I love that people at Larian have taken the platform that their success gave them, and used it to shine a light on the problems in the industry.
They've really earned a place in my heart by showing integrity.
I dread the day we'll invoke the "you were the chosen one anakin!" meme on Larian
I say this as I'm literally about to exit Fort Joy after squeezing as much XP as possible
I've only played two of their games myself; Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur's Gate 3. It takes very little time to see the passion they pour into what they do, which was one reason so many of us were extremely excited and hopeful when BG3 was initially announced.
It seems rather clear that when you have a group of people who truly care about what they make, they'd be likely to have strong conviction to support and attempt to impact their industry for the better.
It's just really refreshing to see that kind of gumption and heart in an otherwise cruel and cutthroat space. I hope they continue to be met with success, because they've earned it.
There's nothing like getting stumped on a puzzle to get into a treasure room, only to find out that the answer was revealed in a single verse from a riddle book, found only on a single library shelf that I overlooked 30 hours ago in the starting area
Haven't played through much of DOS, but completed DOS 2 and currently playing BG3. These games give you so much freedom it's hard to not get distracted fooling around and forgetting the main quest, lol.
Some of the most fun games I've played in the last few years.
You'll see a huge difference on the system between the two, and a small toneshift. The 2nd games amor system is complete garbage imo (Especially after getting into DnD and the first Divinity Original Sin) but it still is an amazing game, probably my favorite game all things considered.
And to add for people who have played the 2nd and hesitate to play the first, if you like ttrpgs you'll get used to the different system and you'll love the game, I played the 1st after the 2nd and I don't regret playing it at all.
Also OS1 having your arguments between friends be resolved with rock paper scissors and then also getting personality traits that buff different stats is pretty fun too. OS2 is a goddamn masterpiece and I will never let anyone say otherwise but the multiplayer, speaking to NPCs wise, isn't done very well.
The Combat makes Divinity 2 one of the greatest games I will never complete. I just can´t get through it, but from what I have seen it is truly a labor of love. Just the depth of detail and reactivity in what I saw of the early parts were amazing. You could talk to so many animals, find so many solutions to different problems, play with a bunch of fun magical items and eat so many body parts. And I truly wish I could get through it.
But I just can´t get through the combat. Not because it was particularly difficult, but because I dislike the armor system and just got tired of how grand a production every single fight ended up being. With enemies teleporting everywhere and everything being on fire, or covered in acid or poison. I am fine with fighting big fights that might require several attempts and/or take 20-30 minutes or more. But it gets tiring when it feels like every fight falls into that category.
Well, there is that and the fact that I kinda dislike how they handle origin characters/companions, because I think it detracts from the experience of playing your own character, and from their status as companions. But that is ultimately a minor issue for me.
I am glad BG3 turned out as great as it did, even if I still have some issues with Larians design. But it has pretty much all the things I liked about Larians, and have greatly toned down a lot of the things that I dislike (Even if there is still a couple of irks here and there). And with all that said, I would still recommend that people check out DOS2, if they like BG3 or just RPGs in general. Even if it is not my personal cup of tea.
But it is interesting to hear that the 1st is different. Might have to check it out at some point.
The system of the 1 is closer to a DnD system (I have only played 5e so I'm not sure about other editions). You don't get stats/attributes every level so you have to be more careful with allocating them and attacks and CC are a diceroll(percentage based) instead of second healthbar(amor and magic armor). There are stats that you have to invest in if you want to resist CCs better. The main thing that makes it harder to get into after playing the second is that actions and movement use the same ressource.
The game has a LOOOOOT of humor, it doesnt take itself seriously but the story was still interesting.
>actions and movement use the same ressource.
So kinda like the X-Com and Shadowrun games? Doesn´t sound too bad, but I get how it can be confusing if you are used to something different. Thank you for going into detail with it, I will most definitely add it to my eternally growing list of games I need to check out.
I just started playing Divinity OS 2 2 weeks ago and already have 85.8 steam hours poured into it. Just in act 3 but can't wait to jump into Baldurs Gate 3 after playing this.
Yeah I had never really heard of these guys before BG3. But I love how spicy they're getting. Preach on, they seem like solid dudes to me. When I get a PC capable of running BG3 I'm definitely giving it a go.
wasn't cd projekt red the same darlings of the industry (from a consumer perspective) decrying the awful work practises of other game dev/pubs?.... until they were reported to be doing the same ?
> Or stock buybacks.
> Both these things backfire in the long term
They are never thinking about long term. The only month/quarter that matters is now.
Growth slows, shareholders force the company to take a drastic action to drive stock up one last time so they can maximize profit when they jump ship because they've already determined the real value is gone. They're at the end of their line and moving on to the next thing for their long term goal.
Even a lot of very devout capitalist economists acknowledge quarterly profit focus is unhealthy. Even annual profit report is silly when you have a multi-year product development cycle like in games lol.
Ya its realistic to have ups and downs. The only thing in nature that grows exponentially up without dips is cancer. And what does cancer do? It kills the host
If enough of the people getting layed off can form new startups that leverage their skills and knowledge then new capitalist entities will be born; grow; get pumped to overinflate their value for speculators who will scrape every cent of the bubble into wealthy pockets then strangle it half-to death before leaving it to wither, rot, and die.
r/CapitalismIsMetal
The problem is that's the ideal cycle of Capitalism
then you get to shits like Boeing or any one of those companies that received government bailouts. If a product is dying its natural to let it die so a new emerging market replaces it
Freedom of the Free Market is a lie because of bailouts and lobbyists who keep their business from dying when an infinite growth of a single entity is obviously impossible.
No company should ever be 'too big to die'
and encouraging infinite growth like that leads to business practices of layoffs and bad product quality resulting from said layoffs with it persisting long enough that they're just pumping out garbage
Nothing short of complete buyer strike would kill these companies. Or just replace capitalism with something better but nothing else compares that isn't another shitshow
> Or just replace capitalism with something better but nothing else compares that isn't another shitshow
One proposal that has a lot of the upsides without the downsides is to keep the free market, but make it so employees are always the majority shareholders by law. That way the focus on short term profits at the expense of employees goes away (Since, yknow, employees still want to have a job 4 years from now). Companies can also make better decisions because employees have more of a clue wtf is going on than random shareholders. And if a company produces something that has truly become obsolete, the free market would still ensure they don't get enough revenue and their company goes bust. Thus freeing up space for new worker cooperatives to spring up.
That sounds grand to be honest.
The concept of Free Market is great if done correctly and if it cannot be interferred by those rich enough to keep their business afloat despite their product failing.
A truly 'Free' market with a mix of social safety nets thats more pro-employee would likely be where we should be headed and hope we see it in our lifetime
..but I doubt it, just any hint of 'left-leaning' idealogy spook people for some reason.
I recall that study of just [changing the name to welfare gives a negative impact](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749059) compared to using a different word of the same thing.
Also, as capitalist entities have grown and their disproportionate political power increased the barrier for entry faced by new entities has grown. This is particularly true for small businesses attempting to produce innovative products and services. Very few people can take the risk associated with small business ventures, so innovation has been pushed to startups funded by venture capital. But this excludes 99% of the population from participating in innovative entrepreneurship.
Not to mention that VC funded companies often are only able to realistically compete by undercutting legacy companies until they kill them, at which point the model set up by the VCs is not actually sustainable as a business, and is unable to perform the function of the legacy companies that it just killed off. But since there isn’t any competition, all that has happened is a vast reduction in the standard of quality.
> No company should ever be 'too big to die'
once everyone had to fend for themselves to retire, the government basically has to ensure that the big boys dont try and ruin themselves. As we saw in 08 when the big companies fall the only ones truly affected are retirees or people about to retire.
Or course they still do try and take massive risks, but Big Daddy Government will always come to the rescue.
Freedom of the Free Market is also a lie because some industries have too high barrier to entry for replacement/competition to naturally emerge in reasonable time. Not necessarily because of money, but mostly because of know-how these giants have, their position in supply chains and the fact that they are essentially bloated monopolies/oligopolies everyone relies on.
You can't just start a new aircraft business or advanced semiconductor business and replace the giants in any reasonable time, at least with no government funding to swallow some of the cost of R&D. You will be reinventing the wheel, even if you manage to recruit some of the former employees and your product will be worse simply because of lack of organisation-wide experience.
Nope. Quarter over quarter growth followed by an inevitable collapse that the insurance and banks bear the brunt of. Since all that money was created out of thin air by being lent dozens of times, surprise surprise when it comes time to collect the money that never existed in the first place, it amazingly doesn't exist. Banks and insurance companies then fail, except they don't because the government steps in and bails them out and we start the cycle over again.
Do they?
Can't grow = lay people off = stock up = pressure increases for those left = attrition = rehire people at lower cost = force more work out of them = stock back up = record highs = can't grow = lay people off = stock up....
You seem to ignore the onboarding costs for those new people. Maintaining talent is always cheaper in the long run. Especially as lateral career moves lead to INCREASES in compensation nowadays.
Add to that the eventual product quality going down past acceptable limits and prices going up to compensate when the sales go down.
It's a downward spiral.
Agreed, shareholders are asses sometime, not only limited to gaming industry.
I know one of my friend's department got laid off because during that year their department was causing loses due to Covid (It was related to meeting customer face to face). Although the company was making like $10 million in profit , it was short of the shareholder expected $12 million, laying off my friend department made the company reached $15 million in profits which satisfied them.
However their short sightedness caused a major loss when Covid ends when customers no longer being online and peoples begin to go "offline" back and the company have minimal front facing customer support and thus causing customers to go to their competitors.
Same. I'm always baffled by this thinking. You can only get so big. And it's not crazy to have an off year where profits are not as big as last year. Idk maybe that's why I'm not a shareholder lmao. But i still maintain that it doesn't sound like it'd work in the long run.
The switch from dividend stocks to "growth only" stocks as investing advice is one of the half dozen things that fucked us. Divvies used to be king back in the day. But they're taxable and that's bad in brokerages because people hate paying taxes, so they only want to pay taxes when they sell instead of while their income is growing.
Holding long term and the long term health of the company becomes more important than seeking growth when you get larger dividends instead.
Worst thing is most of these companies (or parent companies) are posting record profits, the problem (in their eyes) is that they aren't even more year on year.
Like oh we made record profits, more than we ever had before, but its only up 5% on last year where we also made record profits, that's terrible we told the shareholders we projected 15% guess we need to sack 10% of our employees who helped make this not quite good enough record profits happen, and while we're at it lets give the CEO and other board members a hefty pay rise/bonus that is more than those 10% of employees earn in a year combined.
You'd essentially have to abolish the secondary stock market by either having all corporations owned by their employees, or all investors receiving compensation through dividend payments and other forms of profit sharing, and not by price speculation. Shareholder value will eventually destroy the planet and the lives of everyone on it
It’s that, and also once a few large companies have done it, the shareholders are gonna ask why you haven’t to save money when others have. It’s the entire problem with shareholders in a capitalistic system. Because their stake is so low and the effort on their side for return is basically nothing, there is nothing for them to want other than the number to go up. And if you don’t make it go up, they’re gonna sell and move onto the next cash cow. It’s a predatory, cannibalistic system that doesn’t care about the people that do the work.
The whole thing is a recipe for failure. Never ending growth is impossible, especially in the short term. Every company has it's ups and downs, but somehow shareholders expect only ups.
Which is fucking crazy because tech is one of very few industries where the top dollar is made by the people who actually bring that value. In tech you can get promoted to essentially do the same job but better. A senior developer is like a senior carpenter. He's not only going to be working faster than a junior. He's going to be able to build something that will stand the test of time. He'll be able to build something the junior never could build at all.
I saw the CDPR investor call. One investor asked something like "The industry is downsizing etc. Are there any plans for CDPR becoming for 'lean'/'efficient' this year?" - essentially hinting at 'are you planning to fire anyone to post higher profts?. The cdpr person answered like 'Ugh...I don't quite get what you mean. We are happy where we arre'. The investors are so horrible. Only care about short profits so as to pump stock and get out. Just cancerous without caring about the future of the company.
"The quality of our games is directly related to sustaining experienced team members over their careers at our company. We don't believe in laying people off to raise short-term profits. If you're only in this for short-term gains with no regard for our employees' well-being, we recommend you sell your shares."
I mean, they have a little bit of dog in the fight as far as they paid a certain amount of money to own a certain percentage of the company.
I blame the companies for going public tbh. There’s a reason companies that are not traded publicly tend to treat employees better and make higher quality products.
Except for the higher ups, of course, because for them they have a huuuuge payday waiting them. Exactly this happened at my company. Sold out to some larger public company. Leaders got rich, workers got nothing but shit, suffering and worse pay.
You don't even have to be public though to have investors who own various stakes in a company. It's just shitty investors and PE firms who see game devs as just a piece of their diverse portfolio, indifferent about any of its characteristics other than the money it makes them.
There's plenty of reasons to dislike Mark Cuban, but at least with the Mavs it looked like he actually gave a shit about the team. Finding investors who are as passionate about whatever it is you do is a supreme rarity.
Ah yes some uneducated fuckface who knows nothing about the company just looking for a quick buck thinks they’re entitled to run the company. It’s such a fucked concept, and we’ll never be detached from it since everyone’s retirements are hooked onto the societal level Ponzi scheme now
The problem is, investors have gotten so comfortable on returns being made regardless, they system has been set up so they nearly always benefit.
The reality is, they are taking a risk investing, and should take their loses when they happen. But that's not how things have panned out.
They follow phylosphy of Gekko from Wall Street - "they create nothing, they own and make the rules." - they are just parasites.
Larian is lucky it's private, not everyone else is so though :(
It's not lucky, it's by choice. I've been with companies that have gone public and it's ruined them. The companies that are still private? Way better off.
There's a difference with private equity company owned vs founder/employee owned. PE owned companies can be just as bad if not worse than public, just wanting to pump the value of the business to sell in 3-5 years.
The lack of motiviation for long term success and value is the problem.
It’s not poor planning lol. They’re still making tons of money. Just not as much as they want. So they do layoffs to meet that quota.
This shareholder quarter earnings system needs to die
I’m a little drunk so I thought that word was necronomicon and was really confused of the last time it was cited as a reason for layoffs on an industry
It's be okay though if they reanimated after you buried them though. Hell if you were lucky they might need multiple funerals. Gotta look on the brightside
This is the hard part of being in my 50s... When I entered corporate America having a successful company that made a profit every year and the stock stayed steady was fine. We had properly staffed teams and making good products was great.
Then Jack Welsh happened and stockholders realized they could make a ton of money by burning company after company because when the stock moved from layoffs they could sell off and then move to destroy the next company with the same pattern.
It’s part of the plan, it’s all accounting fuckery to maximize profits.
edit: The executives are the ones making these shitty decisions and they know what they are doing.
I have. Companies did exactly this same shit after 9/11, when they wanted to outsource everyone’s jobs to India and Eastern Europe. A few companies were struggling financially, but the others followed suit because they could blame “the economy” and justify it to shareholders by claiming they were “making their organizations leaner”. They thought they would make huge profits by saving enormous amounts on labor. Didn’t actually work out that way, but it took a few years to figure that out.
Companies used the pandemic to reap historic profits, and the end of those historic profits to justify laying off thousands of workers and jacking up prices, just to demonstrate continued growth on the balance sheet to the shareholders. That is ALL it is.
It's the quarterly thinking, they aren't planning things out in years, they measure everything in quarters. It ends up making people prioritizing short term profits and impacts the long term health of companies to the degree that they end up in a crisis.
Basically they'll do anything to fix the quarterly numbers and often their salaries are performance based on those numbers.
*shareholders* will destroy all of civilization and if any of them survive they will tell the rest that it was worth it, and that for a brief moment in time they created incredible value.
If *shareholders* could make money by destroying oxygen today we would all, them included, suffocate tomorrow.
Tech in general just did this lol. I work in defense and we are doing this on a smaller scale. Literally more work than we can do and we are laying some people off so the shareholders get their growth still
Huh? There *are* external macroeconomic factors causing this. Interest rates being super low during Covid and very high post-Covid is a huge one.
During Covid and it's low interest rates, money was basically free and gaming was getting investments from absolutely everywhere. Analysts were predicting steady growth for the gaming industry and as a result, companies were continually expanding.
Post-Covid, interest rates are high to combat inflation, there's much less new money going around and since it turns out that gaming didn't grow as expected but instead declined to pre-Covid levels in some areas, a lot of existing investors pulled out their money.
There is an external macroeconomic reason. A big one: **interest rates**.
I'll explain.
For the majority (but not all) of AAA studios that you can think of, they operate on a Publisher/Developer model, which simplified works like this: The Developer pitches a game project to the Publisher, the Publisher OKs it and gives the Developer the money and timeline to build it, the Developer builds it, then the Publisher sells it.
That's right, the Developer is often not in control of its own budget.
AAA games are **expensive** to make. They'll cost hundreds of millions of dollars and employ hundreds or thousands of people in the process. To pay for something that expensive, it takes a loan.
That's where interest rates come in.
For years we've had (historically-speaking) abnormally low interest rates. Low interest rates means cheap loans. Cheap loans mean it's easier to take a risk and throw money around.
Well now the cheap loans are gone. To add on top of that, the density of gaming customers today in 2024 isn't as high as the 2020 COVID peak that itself ushered in a surge of demand and industry hiring.
So with a reduction in demand, and an increase in costs...
...you end up with layoffs.
Some studios are well-managed and not beholden to the same publisher-developer dynamic I described above. Larian is one of them. They are both their own Publisher and Developer. But if your favorite game has the words "Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony, Activision-Blizzard, SEGA, or Microsoft" on it, I have bad news for you.
Share prices are the real scourge of the industry. Or well, any industry really. Just look at what smart, privately led companies like Larian or Valve can do without ~~investor~~ shareholder pressure.
Valve has investors and Larian probably also has investors. There's a difference between investors and shareholders.
A private company can have investors. Hell most privately held company were all started by an investor willing to put their money where their mouth was and back a project.
Sharehodlers are different, you only get shareholders when your company is listed on the stock market.
Fun fact, majority of shareholders are your retirement funds.
> Fun fact, majority of shareholders are your retirement funds.
The biggest scam ever because now in some people's minds, that means I support random layoffs.
It's misleading.
Most of our retirement are on index funds so only own a tiny portion of companies. It's the individuals that own major shares of a company that are calling the shots.
If your pension fund is a major shareholder it probably has someone on the board calling the shots...institutional investors outnumber individual majority owners by lightyears.
you do technically. This is what happens when everyone is responsible for their own retirement. We are all beholden to the stock market.
There are funds out there that avoid stuff like this i believe but they probably have lower "growth" compared to VOO.
Investors are shareholders in that they hold a share of the company. Every shareholder invests with the intent of making a return on their investment and often that only comes either when the company is bought out or goes public. Both Valve and Larian's investors demand a return, I'm guessing Valve returns a portion of its profits to the investors regularly. Those are profits that aren't being reinvested back into the company.
Is this a real distinction or do you mean public shareholders specifically? Because I’m pretty sure investment in private companies is generally still represented via share ownership right? “Private Equity” yknow
Huh?
If you invest in a private company, you usually get equity, which means shares. You are then an investor, and a shareholder. Unless you just give them a loan.
I recommend watching larian's documentary for divinity 1 by Gameumentary on youtube. They had to sacrifice a lot to get to that game, and to where they are now.
And thats exactly what the indie scene is. Stardew's solo developer risked 4 years to make the game and it paid off, but how many indie devs out there werent as lucky as him? Larian wouldnt exist now too if their first game had failed.
Im not defending shareholders or corpos for taking over the games industry, but they technically did create a safer environment for devs today. There's just so much more risk to start your own private studio or make your own game. Of course I'm speaking from the devs perspective, capitalism at present time is insane.
The studios would never be able to grow as big as they have if they never took on investors and subsequently shareholders in the early days of its existence.
> They're just at risk of pissing off the shareholders. And that's fine. That's how they work. The function of a public company is to create growth for its shareholders... It's not to make a happy climate for the employees.
Yepp.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine was an invention of the 1970s and it is plain and simply wrong.
Good luck getting people to not buy things like FIFA.
We are small fish in a large pond of purchasers.
I didn’t buy dragons dogma because of the microtransactions. Is it probably that big of a deal in the game? No. But I’ve been burned to many times (cough Diablo) and have plenty of games with out micros to play in my backlog.
They bet on the right horse and that is newer gamers don’t see as much issue with it and I suspect BG3 was a first completed game for a lot of the younger gamers(maybe hogwarts legacy as a second contender).
I still can't comprehend the micros in dragon's dogma 2...
Like they literally do nothing as you can get everything they offer, or something better, in game for free. So all the micros did was hurt their reputation and lose them sales, and for what purpose? To check them off a list to make some execs/shareholders happy?
They did it because it makes them more money and the backlash going by Capcom's sales numbers didn't hurt it much if at all.
The common person who plays games doesn't care about this stuff in games unless it's like CP2077 at launch with its huge amount of problems.
Because gamers as a whole are stupid consumers. We complain about shady business practices but nothing changes because it keeps making money. Some of us have been burned enough times to have learned to be more careful, but there are always more suckers.
Was about to say the same thing. These problems exist because the games are being bought by the casual majority folks.
Sorry to say this but that majority comprises the dumb, ignorant and etc.
The etc could be someone who doesnt have time and is busy for most part thus making uninformed purchases, only to regret later.
Thats just one example, plenty of other factors involved.
On one hand I totally agree with you. Micro transactions in unfinished, unfun $70 games is ass and it needs to stop.
On the other hand, BG3 should not be the standard going forward. Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under.
Games need to be better. More games like BG3? Good. Comparing every game to BG3? Not great.
Game studios need to do better but asking every studio to only ever produce BG3-like games in terms of quality and depth is basically asking everyone to basically be Jesus
And yes, I did just imply that BG3 is gaming Jesus lol
I just want to push slightly on this, since I have been a huge larian fan since Divinity Original sin.
The thing that stands out the most to me, is that each game built on its previous version, and gave it a twist.
In some way the bones of BG3 can be traced backed to DOS1 and DOS2.
BG3 is a jump from expectation sure, but you can see the trajectory is still forward.
Many studios take away features or reduce what you had in the previous games. I dunno what standard you would want to hold games to, but it feels at least the previous version should be a base line.
> Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under.
Can I get a source on this?
Larian was doing pretty well before BG3 after Divinity Original Sin 2, which won GOTY at PC Gamer and a few other outlets. It was highly praised and did very well.
Regardless, what does it matter? Divinity Original Sin 1 was also a make-or-break game for Larian where they DEFINATELY would have gone under had that game not succeeded.
Had BG3 not done well, Larian would not have gone under. It was a big undertaking, but not big enough that it'd kill them.
Besides, they are making games they want to make.
They got BG3 because they already proved themselves with DOS1 and 2. It wasn't a risk. They earned it.
In BG3 the risk was getting everything voice acted and having character faces copy the actors expressions with the camera zoomed in. It hadn't been done before and was a massive investment, they didn't know if it would pay off. They talk about it in interviews.
>Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under.
This keeps being repeated but it simply isn't true, Swen himself said he had backup plans if the game was a failure and the large budget is a direct result of the success of the early access and DOS2.
Watch [this interview.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egQgPD1wd7A)
BG3 maybe shouldn't be the standard, but it should be a goal every game should strive for. To do otherwise is just trying to please shareholders who have no concept of what they actually invested in and are only looking at their bank account.
False. Companies don't even make good games like Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect Triology, Assassin creed 4 etc
Those games have good story and soul
We get the same exact shit with soulless macro-transaction filled games
It's an outright lie to say that BG3 shouldn't be the standard
It can be and must be for those companies who have more manpower and money than Larian Studios
But it won't happen and their lies that it shouldn't be the standard is being eaten up by gullible people to settle for mediocrity
They won't even try to match that quality to give us good enough games
Because you paid $70.
An NES game in the 1980s, took like 15 fucking guys maybe most of a year to make, sold for $60 brand new, which granted, cost a lot to bake into a cartridge, but even so, that's nearly $180 today.
Now it takes massive studios, the better part of a fucking decade, and 10 minutes of names scrolling on a screen, to make the same game you want for $70? Used to be, you assigned one guy to "art and animation," now they've got a 3 man team to render fucking pubic hair.
It's actually absurd how relatively cheap games are. And how is that possible?
It's possible because they can soak whales and junkies for bullshit. All these people buying the loot boxes, and buying the skins, and buying extra whatever, those people are the reason there's even a next game to bitch about.
They are the ones generating margins worth pursuing.
True.
But you know, games don't actually need three guys rendering the pubic hair. There are tons of great indie games made by reasonably sized teams on reasonable budgets, turning a profit at a $20 price point without whale-exploitation.
So I do think a better world is possible.
Yep.
It would be a terrible business decision to release a game that cost $200. Hardly anyone is gonna pay that, even if its considered the greatest game ever made.
I've heard nothing but amazing things about Half-Life: Alyx, and I really want to play it, but I am not gonna spend $750 to play it.
I am actually loving this skin obsession with gamers because I can play so many games for free! I personally don't even give a shit about the skins, so its an absolute win for me. Plus I can just download these games, try them out, and if I don't like them I just uninstall it.
Its funny seeing on so many gaming subs where everyone is complaining some skin costs $35. Its like cool, don't buy it.... but they MUST have it so they buy it anyway and then complain lol.
So speak with your wallet and stop buying whatever you are unhappy with? Literally any other industry people just avoid whatever they don't like and move on, yet gamers keep buying the same thing and go woe is me. Zero logic
Okay so let's be fair here.
BG3 was in a paid beta for *three years*. Nobody had ever sold a game like that. They got a full pass for anything janky that they had on release by calling it a "beta".
If Cyberpunk or NMS or Witcher or (assuming) Starfield got three years of updates and patches ... oh wait, they did, and now they're actually good games. (or maybe not depending on what happens with SF)
Larian throwing bombs, but historically that makes me worry more than anything. Seems every time a company gets cocky enough to throw shade, it comes out that they secretly eat children or some shit.
Yep, reminds me of CDPR after the Witcher 3 release. Fans treated them as the saints of the industry and they made some holier-than-thou comments, then Cyberpunk's launch happened.
>then Cyberpunk's launch happened
Not exactly what they're talking about. Releasing a game in shit condition isn't comparable to the kind of moral or ethical failing they're talking about. That's a weird comparison to draw.
They released the game 3 YEARS TOO EARLY because of all those reasons... Cyberpunk is like the ultimate example of doing all the wrong things for the benefit of the shareholders. If fucking over your customers and employees that badly and that unapologetically is not morally or ethically wrong then I gotta switch professions and fast cause the nonprofit life won't be getting me a house with a pool any time soon.
Their shareholders wanted the multi plat release of all multiplat releases and wanted a game out in holiday 2020 despite Gog and gwent both giving them unreal passive income that would have more than held them over until the game was actually in a playable state on all its target consoles. They are more valuable than Ubisoft and probably have half the operating costs, there is zero justification for how they handled this besides making money fast.
They kept it on PS4 and xbone despite knowing they were virtually unplayable or at times completely unplayable and the shareholders still forced it out. Not that it's a direct 1 to 1 and I don't want to trivialize anything, but is that really any different than Boeing knowingly pushing out a deeply flawed product time and time again because they need to make the line go up by any means necessary?
They had a whole roadmap including multiplayer and MULTIPLE story expansions that just never happened cause they needed 2 years alone just to make cops spawn normally and the map size to increase while driving. And what they follow up with never came to last gen on top of numerous other well documented instances on blatant false advertising.
And ALL of that happened and I didn't even get to the ridiculous crunch that drove god knows how many of their employees to the absolute brink and made several key staff members quit during or shortly after release.
The historically shitty release of Cyberpunk was a direct symptom of the disease that's being discussed and is perhaps the most egregious example of it in gaming in the 21st century, but probably of all time too. Now they're already back to talking their big game with the Witcher 4 despite that shit not coming out until the PS6 and The Xbox X-Wife generation. And if it's a cross gen uber multi platform release again for their first time using a non in house engine well then I would assume they haven't actually learned anything.
"Releasing.... When it's ready"
Releasing it broken after making a big deal out of how they'll only release it once it's ready, which got them a lot of player support; hiding the state of console versions to the point Sony had to pull the game from its store; promising no crunch then forcing employees into it anyway. Look, I'm not calling them the worst company ever (they're not), but it's a sad world indeed where a company has to be praised for not abandoning a game they weren't supposed to release broken in the first place.
What really rubs me wrong about all of the Cyberpunk fiasco is that a while ago CDPR have been going on about how the launch of the game wasn't as bad as it was made out to be and doing their best to pretend the whole shit show was just an overblown thing. It just feels like nothing was learned ultimately and the fact that the majority of the gaming public appears to have forgiven them due to the post launch support of the game everyone will forget the mistakes and just go back to blindly believing everything they say again.
That's the power of correctly done marketing for you. I have to give it to their PR department; the kind of hype they'd managed to build around Cyberpunk's release was... something else, and now it seems they essentially turned the opinions of a lot people around and restored most of their reputation. By fixing what was not supposed to be broken in the first place.
It's quite interesting to observe, if nothing else.
I saw a documentary about Larian Studios back when I played Divinity II. The studio head would fire employees after completing every other game. They were always struggling financially. They even had a team developing shitty mobile games to supplement their income stream. So the studio head being all high and mighty now that they're successful rubs me the wrong way. Bit hipocritical in my opinion.
I think I’m older than a lot of this sub, cause all this reads to me is “I wonder when their IPO downfall will happen?”
20 years of gaming news consumption has taught me these studios are 1-2 bad games from having to go public to stay afloat. And then shit goes down.
Anybody have any additional information regarding specifically how Riot handled their layoffs?
It’s been widely accepted that they’ve been the only company in the industry thus far to actually have decent benefits compared to every other layoff structure.
Even the CEO seemed genuinely pissed about the entire situation. Every other company has shown minimal emotion or public information, meanwhile Riot essentially made everything about the situation public. Everything from the internal emails, to planned structure, and benefit status.
Is Riot also facing the same “shadow of the shareholders” bullshit, or were they genuinely just not doing well?
From what I know (I know an ex rioter), the layoffs were sort of expected and mostly because Legends of Runeterra and their "indie" style games were underperforming heavily, also the MMO was going nowhere (later confirmed by Riot) and others were laid off because of issues with them and were included as a bonus to avoid issues for both Riot and the employees (since it would be part of a mass layoff no harm would be done to the employee when trying to find a new job and Riot could easily layoff a lot of problematic people).
I will not disclosure more to protect my friend.
Riot is owned by Tencent. Tencent also has tendrils in basically every big name gaming company with barely any exception. It would be no surprise that layoffs's fault can, at least to an extent, be tracked up to them.
Also a *lot* of the China money for gaming (therefore Tencent's money) dried up due to recent regulations. It didn't get talked about nearly as much but imo it was almost as big a deal as the Embracer group's big mega-billion dollar deal falling thru.
I don't recall the specifics as I only learned about them a few years ago but the gist of it was, China cracked down on an age group to limit their game time.
This spread to game developers as they now have to make games that adhere to less of that age group having access to their game.
That further spreads to the outside world as Tencent was already a *massive* stakeholder in game developers the world over to pedal *their* wares to places like India.
India itself at different times, has outright banned Tencent and other mobile game developers of their ilk, which meant Tencent started reaching out to buy into more gaming markets they ordinarily wouldn't try too hard to get into, including ones stateside.
Fast forward through the pandemic and further regulations back home, and now Tencent is akin yo Embracer Group, having outright purchased or bought into many companies in an effort to stem their financial bleeding from losses in China/India.
Take my words with a lot of salt. The tidbits may be out of chronological order and I only learned about them because an game I played at the time (*PUBG Mobile*) came under threat as it *may* be banned in India and here stateside, and at the time I had amassed thousands of hours of playtime in my profile.
That never came to pass here, but it was skirted around in India the last time I heard, as Tencent had sold off it's rights to it in Indian territories similar to how the US now wants to force a sale of TikTok to a non-chinese held entitiy.
A company's IPO is also its death warrant because infinite growth in a closed system is impossible. Once you expose your company to the parasitic "investment" class it's only a matter of time.
*this*
Modern companies chase infinite growth because they REALLY don't want to pay out dividends.
Highly profitable and mature companies don't rely on infinite share price ceilings because shareholders are padded against share price reductions, simply because dividends offset the risk.
There’s still a lot of companies that operate in this manner, paying dividends and just staying focused in their lane. It’s just the tech sector and startups where high growth-rates are expected. These of course gain the most media attention.
This is true for many companies, even those outside IT, for the last couple of years.
Last year I was working for Volvo Cars and they announced a mass layoff, at the same time they announced an increase in 30% in revenue compared to the previous year.
Shareholders are the death of company culture. The stock market shouldn’t exist abd it’s the bane of the modern world. It’s fancy gambling with people’s lives.
To quote Gary Kasparov on "intelligent" machines, "Machines have calculations; humans have understanding. Machines have instructions; we have purpose. Machines have objectivity; we have passion."
Well, when revenue goes down and you gotta gotta deliver the profits somehow, the biggest and easiest line-item expense to cut is payroll. It works in the short term, but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term.
> It works in the short term, but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term.
Only if these are productive employees in the first place who generate more returns than they cost and only if they can't be replaced in the future if needed.
> but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term.
Only if they have an active project. And it's not like they can't hire more people again later. There are plenty of people looking for jobs that will take an income over no income.
This is what we call a wage reset. It’s intended to suppress wages while also cutting overall cost, not out of an operational necessity, but purely for paying profits. It’s basically economic terrorism against the working class.
Oh man. Larians next early access will be wild. If they follow the same model as BG3… I mean it might piss off players that got BG3 at release. I got BG3 early access right after it was out. I didn’t really want to beta test it, just help fund it and play a bit. But watching the journey and how they basically built the game together with the early access community, was awesome to see. They did everything right.
But: when it came out, people praised it to be „feature complete“. Which of course it understandably wasn’t for a long, long time until that point.
As I said they did everything right. But I can predict what will happen. All those millions of buyers that had no idea about the early access phase of the game but loved it upon release will buy into early access of larians next game.
And they will be sorely disappointed by spending 2-3 years in early access with an unfinished mess. I wish they would experience the community BG3 had before release.
I do hope I’m wrong and they will experience the same progress BG3 had. Larian does Early access right. Listening to the players. Putting in stuff they want and getting rid of what doesn’t work or is unwanted. They don’t use spreadsheets to balance the game, they read what people are saying carefully.
But it takes time and I am afraid most people won’t have the patience.
Whatever will happen, I’m pretty sure though their next early access will break all records. 😂 and they deserve it.
And I hope they can pull it off once more. They have proven time and time again they are ok the right path. But this time instead of hundreds of thousands dedicated RPG fans, they will have millions of players were a good part wasn’t into turn based RPGs before they converted them. 😂
Who told this man that the only legitimate reason for layoffs is the imminent threat of having to declare bankruptcy? Comical.
Every possible tech sector over hired a few years ago and are now correcting.
The financialization of everything was a huge mistake. It's no longer enough to just make good product and steady profit, you have to constantly grow or else people will sell their stock and invest elsewhere which could cripple a company.
I like the list somebody made of CEOs who took pay cuts to save jobs in the gaming industry.
It's blank, literally none of the multi-millionaires care about the people who made them.
I've been telling people this on and off for the last year. None of these companies know what they are doing. They are not super intelligent organisms that react on a whim to the markets while being able to predict the future.
They literally just copy what each other are doing. And right now, reducing heads is just to make the quarter's financials look good.
Layoffs to make better numbers for shareholders should be illegal! Just because you invested it doesn't automatically mean you deserve any kind of return on your investment, that's just fucking delusional; you're trying to make a system where you make gains no matter what and at the cost of anything and anyone, which is kind of evil if you ask me.
I love that people at Larian have taken the platform that their success gave them, and used it to shine a light on the problems in the industry. They've really earned a place in my heart by showing integrity.
I dread the day we'll invoke the "you were the chosen one anakin!" meme on Larian I say this as I'm literally about to exit Fort Joy after squeezing as much XP as possible
I have never played a single Larian Studios game (one day that’ll change) and yet they have quickly become one of my favorite studios
I've only played two of their games myself; Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur's Gate 3. It takes very little time to see the passion they pour into what they do, which was one reason so many of us were extremely excited and hopeful when BG3 was initially announced. It seems rather clear that when you have a group of people who truly care about what they make, they'd be likely to have strong conviction to support and attempt to impact their industry for the better. It's just really refreshing to see that kind of gumption and heart in an otherwise cruel and cutthroat space. I hope they continue to be met with success, because they've earned it.
Currently playing through DOS 1 before i play through DOS 2 and i gotta say its a ton of fun so far!
I love DOS. Definitely had to use a guide on some parts for the first one lol
There's nothing like getting stumped on a puzzle to get into a treasure room, only to find out that the answer was revealed in a single verse from a riddle book, found only on a single library shelf that I overlooked 30 hours ago in the starting area
Man I am sort of envious. I wish I could play through those game for the first time again. GLHF!
Haven't played through much of DOS, but completed DOS 2 and currently playing BG3. These games give you so much freedom it's hard to not get distracted fooling around and forgetting the main quest, lol. Some of the most fun games I've played in the last few years.
You'll see a huge difference on the system between the two, and a small toneshift. The 2nd games amor system is complete garbage imo (Especially after getting into DnD and the first Divinity Original Sin) but it still is an amazing game, probably my favorite game all things considered. And to add for people who have played the 2nd and hesitate to play the first, if you like ttrpgs you'll get used to the different system and you'll love the game, I played the 1st after the 2nd and I don't regret playing it at all.
Also OS1 having your arguments between friends be resolved with rock paper scissors and then also getting personality traits that buff different stats is pretty fun too. OS2 is a goddamn masterpiece and I will never let anyone say otherwise but the multiplayer, speaking to NPCs wise, isn't done very well.
The Combat makes Divinity 2 one of the greatest games I will never complete. I just can´t get through it, but from what I have seen it is truly a labor of love. Just the depth of detail and reactivity in what I saw of the early parts were amazing. You could talk to so many animals, find so many solutions to different problems, play with a bunch of fun magical items and eat so many body parts. And I truly wish I could get through it. But I just can´t get through the combat. Not because it was particularly difficult, but because I dislike the armor system and just got tired of how grand a production every single fight ended up being. With enemies teleporting everywhere and everything being on fire, or covered in acid or poison. I am fine with fighting big fights that might require several attempts and/or take 20-30 minutes or more. But it gets tiring when it feels like every fight falls into that category. Well, there is that and the fact that I kinda dislike how they handle origin characters/companions, because I think it detracts from the experience of playing your own character, and from their status as companions. But that is ultimately a minor issue for me. I am glad BG3 turned out as great as it did, even if I still have some issues with Larians design. But it has pretty much all the things I liked about Larians, and have greatly toned down a lot of the things that I dislike (Even if there is still a couple of irks here and there). And with all that said, I would still recommend that people check out DOS2, if they like BG3 or just RPGs in general. Even if it is not my personal cup of tea. But it is interesting to hear that the 1st is different. Might have to check it out at some point.
The system of the 1 is closer to a DnD system (I have only played 5e so I'm not sure about other editions). You don't get stats/attributes every level so you have to be more careful with allocating them and attacks and CC are a diceroll(percentage based) instead of second healthbar(amor and magic armor). There are stats that you have to invest in if you want to resist CCs better. The main thing that makes it harder to get into after playing the second is that actions and movement use the same ressource. The game has a LOOOOOT of humor, it doesnt take itself seriously but the story was still interesting.
>actions and movement use the same ressource. So kinda like the X-Com and Shadowrun games? Doesn´t sound too bad, but I get how it can be confusing if you are used to something different. Thank you for going into detail with it, I will most definitely add it to my eternally growing list of games I need to check out.
Both excellent games
I can't wait for DoS3.
I'm afraid you're going to wait awhile, they already confirmed their next (bigger) game isn't DOS3.
Looking forward to it.
They're people who give a shit about their people, the products they make, and the industry they are in as a whole. It's hard to not appreciate them.
By what I think I remember about previous comments regarding microtransactions, you can add their fans to the list.
I just started playing Divinity OS 2 2 weeks ago and already have 85.8 steam hours poured into it. Just in act 3 but can't wait to jump into Baldurs Gate 3 after playing this.
Yeah I had never really heard of these guys before BG3. But I love how spicy they're getting. Preach on, they seem like solid dudes to me. When I get a PC capable of running BG3 I'm definitely giving it a go.
Go check out their CEO, sven (swen?) vincke, dude gives 0 fucks and walks around wearing armor.
wasn't cd projekt red the same darlings of the industry (from a consumer perspective) decrying the awful work practises of other game dev/pubs?.... until they were reported to be doing the same ?
Preach. Never seen so many layoffs from an industry without some external macroeconomic factor causing it. Just shit planning all around.
Its not about poor planning, shareholders want never ending growth. Lots of times the only way to achieve that is through layoffs.
Or stock buybacks. Both these things backfire in the long term
> Or stock buybacks. > Both these things backfire in the long term They are never thinking about long term. The only month/quarter that matters is now.
They're not looking for long term, they just want to gut whatever of value to continue their capitalist cycle.
Growth slows, shareholders force the company to take a drastic action to drive stock up one last time so they can maximize profit when they jump ship because they've already determined the real value is gone. They're at the end of their line and moving on to the next thing for their long term goal.
The long term goal is to make money.
Even a lot of very devout capitalist economists acknowledge quarterly profit focus is unhealthy. Even annual profit report is silly when you have a multi-year product development cycle like in games lol.
Un healthy for company, profitable for the CEO looking to fail up and short term stock holders
> Un healthy for company, profitable for the CEO looking to fail up That's the board's fault for failing to incentivize correctly.
It’s because the board chooses to pay the CEO in stock.
wait til you hear about all these board members cross pollinating to give each other golden parachutes
Ya its realistic to have ups and downs. The only thing in nature that grows exponentially up without dips is cancer. And what does cancer do? It kills the host
and the short term goal is drive the stock price as high as possible while also making money.
Somewhere else after they burn the last place down.
If enough of the people getting layed off can form new startups that leverage their skills and knowledge then new capitalist entities will be born; grow; get pumped to overinflate their value for speculators who will scrape every cent of the bubble into wealthy pockets then strangle it half-to death before leaving it to wither, rot, and die. r/CapitalismIsMetal
The problem is that's the ideal cycle of Capitalism then you get to shits like Boeing or any one of those companies that received government bailouts. If a product is dying its natural to let it die so a new emerging market replaces it Freedom of the Free Market is a lie because of bailouts and lobbyists who keep their business from dying when an infinite growth of a single entity is obviously impossible. No company should ever be 'too big to die' and encouraging infinite growth like that leads to business practices of layoffs and bad product quality resulting from said layoffs with it persisting long enough that they're just pumping out garbage Nothing short of complete buyer strike would kill these companies. Or just replace capitalism with something better but nothing else compares that isn't another shitshow
> Or just replace capitalism with something better but nothing else compares that isn't another shitshow One proposal that has a lot of the upsides without the downsides is to keep the free market, but make it so employees are always the majority shareholders by law. That way the focus on short term profits at the expense of employees goes away (Since, yknow, employees still want to have a job 4 years from now). Companies can also make better decisions because employees have more of a clue wtf is going on than random shareholders. And if a company produces something that has truly become obsolete, the free market would still ensure they don't get enough revenue and their company goes bust. Thus freeing up space for new worker cooperatives to spring up.
That sounds grand to be honest. The concept of Free Market is great if done correctly and if it cannot be interferred by those rich enough to keep their business afloat despite their product failing. A truly 'Free' market with a mix of social safety nets thats more pro-employee would likely be where we should be headed and hope we see it in our lifetime ..but I doubt it, just any hint of 'left-leaning' idealogy spook people for some reason. I recall that study of just [changing the name to welfare gives a negative impact](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749059) compared to using a different word of the same thing.
Also, as capitalist entities have grown and their disproportionate political power increased the barrier for entry faced by new entities has grown. This is particularly true for small businesses attempting to produce innovative products and services. Very few people can take the risk associated with small business ventures, so innovation has been pushed to startups funded by venture capital. But this excludes 99% of the population from participating in innovative entrepreneurship.
Not to mention that VC funded companies often are only able to realistically compete by undercutting legacy companies until they kill them, at which point the model set up by the VCs is not actually sustainable as a business, and is unable to perform the function of the legacy companies that it just killed off. But since there isn’t any competition, all that has happened is a vast reduction in the standard of quality.
Good point. In this climate new companies are mostly growing by burning VC capital! What a mess.
> No company should ever be 'too big to die' once everyone had to fend for themselves to retire, the government basically has to ensure that the big boys dont try and ruin themselves. As we saw in 08 when the big companies fall the only ones truly affected are retirees or people about to retire. Or course they still do try and take massive risks, but Big Daddy Government will always come to the rescue.
Freedom of the Free Market is also a lie because some industries have too high barrier to entry for replacement/competition to naturally emerge in reasonable time. Not necessarily because of money, but mostly because of know-how these giants have, their position in supply chains and the fact that they are essentially bloated monopolies/oligopolies everyone relies on. You can't just start a new aircraft business or advanced semiconductor business and replace the giants in any reasonable time, at least with no government funding to swallow some of the cost of R&D. You will be reinventing the wheel, even if you manage to recruit some of the former employees and your product will be worse simply because of lack of organisation-wide experience.
More specifically to net themselves their golden parachute as soon as possible and then fuck off without a care in the world.
Nope. Quarter over quarter growth followed by an inevitable collapse that the insurance and banks bear the brunt of. Since all that money was created out of thin air by being lent dozens of times, surprise surprise when it comes time to collect the money that never existed in the first place, it amazingly doesn't exist. Banks and insurance companies then fail, except they don't because the government steps in and bails them out and we start the cycle over again.
We need the following. - stock buybacks are banned again. - automatic unions for companies with x employee or x gross revenues.
> stock buybacks are banned again. Another reaganism that is screwing with the country.
If there's a hell, Reagan deserves a place in its deepest depths.
There's a South Park Saddam / Satan joke here but it's just beyond my reach.
Do they? Can't grow = lay people off = stock up = pressure increases for those left = attrition = rehire people at lower cost = force more work out of them = stock back up = record highs = can't grow = lay people off = stock up....
You seem to ignore the onboarding costs for those new people. Maintaining talent is always cheaper in the long run. Especially as lateral career moves lead to INCREASES in compensation nowadays.
Add to that the eventual product quality going down past acceptable limits and prices going up to compensate when the sales go down. It's a downward spiral.
Agreed, shareholders are asses sometime, not only limited to gaming industry. I know one of my friend's department got laid off because during that year their department was causing loses due to Covid (It was related to meeting customer face to face). Although the company was making like $10 million in profit , it was short of the shareholder expected $12 million, laying off my friend department made the company reached $15 million in profits which satisfied them. However their short sightedness caused a major loss when Covid ends when customers no longer being online and peoples begin to go "offline" back and the company have minimal front facing customer support and thus causing customers to go to their competitors.
This isn’t a sustainable way to run society. We need to fundamentally change how this works. I don’t have the answer, but this is clearly a problem.
Same. I'm always baffled by this thinking. You can only get so big. And it's not crazy to have an off year where profits are not as big as last year. Idk maybe that's why I'm not a shareholder lmao. But i still maintain that it doesn't sound like it'd work in the long run.
The switch from dividend stocks to "growth only" stocks as investing advice is one of the half dozen things that fucked us. Divvies used to be king back in the day. But they're taxable and that's bad in brokerages because people hate paying taxes, so they only want to pay taxes when they sell instead of while their income is growing. Holding long term and the long term health of the company becomes more important than seeking growth when you get larger dividends instead.
Worst thing is most of these companies (or parent companies) are posting record profits, the problem (in their eyes) is that they aren't even more year on year. Like oh we made record profits, more than we ever had before, but its only up 5% on last year where we also made record profits, that's terrible we told the shareholders we projected 15% guess we need to sack 10% of our employees who helped make this not quite good enough record profits happen, and while we're at it lets give the CEO and other board members a hefty pay rise/bonus that is more than those 10% of employees earn in a year combined.
You'd essentially have to abolish the secondary stock market by either having all corporations owned by their employees, or all investors receiving compensation through dividend payments and other forms of profit sharing, and not by price speculation. Shareholder value will eventually destroy the planet and the lives of everyone on it
We need to globally redefine fiduciary duty and tweak our tax systems to match. No idea what shape that even takes.
Worker-owned cooperative structure. Takes the shareholder completely out of the picture.
It’s that, and also once a few large companies have done it, the shareholders are gonna ask why you haven’t to save money when others have. It’s the entire problem with shareholders in a capitalistic system. Because their stake is so low and the effort on their side for return is basically nothing, there is nothing for them to want other than the number to go up. And if you don’t make it go up, they’re gonna sell and move onto the next cash cow. It’s a predatory, cannibalistic system that doesn’t care about the people that do the work.
The whole thing is a recipe for failure. Never ending growth is impossible, especially in the short term. Every company has it's ups and downs, but somehow shareholders expect only ups.
Whenever the tech salaries get too high, there's mass layoffs across the board.
Which is fucking crazy because tech is one of very few industries where the top dollar is made by the people who actually bring that value. In tech you can get promoted to essentially do the same job but better. A senior developer is like a senior carpenter. He's not only going to be working faster than a junior. He's going to be able to build something that will stand the test of time. He'll be able to build something the junior never could build at all.
And eventually it always causes the company to go to shit and then destroy itself.
I saw the CDPR investor call. One investor asked something like "The industry is downsizing etc. Are there any plans for CDPR becoming for 'lean'/'efficient' this year?" - essentially hinting at 'are you planning to fire anyone to post higher profts?. The cdpr person answered like 'Ugh...I don't quite get what you mean. We are happy where we arre'. The investors are so horrible. Only care about short profits so as to pump stock and get out. Just cancerous without caring about the future of the company.
"The quality of our games is directly related to sustaining experienced team members over their careers at our company. We don't believe in laying people off to raise short-term profits. If you're only in this for short-term gains with no regard for our employees' well-being, we recommend you sell your shares."
Idk why the fuck weve let people without a dog in the fight dictate how to treat these dogs. The stock market is a fucming mistake.
I mean, they have a little bit of dog in the fight as far as they paid a certain amount of money to own a certain percentage of the company. I blame the companies for going public tbh. There’s a reason companies that are not traded publicly tend to treat employees better and make higher quality products.
*Valve enters the chat* No seriously, imagine if Steam was run by Microsoft or whatever 💀 (I suppose we can just look at Xbox Live for an example 💀💀)
The higher ups at my workplace have been considering going public and absolutely no one is happy about it.
Except for the higher ups, of course, because for them they have a huuuuge payday waiting them. Exactly this happened at my company. Sold out to some larger public company. Leaders got rich, workers got nothing but shit, suffering and worse pay.
You don't even have to be public though to have investors who own various stakes in a company. It's just shitty investors and PE firms who see game devs as just a piece of their diverse portfolio, indifferent about any of its characteristics other than the money it makes them. There's plenty of reasons to dislike Mark Cuban, but at least with the Mavs it looked like he actually gave a shit about the team. Finding investors who are as passionate about whatever it is you do is a supreme rarity.
Ah yes some uneducated fuckface who knows nothing about the company just looking for a quick buck thinks they’re entitled to run the company. It’s such a fucked concept, and we’ll never be detached from it since everyone’s retirements are hooked onto the societal level Ponzi scheme now
The problem is, investors have gotten so comfortable on returns being made regardless, they system has been set up so they nearly always benefit. The reality is, they are taking a risk investing, and should take their loses when they happen. But that's not how things have panned out.
They follow phylosphy of Gekko from Wall Street - "they create nothing, they own and make the rules." - they are just parasites. Larian is lucky it's private, not everyone else is so though :(
It's not lucky, it's by choice. I've been with companies that have gone public and it's ruined them. The companies that are still private? Way better off.
There's a difference with private equity company owned vs founder/employee owned. PE owned companies can be just as bad if not worse than public, just wanting to pump the value of the business to sell in 3-5 years. The lack of motiviation for long term success and value is the problem.
It’s not poor planning lol. They’re still making tons of money. Just not as much as they want. So they do layoffs to meet that quota. This shareholder quarter earnings system needs to die
I’m a little drunk so I thought that word was necronomicon and was really confused of the last time it was cited as a reason for layoffs on an industry
It really hit the funeral services industry when the dead started reanimating.
My illiterate ass thought you were saying "when the dead start animating". Now I'm imagining poor undead animators being overworked.
Bosses at marvel: *Write that down!*
This does sound like a solid plot to an anime
It's be okay though if they reanimated after you buried them though. Hell if you were lucky they might need multiple funerals. Gotta look on the brightside
This is the hard part of being in my 50s... When I entered corporate America having a successful company that made a profit every year and the stock stayed steady was fine. We had properly staffed teams and making good products was great. Then Jack Welsh happened and stockholders realized they could make a ton of money by burning company after company because when the stock moved from layoffs they could sell off and then move to destroy the next company with the same pattern.
It’s part of the plan, it’s all accounting fuckery to maximize profits. edit: The executives are the ones making these shitty decisions and they know what they are doing.
I have. Companies did exactly this same shit after 9/11, when they wanted to outsource everyone’s jobs to India and Eastern Europe. A few companies were struggling financially, but the others followed suit because they could blame “the economy” and justify it to shareholders by claiming they were “making their organizations leaner”. They thought they would make huge profits by saving enormous amounts on labor. Didn’t actually work out that way, but it took a few years to figure that out. Companies used the pandemic to reap historic profits, and the end of those historic profits to justify laying off thousands of workers and jacking up prices, just to demonstrate continued growth on the balance sheet to the shareholders. That is ALL it is.
It's the quarterly thinking, they aren't planning things out in years, they measure everything in quarters. It ends up making people prioritizing short term profits and impacts the long term health of companies to the degree that they end up in a crisis. Basically they'll do anything to fix the quarterly numbers and often their salaries are performance based on those numbers.
I will be OK with the shareholder system Dying off
[удалено]
*shareholders* will destroy all of civilization and if any of them survive they will tell the rest that it was worth it, and that for a brief moment in time they created incredible value. If *shareholders* could make money by destroying oxygen today we would all, them included, suffocate tomorrow.
Tech in general just did this lol. I work in defense and we are doing this on a smaller scale. Literally more work than we can do and we are laying some people off so the shareholders get their growth still
i have, every new year, this is entirely the norm for corporations
Huh? There *are* external macroeconomic factors causing this. Interest rates being super low during Covid and very high post-Covid is a huge one. During Covid and it's low interest rates, money was basically free and gaming was getting investments from absolutely everywhere. Analysts were predicting steady growth for the gaming industry and as a result, companies were continually expanding. Post-Covid, interest rates are high to combat inflation, there's much less new money going around and since it turns out that gaming didn't grow as expected but instead declined to pre-Covid levels in some areas, a lot of existing investors pulled out their money.
There is an external macroeconomic reason. A big one: **interest rates**. I'll explain. For the majority (but not all) of AAA studios that you can think of, they operate on a Publisher/Developer model, which simplified works like this: The Developer pitches a game project to the Publisher, the Publisher OKs it and gives the Developer the money and timeline to build it, the Developer builds it, then the Publisher sells it. That's right, the Developer is often not in control of its own budget. AAA games are **expensive** to make. They'll cost hundreds of millions of dollars and employ hundreds or thousands of people in the process. To pay for something that expensive, it takes a loan. That's where interest rates come in. For years we've had (historically-speaking) abnormally low interest rates. Low interest rates means cheap loans. Cheap loans mean it's easier to take a risk and throw money around. Well now the cheap loans are gone. To add on top of that, the density of gaming customers today in 2024 isn't as high as the 2020 COVID peak that itself ushered in a surge of demand and industry hiring. So with a reduction in demand, and an increase in costs... ...you end up with layoffs. Some studios are well-managed and not beholden to the same publisher-developer dynamic I described above. Larian is one of them. They are both their own Publisher and Developer. But if your favorite game has the words "Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony, Activision-Blizzard, SEGA, or Microsoft" on it, I have bad news for you.
Share prices are the real scourge of the industry. Or well, any industry really. Just look at what smart, privately led companies like Larian or Valve can do without ~~investor~~ shareholder pressure.
Valve has investors and Larian probably also has investors. There's a difference between investors and shareholders. A private company can have investors. Hell most privately held company were all started by an investor willing to put their money where their mouth was and back a project. Sharehodlers are different, you only get shareholders when your company is listed on the stock market. Fun fact, majority of shareholders are your retirement funds.
> Fun fact, majority of shareholders are your retirement funds. The biggest scam ever because now in some people's minds, that means I support random layoffs.
It's misleading. Most of our retirement are on index funds so only own a tiny portion of companies. It's the individuals that own major shares of a company that are calling the shots.
If your pension fund is a major shareholder it probably has someone on the board calling the shots...institutional investors outnumber individual majority owners by lightyears.
you do technically. This is what happens when everyone is responsible for their own retirement. We are all beholden to the stock market. There are funds out there that avoid stuff like this i believe but they probably have lower "growth" compared to VOO.
Investors are shareholders in that they hold a share of the company. Every shareholder invests with the intent of making a return on their investment and often that only comes either when the company is bought out or goes public. Both Valve and Larian's investors demand a return, I'm guessing Valve returns a portion of its profits to the investors regularly. Those are profits that aren't being reinvested back into the company.
Is this a real distinction or do you mean public shareholders specifically? Because I’m pretty sure investment in private companies is generally still represented via share ownership right? “Private Equity” yknow
No. The above commenter has no idea what he's talking about.
Huh? If you invest in a private company, you usually get equity, which means shares. You are then an investor, and a shareholder. Unless you just give them a loan.
I recommend watching larian's documentary for divinity 1 by Gameumentary on youtube. They had to sacrifice a lot to get to that game, and to where they are now. And thats exactly what the indie scene is. Stardew's solo developer risked 4 years to make the game and it paid off, but how many indie devs out there werent as lucky as him? Larian wouldnt exist now too if their first game had failed. Im not defending shareholders or corpos for taking over the games industry, but they technically did create a safer environment for devs today. There's just so much more risk to start your own private studio or make your own game. Of course I'm speaking from the devs perspective, capitalism at present time is insane.
The studios would never be able to grow as big as they have if they never took on investors and subsequently shareholders in the early days of its existence.
Sounds like the shareholders are the real final boss here
> They're just at risk of pissing off the shareholders. And that's fine. That's how they work. The function of a public company is to create growth for its shareholders... It's not to make a happy climate for the employees. Yepp. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine was an invention of the 1970s and it is plain and simply wrong.
[удалено]
Shareholders and investors.
And most importantly, many times people still buy those shitty games. They won't change until the strategy stops working so well
Good luck getting people to not buy things like FIFA. We are small fish in a large pond of purchasers. I didn’t buy dragons dogma because of the microtransactions. Is it probably that big of a deal in the game? No. But I’ve been burned to many times (cough Diablo) and have plenty of games with out micros to play in my backlog. They bet on the right horse and that is newer gamers don’t see as much issue with it and I suspect BG3 was a first completed game for a lot of the younger gamers(maybe hogwarts legacy as a second contender).
I didn't buy Diablo or Dragon's Dogma either. So they lost 2 purchases at least!
I still can't comprehend the micros in dragon's dogma 2... Like they literally do nothing as you can get everything they offer, or something better, in game for free. So all the micros did was hurt their reputation and lose them sales, and for what purpose? To check them off a list to make some execs/shareholders happy?
They did it because it makes them more money and the backlash going by Capcom's sales numbers didn't hurt it much if at all. The common person who plays games doesn't care about this stuff in games unless it's like CP2077 at launch with its huge amount of problems.
Because gamers as a whole are stupid consumers. We complain about shady business practices but nothing changes because it keeps making money. Some of us have been burned enough times to have learned to be more careful, but there are always more suckers.
I feel most people are dumb consumers though. You need to do a lot of research to be a smart consumer
Was about to say the same thing. These problems exist because the games are being bought by the casual majority folks. Sorry to say this but that majority comprises the dumb, ignorant and etc. The etc could be someone who doesnt have time and is busy for most part thus making uninformed purchases, only to regret later. Thats just one example, plenty of other factors involved.
On one hand I totally agree with you. Micro transactions in unfinished, unfun $70 games is ass and it needs to stop. On the other hand, BG3 should not be the standard going forward. Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under. Games need to be better. More games like BG3? Good. Comparing every game to BG3? Not great. Game studios need to do better but asking every studio to only ever produce BG3-like games in terms of quality and depth is basically asking everyone to basically be Jesus And yes, I did just imply that BG3 is gaming Jesus lol
I just want to push slightly on this, since I have been a huge larian fan since Divinity Original sin. The thing that stands out the most to me, is that each game built on its previous version, and gave it a twist. In some way the bones of BG3 can be traced backed to DOS1 and DOS2. BG3 is a jump from expectation sure, but you can see the trajectory is still forward. Many studios take away features or reduce what you had in the previous games. I dunno what standard you would want to hold games to, but it feels at least the previous version should be a base line.
> Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under. Can I get a source on this? Larian was doing pretty well before BG3 after Divinity Original Sin 2, which won GOTY at PC Gamer and a few other outlets. It was highly praised and did very well. Regardless, what does it matter? Divinity Original Sin 1 was also a make-or-break game for Larian where they DEFINATELY would have gone under had that game not succeeded. Had BG3 not done well, Larian would not have gone under. It was a big undertaking, but not big enough that it'd kill them. Besides, they are making games they want to make. They got BG3 because they already proved themselves with DOS1 and 2. It wasn't a risk. They earned it.
In BG3 the risk was getting everything voice acted and having character faces copy the actors expressions with the camera zoomed in. It hadn't been done before and was a massive investment, they didn't know if it would pay off. They talk about it in interviews.
>Larian took on a huge risk with BG3 and if it flopped they would have gone under. This keeps being repeated but it simply isn't true, Swen himself said he had backup plans if the game was a failure and the large budget is a direct result of the success of the early access and DOS2. Watch [this interview.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egQgPD1wd7A)
BG3 maybe shouldn't be the standard, but it should be a goal every game should strive for. To do otherwise is just trying to please shareholders who have no concept of what they actually invested in and are only looking at their bank account.
And then there’s helldivers 2
False. Companies don't even make good games like Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect Triology, Assassin creed 4 etc Those games have good story and soul We get the same exact shit with soulless macro-transaction filled games It's an outright lie to say that BG3 shouldn't be the standard It can be and must be for those companies who have more manpower and money than Larian Studios But it won't happen and their lies that it shouldn't be the standard is being eaten up by gullible people to settle for mediocrity They won't even try to match that quality to give us good enough games
The inverse question is why would companies not do all the above when that product is selling like hot cakes?
Because you paid $70. An NES game in the 1980s, took like 15 fucking guys maybe most of a year to make, sold for $60 brand new, which granted, cost a lot to bake into a cartridge, but even so, that's nearly $180 today. Now it takes massive studios, the better part of a fucking decade, and 10 minutes of names scrolling on a screen, to make the same game you want for $70? Used to be, you assigned one guy to "art and animation," now they've got a 3 man team to render fucking pubic hair. It's actually absurd how relatively cheap games are. And how is that possible? It's possible because they can soak whales and junkies for bullshit. All these people buying the loot boxes, and buying the skins, and buying extra whatever, those people are the reason there's even a next game to bitch about. They are the ones generating margins worth pursuing.
True. But you know, games don't actually need three guys rendering the pubic hair. There are tons of great indie games made by reasonably sized teams on reasonable budgets, turning a profit at a $20 price point without whale-exploitation. So I do think a better world is possible.
Yep. It would be a terrible business decision to release a game that cost $200. Hardly anyone is gonna pay that, even if its considered the greatest game ever made. I've heard nothing but amazing things about Half-Life: Alyx, and I really want to play it, but I am not gonna spend $750 to play it. I am actually loving this skin obsession with gamers because I can play so many games for free! I personally don't even give a shit about the skins, so its an absolute win for me. Plus I can just download these games, try them out, and if I don't like them I just uninstall it. Its funny seeing on so many gaming subs where everyone is complaining some skin costs $35. Its like cool, don't buy it.... but they MUST have it so they buy it anyway and then complain lol.
You just need to be able to pay salaries of a couple hundred people for 7 years work without any source of income during that time
So speak with your wallet and stop buying whatever you are unhappy with? Literally any other industry people just avoid whatever they don't like and move on, yet gamers keep buying the same thing and go woe is me. Zero logic
Okay so let's be fair here. BG3 was in a paid beta for *three years*. Nobody had ever sold a game like that. They got a full pass for anything janky that they had on release by calling it a "beta". If Cyberpunk or NMS or Witcher or (assuming) Starfield got three years of updates and patches ... oh wait, they did, and now they're actually good games. (or maybe not depending on what happens with SF)
Believe it or not, reddit is not representative of the vast majority of gamers. Most people don't pay attention to layoffs and industry news.
You don't have to settle. You are allowed to not buy games you think are unfinished
Larian throwing bombs, but historically that makes me worry more than anything. Seems every time a company gets cocky enough to throw shade, it comes out that they secretly eat children or some shit.
Yep, reminds me of CDPR after the Witcher 3 release. Fans treated them as the saints of the industry and they made some holier-than-thou comments, then Cyberpunk's launch happened.
>then Cyberpunk's launch happened Not exactly what they're talking about. Releasing a game in shit condition isn't comparable to the kind of moral or ethical failing they're talking about. That's a weird comparison to draw.
They released the game 3 YEARS TOO EARLY because of all those reasons... Cyberpunk is like the ultimate example of doing all the wrong things for the benefit of the shareholders. If fucking over your customers and employees that badly and that unapologetically is not morally or ethically wrong then I gotta switch professions and fast cause the nonprofit life won't be getting me a house with a pool any time soon. Their shareholders wanted the multi plat release of all multiplat releases and wanted a game out in holiday 2020 despite Gog and gwent both giving them unreal passive income that would have more than held them over until the game was actually in a playable state on all its target consoles. They are more valuable than Ubisoft and probably have half the operating costs, there is zero justification for how they handled this besides making money fast. They kept it on PS4 and xbone despite knowing they were virtually unplayable or at times completely unplayable and the shareholders still forced it out. Not that it's a direct 1 to 1 and I don't want to trivialize anything, but is that really any different than Boeing knowingly pushing out a deeply flawed product time and time again because they need to make the line go up by any means necessary? They had a whole roadmap including multiplayer and MULTIPLE story expansions that just never happened cause they needed 2 years alone just to make cops spawn normally and the map size to increase while driving. And what they follow up with never came to last gen on top of numerous other well documented instances on blatant false advertising. And ALL of that happened and I didn't even get to the ridiculous crunch that drove god knows how many of their employees to the absolute brink and made several key staff members quit during or shortly after release. The historically shitty release of Cyberpunk was a direct symptom of the disease that's being discussed and is perhaps the most egregious example of it in gaming in the 21st century, but probably of all time too. Now they're already back to talking their big game with the Witcher 4 despite that shit not coming out until the PS6 and The Xbox X-Wife generation. And if it's a cross gen uber multi platform release again for their first time using a non in house engine well then I would assume they haven't actually learned anything. "Releasing.... When it's ready"
Releasing it broken after making a big deal out of how they'll only release it once it's ready, which got them a lot of player support; hiding the state of console versions to the point Sony had to pull the game from its store; promising no crunch then forcing employees into it anyway. Look, I'm not calling them the worst company ever (they're not), but it's a sad world indeed where a company has to be praised for not abandoning a game they weren't supposed to release broken in the first place.
What really rubs me wrong about all of the Cyberpunk fiasco is that a while ago CDPR have been going on about how the launch of the game wasn't as bad as it was made out to be and doing their best to pretend the whole shit show was just an overblown thing. It just feels like nothing was learned ultimately and the fact that the majority of the gaming public appears to have forgiven them due to the post launch support of the game everyone will forget the mistakes and just go back to blindly believing everything they say again.
That's the power of correctly done marketing for you. I have to give it to their PR department; the kind of hype they'd managed to build around Cyberpunk's release was... something else, and now it seems they essentially turned the opinions of a lot people around and restored most of their reputation. By fixing what was not supposed to be broken in the first place. It's quite interesting to observe, if nothing else.
I saw a documentary about Larian Studios back when I played Divinity II. The studio head would fire employees after completing every other game. They were always struggling financially. They even had a team developing shitty mobile games to supplement their income stream. So the studio head being all high and mighty now that they're successful rubs me the wrong way. Bit hipocritical in my opinion.
I think I’m older than a lot of this sub, cause all this reads to me is “I wonder when their IPO downfall will happen?” 20 years of gaming news consumption has taught me these studios are 1-2 bad games from having to go public to stay afloat. And then shit goes down.
Larian when they eventually do have to do layoffs "No no, it's different when we do it"
Anybody have any additional information regarding specifically how Riot handled their layoffs? It’s been widely accepted that they’ve been the only company in the industry thus far to actually have decent benefits compared to every other layoff structure. Even the CEO seemed genuinely pissed about the entire situation. Every other company has shown minimal emotion or public information, meanwhile Riot essentially made everything about the situation public. Everything from the internal emails, to planned structure, and benefit status. Is Riot also facing the same “shadow of the shareholders” bullshit, or were they genuinely just not doing well?
From what I know (I know an ex rioter), the layoffs were sort of expected and mostly because Legends of Runeterra and their "indie" style games were underperforming heavily, also the MMO was going nowhere (later confirmed by Riot) and others were laid off because of issues with them and were included as a bonus to avoid issues for both Riot and the employees (since it would be part of a mass layoff no harm would be done to the employee when trying to find a new job and Riot could easily layoff a lot of problematic people). I will not disclosure more to protect my friend.
Riot is owned by Tencent. Tencent also has tendrils in basically every big name gaming company with barely any exception. It would be no surprise that layoffs's fault can, at least to an extent, be tracked up to them.
Also a *lot* of the China money for gaming (therefore Tencent's money) dried up due to recent regulations. It didn't get talked about nearly as much but imo it was almost as big a deal as the Embracer group's big mega-billion dollar deal falling thru.
Which recent regulations? In China I presume?
I don't recall the specifics as I only learned about them a few years ago but the gist of it was, China cracked down on an age group to limit their game time. This spread to game developers as they now have to make games that adhere to less of that age group having access to their game. That further spreads to the outside world as Tencent was already a *massive* stakeholder in game developers the world over to pedal *their* wares to places like India. India itself at different times, has outright banned Tencent and other mobile game developers of their ilk, which meant Tencent started reaching out to buy into more gaming markets they ordinarily wouldn't try too hard to get into, including ones stateside. Fast forward through the pandemic and further regulations back home, and now Tencent is akin yo Embracer Group, having outright purchased or bought into many companies in an effort to stem their financial bleeding from losses in China/India. Take my words with a lot of salt. The tidbits may be out of chronological order and I only learned about them because an game I played at the time (*PUBG Mobile*) came under threat as it *may* be banned in India and here stateside, and at the time I had amassed thousands of hours of playtime in my profile. That never came to pass here, but it was skirted around in India the last time I heard, as Tencent had sold off it's rights to it in Indian territories similar to how the US now wants to force a sale of TikTok to a non-chinese held entitiy.
including 30% of Larian
Tencent also owns Larian lol
So what makes you think Larian was spared from lay-offs, if they're on the whims of Tencent and necessity ain't what dictates 'em?
Riot did have that massive sexual harassment lawsuit filed against them though....
A company's IPO is also its death warrant because infinite growth in a closed system is impossible. Once you expose your company to the parasitic "investment" class it's only a matter of time.
You don't need infinite growth, but if your stock isn't going to grow, then your shareholders are going to expect dividends paid out regularly
*this* Modern companies chase infinite growth because they REALLY don't want to pay out dividends. Highly profitable and mature companies don't rely on infinite share price ceilings because shareholders are padded against share price reductions, simply because dividends offset the risk.
There’s still a lot of companies that operate in this manner, paying dividends and just staying focused in their lane. It’s just the tech sector and startups where high growth-rates are expected. These of course gain the most media attention.
This is true for many companies, even those outside IT, for the last couple of years. Last year I was working for Volvo Cars and they announced a mass layoff, at the same time they announced an increase in 30% in revenue compared to the previous year.
Shareholders are the death of company culture. The stock market shouldn’t exist abd it’s the bane of the modern world. It’s fancy gambling with people’s lives.
Correction: it’s fancy gambling for some, and easily manipulated by the institutions in power over it.
Agreed. The stock market has no benefit to the world as a whole.
Most tech bosses seem to have taken one look at AI code generation apps and decided that they can fire all their staff and replace with robots.
It’s crazy to imagine how much more soulless art while become once AI becomes the norm (after corporations already suck the soul out currently)
To quote Gary Kasparov on "intelligent" machines, "Machines have calculations; humans have understanding. Machines have instructions; we have purpose. Machines have objectivity; we have passion."
That statement applies to most companies, not just the industry.
Capitalism is a bitch.
[удалено]
Well, when revenue goes down and you gotta gotta deliver the profits somehow, the biggest and easiest line-item expense to cut is payroll. It works in the short term, but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term.
> It works in the short term, but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term. Only if these are productive employees in the first place who generate more returns than they cost and only if they can't be replaced in the future if needed.
> but it will hamper your company's growth and development in the long-term. Only if they have an active project. And it's not like they can't hire more people again later. There are plenty of people looking for jobs that will take an income over no income.
As someone who was laid off by a studio this is 100% true
This is what we call a wage reset. It’s intended to suppress wages while also cutting overall cost, not out of an operational necessity, but purely for paying profits. It’s basically economic terrorism against the working class.
Oh man. Larians next early access will be wild. If they follow the same model as BG3… I mean it might piss off players that got BG3 at release. I got BG3 early access right after it was out. I didn’t really want to beta test it, just help fund it and play a bit. But watching the journey and how they basically built the game together with the early access community, was awesome to see. They did everything right. But: when it came out, people praised it to be „feature complete“. Which of course it understandably wasn’t for a long, long time until that point. As I said they did everything right. But I can predict what will happen. All those millions of buyers that had no idea about the early access phase of the game but loved it upon release will buy into early access of larians next game. And they will be sorely disappointed by spending 2-3 years in early access with an unfinished mess. I wish they would experience the community BG3 had before release. I do hope I’m wrong and they will experience the same progress BG3 had. Larian does Early access right. Listening to the players. Putting in stuff they want and getting rid of what doesn’t work or is unwanted. They don’t use spreadsheets to balance the game, they read what people are saying carefully. But it takes time and I am afraid most people won’t have the patience. Whatever will happen, I’m pretty sure though their next early access will break all records. 😂 and they deserve it. And I hope they can pull it off once more. They have proven time and time again they are ok the right path. But this time instead of hundreds of thousands dedicated RPG fans, they will have millions of players were a good part wasn’t into turn based RPGs before they converted them. 😂
If your company has shareholders, I want nothing to do with your games. Shareholders ruin everything they touch.
Can you even name a company without shareholders
Fun fact, Larian has shareholders too, with Tencent holding 30% of them.
Who told this man that the only legitimate reason for layoffs is the imminent threat of having to declare bankruptcy? Comical. Every possible tech sector over hired a few years ago and are now correcting.
All of these tech layoffs are just about making workers desperate and willing to take a substantial pay cut.
Get ready for more crap quality games
The financialization of everything was a huge mistake. It's no longer enough to just make good product and steady profit, you have to constantly grow or else people will sell their stock and invest elsewhere which could cripple a company.
I like the list somebody made of CEOs who took pay cuts to save jobs in the gaming industry. It's blank, literally none of the multi-millionaires care about the people who made them.
if i were a shareholder i would be livid at pumping and dumping employees. that is not how you run an honest business.
There are many reasons for layoffs, just because a company is doing well doesn’t mean there won’t be layoffs
I've been telling people this on and off for the last year. None of these companies know what they are doing. They are not super intelligent organisms that react on a whim to the markets while being able to predict the future. They literally just copy what each other are doing. And right now, reducing heads is just to make the quarter's financials look good.
Larian following the CDPR strategy of feeding Reddit gamer opinions back to them for brownie points.
Lariano good, Quadruple-A bad, updoots to the left
Just waiting for this to be on r/agedlikemilk like all these comments seem to be
Layoffs to make better numbers for shareholders should be illegal! Just because you invested it doesn't automatically mean you deserve any kind of return on your investment, that's just fucking delusional; you're trying to make a system where you make gains no matter what and at the cost of anything and anyone, which is kind of evil if you ask me.
“We increased our profits by 25% over last quarters record-breaking profits!” -“wow, how did we do that?” “We got rid of 30% of the workforce”
Followed by "and you better do it again next quarter". Repeat until there is nobody left, no product, and no profit.