jawa_ wrote:Eurogamer wrote:League of Legends developer Riot Games has announced it's laying off 530 employees - roughly 11 percent of its total global workforce - saying it's making the decision as it refocuses on "fewer, high-impact projects to move us toward a more sustainable future."
It seems that this theme of developers/publishers focusing on "core" games and little else will be a common picture over the next couple of years. That probably makes sense; as game purchase costs increase and the wider economic issues remain at large, the mass market probably just isn't going to buy as many.
While it's nice to think that the problems within the games industry are a direct consequence of consumers or the market reacting to £70 launch prices and season passes and the like, I think the reality is that it probably has very little to do with these layoffs.
Sales of video games are still very high, people are still buying massive games at launch or with a small discount shortly afterwards, and not every country's economy is struggling in the same way ours is - it ought to be sustainable to keep that going for the most part. What seems to be happening at the moment is probably more a combination of the industry continuing to come off a big unexpected boom period that peaked during the pandemic (and the hiring of new staff required to meet that boom), coupled with capitalist investors largely abandoning video game publishers over the last year or so as interest rates skyrocketed and sales plateaued.
If it continues in this way then the "core" AAA model is potentially on its last legs, maybe even taking a good chunk of the rest of the industry down with it - if capitalist investors are too risk adverse for the big tent pole releases because the potential returns on a five year development cycle are lower than they were a few years ago, then they're just going to move past smaller independent developers and publishers and put their money into the next industry that promises better returns and unobtainable infinite growth.
It also doesn't hurt bosses at all these video game companies to announce job cuts around the same time because it tells the staff still in a job that there isn't anywhere else to run off to, or any money to build your own studio, which helps keep staff from pushing for pay rises and, especially in the US, depresses efforts to unionise. I'm not suggesting it's a coordinated effort on the part of the those companies, since I'm pretty sure that's highly illegal in even US law, but unscrupulous people at the top aren't going to pass up an opportunity to strengthen their own positions.
