Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition
I’m not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000’s.
Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.
If you have a blockbuster product, layoffs improve your financials even more.
Poor product? Layoffs make your financials not look terrible.
Work productivity goes up too much (unit of work measured / hours of labor)? Well, that means you can do layoffs because you don’t need productivity that high. Plus, at least initially it will look even better since you lowered the denominator.
Terrible productivity? Layoffs make it look better quickly.
Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only “hold off the wolves” so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don’t have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the “easy” solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.
Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It’s easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the past where basically every big game studio had their own engine).
Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It’s easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I’ve heard it’s fallen off a lot since 5 but it’s still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.
Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you’ve done for them lately.
“I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter” gets rewarded, not “I’m leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we’ll be more successful in 7 years”
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don’t aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn’t require the best.
Ok let’s say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn’t make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
They don’t, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don’t want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don’t need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.
Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition
I’m not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000’s.
Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.
Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only “hold off the wolves” so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don’t have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the “easy” solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.
Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It’s easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the past where basically every big game studio had their own engine).
Tldr:
Unreal is slop and enables this behaviour.
Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It’s easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I’ve heard it’s fallen off a lot since 5 but it’s still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.
Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you’ve done for them lately.
“I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter” gets rewarded, not “I’m leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we’ll be more successful in 7 years”
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don’t aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn’t require the best.
Ok let’s say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn’t make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
They don’t, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don’t want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don’t need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.
It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.
Because capitalism doesn’t seek perfection, and it’s far from a fair system