2024 may not be kind for game developers.
- Thread starter Silent_Buddha
- Start date
Both Outcast and Alone in the Dark have sold below the predictions, Embracer Group has admitted.
www.ign.com
Alone in the Dark Reboot Flopped, Embracer Says After Laying Off Staff - IGN
The Alone in the Dark reboot failed to meet sales expectations at the embattled Embracer Group, it has said.
I haven't listened to it yet but The Verge discusses the problems in the games industry in a podcast.
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www.theverge.com
Why the video game industry is such a mess
The layoffs will continue until everything is Fortnite.
www.theverge.com
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
Apparently there are 270k game devs in the US, which is apparently 39% of the total game developers. Thus there are 692k game devs world-wide. 10k laid off out of 692k doesn't really seem like a big number to me (roughly 1.5%) for a struggling industry. Did game devs expect to be immune to job loss for some reason?
Why isn't Nintendo first party viewed as a "black hole" on Switch? Haven't the biggest games always commanded a huge share of revenue?
Why isn't Nintendo first party viewed as a "black hole" on Switch? Haven't the biggest games always commanded a huge share of revenue?
Just mathing this more fully - 1.5% so far this year. "Tens of thousands since 2022" could be 5+%. So 6-7% reduction in jobs over a couple of years, and that's only counting the big ticket items.
They are sold and not on-goingly monetised. You don't have whales dropping $2000 over 5 years on a Nintendo game instead of buying multiple games from multiple devs and playing each for 20 hours.
I really didn't see the point of that reboot. I would have bought a faithful remake! They just had to remake the graphics and modernize the controls as the rest is still great today. It would also have being cheaper to make without the useless cutscenes budget. The original game didn't have that. Just great settings, lovecraft lore, puzzles and monsters. The game was already so modern you could already decide to play as a man or woman, they just had to use modern controls/graphics and that was it.Both Outcast and Alone in the Dark have sold below the predictions, Embracer Group has admitted.
Alone in the Dark Reboot Flopped, Embracer Says After Laying Off Staff - IGN
The Alone in the Dark reboot failed to meet sales expectations at the embattled Embracer Group, it has said.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
There's this delusion among too many higher ups in the games industry that spending more money on games is required to keep up with the competition that has spent more money on games. Witness X-Com/Midnight Suns designer Jake Solomon implicitly blaming increasing budget competition and games like Forbidden West "outspending him" on the failure of Midnight Suns, rather than it being a weird X-Com super lite with Super Heroes/Partial life simulator where you hang out with said super heroes, a concept that doesn't sound like it'd sell to almost anyone.
That "more $ = more sales" entirely discounts just how much money Nintendo games can make, or that Stardew Valley was made by one person that's now worth half a billion from it or something. Most recently one can point to the most financially successful game of the first half of 2024, Helldiver's 2, as a game that's not pushing visuals or cutscenes or budget in any huge way but is hugely successful because, gasp! it's fun.
Yes, a giant number of "leaders" in the games industry literally don't understand that people buy games primarily because they're fun. It would be baffling, except for:
There's other problems the games industry has, which is that there's a lack of a widespread knowledge base for how to find people that are actually talented at the sort of game design that sells. Witness The Suicide Squad and the studio heads they made Arkham Knight, repeated that formula 2 more times, and then when it came to Suicide Squad demonstrated that they didn't actually know how to design games in any professional, systemic manner and just got lucky with Arkham Knight and repeated that formula twice more. According to another Schrier piece (hey the guy can investigative journalism sometimes) the two had no idea what they were doing, deciding themselves to make a live service game but refusing to play other live service games, refusing to communicate what type of game they were making to employees, wasting gobs of time and resources on a vehicle system despite the super powered traversal system already being in, etc. etc.
Publishers really need wider spread institutional knowledge for how to tell wheter a game designer is rational or not, but given some of the industry is run by the likes of Yves Guillemot and Phil Spencer I don't see that happening anytime soon. But at least if they spent less money, as seems to be happening with recent information from studios like Zenimax and Insomniac, any disasters would be smaller disasters.
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Johnny Awesome
Veteran
That seems exaggerated. How many were hired during that time? Big headlines, but no detailed analysis. Poor journalism.
Nintendo 1st party is the biggest black hole going. The fact that it's 10 games over 5 years instead of 1 game with MTX is irrelevant.
Why? If 10k is 1.5%, and we're told there have already been 10,000s of job losses since 2022, that's maybe 30,000 for 4.5%. Depend on what "tens of thousands" actually is. And that's also only looking at the reported large-ticket redundancies. Even if going with the smaller estimate of 5% over a couple of years, I think that's pretty significant.
Could be, but that's now changing the argument. I'm just focussing on whether the number of job losses is significant or not. You said 1.5% wasn't a lot. I'm saying it's notably more, 1.5% in 6 months, something like 5% (could be more, could be less if "tens of thousands" is over-stated) over two years. Is that or is that not a notable loss?
I like the way you ask why Nintendo isn't viewed as a black hole, and when presented with a reason why that doesn't count, just then state it is a black hole with no justification! I understand why people don't see Ninty as a problem but don't understand the opposite POV because it hasn't been explained.
What actually makes Nintendo black hole then?
Huge profits. They are a black hole for customers money.
Because if 10k people get fired from one studio, but 9k of those people get hired by another studio (or form a new studio in the industry), then there isn't really 10k's of job losses in the industry, that would be a 1k. Knowing the losses without the gains means you don't have the full picture of industry health. So stating the industry is in some sort of trouble because of tens of thousands of job losses without any input from job gains gives you a one sided view of the state of the industry.
To be clear, I don't know how many people have been hired that previously lost their jobs in the last year, but that's exactly the problem. Also, I suppose it doesn't matter* statistically if those people get rehired if new people get hired to take their place in the industry. If the industry has been made up of roughly 700k developers, and a portion leave the industry and a roughly equal population join it, the industry, from an employment standpoint, would be roughly equal.
*Obviously getting let go would matter to them, I'm only talking abstractly about the numbers
I feel like this is one of those 'we dont have all the numbers but we kinda dont need them' situations to understand the state of the industry is bad. We have countless comments from actual professional developers talking about how poor job security is right now in games development, and we can see how companies doing really well overall financially are still cutting jobs anyways, because growth simply hasn't kept up with the completely unreasonable levels seen during Covid.
I get wanting to prove everything on a pure facts-based level, but sometimes analysis requires just stepping back and looking at the whole picture with a bit of common sense.
I get wanting to prove everything on a pure facts-based level, but sometimes analysis requires just stepping back and looking at the whole picture with a bit of common sense.
But we can't see the whole picture without having the numbers. That's the whole point.
We have enough of a picture. We dont need literally every fine data point to make the case that things are bad.
People in this forum have a bad habit of this, though. They use literally any small absence of data or something to deny certain arguments. At some point, it becomes less about being discerning, and more about being contrarian when the obvious reality is still staring them in the face.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
That sounds like a comment from someone that is ok with a lack of data. Some of us aren't ok with it. 
The problem is that in the absence of data people "fill in the gaps" with their own biases and pre-suppositions.
With that being said I think the "big picture" of being a game developer is more challenging right now, but my point was that journalists sell "stories" not information and from their own self-interest want the sky to be falling and Armageddon to be right around the corner and all of these challenges are being exaggerated right now for clicks.
The problem is that in the absence of data people "fill in the gaps" with their own biases and pre-suppositions.
With that being said I think the "big picture" of being a game developer is more challenging right now, but my point was that journalists sell "stories" not information and from their own self-interest want the sky to be falling and Armageddon to be right around the corner and all of these challenges are being exaggerated right now for clicks.
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I lost my job from the gaming industry. I gave up looking. Everyone I know who lost their job are also struggling to find a job in the gaming industry. I personally gave up and I was lucky to find an unrelated job due to my past background.
There is a lot of data of the gaming industry as a whole going through a crisis, studios closing, projects getting canceled, firing due to not meeting sales/growth expectations and need to cut costs. When this is how the industry is in general, the room for hire is minimal. The argument of "lack of data of hiring" at this point sounds like a weak argument compared to what we have and know of the state of the industry.
There is a lot of data of the gaming industry as a whole going through a crisis, studios closing, projects getting canceled, firing due to not meeting sales/growth expectations and need to cut costs. When this is how the industry is in general, the room for hire is minimal. The argument of "lack of data of hiring" at this point sounds like a weak argument compared to what we have and know of the state of the industry.
Truly, one can never see the "whole picture" in situations like these as there is no tracking for what is being asked. We only know about the layoffs because companies made the decision to announce them. However, if Company A decided to quietly let go of several hundred, or even several thousand employees over the span of a year, there's no tracking for this. And if every one of those employees were re-absorbed by other companies, there's equally no tracking there either. The Bureau for Labor Statistics here in the states tracks unemployment filing which can be a sort of proxy indicator, yet even then it's not necessarily reliable for a multitude of reasons.
I'm not sure I'd go that far... Data is still data, and anecdotes are still not data. There are other leading or trailing indicators of health for industries, we simply need to leverage those alternate data sources to make good inferences. To be clear, social media posting (this forum included) are anecdotal and not data. I think Nesh's callout of studio closures is closer to the mark, however we'd also need some ability to think about studios which are opening too. Projects getting cancelled happens all the time, and the "need" to cut costs is easily laid at the feet of corporate greed.
Although I will say this: I've been working with a Fortune 25 company over the past few months, one that anyone in the US (and lots of people outside the US) have absolutely heard of and done some amount of business with. They have an astounding amount of duplicate effort and related duplicate jobs. There are five very large groups who do literally the same things, but use different tools, use different methods and processes, and all report to five different leads -> managers -> directors -> VPs -> SVPs -> EVPs. And for what? If they collapsed into a single unified team and standardized on a singular common set of tools, they'd slash costs by an insane amount but also end up losing probably half the staff. Really enormous and old companies really can slash a shitload of cost out of an org related to duplication of efforts. This isn't the only example I've seen, but this one (so far) is the worst.
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Yeah that's pretty much any big company. It's a problem of scale. It's really hard to do something once and scale it to support many businesses at once given differing timelines, budget, priorities etc.
Sorry to hear. Was it in software development? That's a pretty transferable skill if you're willing to switch industries.
Oh yes, 100% agree with your statement here. I was more pointing to an anecdote where an old and/or large company can have a lot of room to shave cost without it necessarily being about greed per-se. Essentially, providing a counter to my own corporate greed statement
I sometimes tend to get on that corporate greed horse a little too fast, and I know of a few others who do too.I was in the 3D art of games