
Why is it happening this week? Are we approaching end of financial year in the US or something?
All the companies that didn't want to do layoffs at Christmas
A lot of companies overhired during COVID, Trump basically turned the Federal Reserve into an unlimited money hack for banks and other companies, the tech sector is particularly sensitive to boom and bust cycles of mass hiring/layoffs every few years, there's been Fed rate hikes recently, and other factors. Your more conspiratorially minded would say it's a concerted effort to make people too afraid to unionize by making them think their jobs are in danger.
Some companies end their fiscal year at the end of January, i.e. FY23 ends January 31, 2024.