Fun fact if you replace the word "layoffs" with "bonus for executives" the meme still works.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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It's usually both.
🤓 Ackshually that's all because of piracy. Games just aren't making enough money to pay developers' salaries. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to swap football team compositions every 12 months? Microtransactions help, but it just isn't enough with all the pirates. /s
Won't someone think of the shareholders
Pretty soon the whole video games industry will rely on one unpaid intern.
Someone has to copy and paste the slop.
Layoffs are a natural part of the corporate world. You hire masses of people to create the illusion of growth, and you fire masses of people to create the illusion of ruthless competence. Line go up no matter what.
All Hail The Line That Always Goes Up! /s
Can you explain why this would be a viable survival strategy for a company? If you kick out all your knowledge and skill every 2months then you will get crushed by better cheaper competition
I'm not defending it, but I can explain it, since it was the same strategy used in drug development in the early to mid 2000's.
Essentially, you have labor costs on your financial reports.
- If you have a blockbuster product, layoffs improve your financials even more.
- Poor product? Layoffs make your financials not look terrible.
- Work productivity goes up too much (unit of work measured / hours of labor)? Well, that means you can do layoffs because you don't need productivity that high. Plus, at least initially it will look even better since you lowered the denominator.
- Terrible productivity? Layoffs make it look better quickly.
Why the fuck would anyone do this? Because individuals are held accountable to quarterly financials instead of long term success. You can only "hold off the wolves" so long before the leader either gets forced to do layouts, quits, or is fires. Companies that are privately owned don't have the same pressure though. Of interest, employee owned companies are also much better, but often take on a terrible work life balance culture due to massive peer pressure without oversight. So even though the "easy" solution is to have employee owned work environments with no management, even that can lead to toxicity.
Because leadership at many companies suffers from the recency effect and only remembers what you've done for them lately.
"I saved us lots of money in staffing this quarter" gets rewarded, not "I'm leaving the short-term money on the table now so that we'll be more successful in 7 years"
Because there is enough willing labour to endure this treatment. AAA companies don't aspire to make high quality games, they aspire to make games that make money, which does not require quality except perhaps graphic fidelity and certainly doesn't require the best.
Ok let's say the buyer does not care about game quality, only good graphics. Even then it wouldn't make sense to fire the staff that has a lot of experience in crafting the slop games fast and efficiently.
They don't, they make mediocre games at a mediocre pace of a mediocre quality. They hire the average coder and the average designer, of which there are many. They don't want to carry headcount through periods of inactivity and don't need to. Sure either keep the key people and leadership roles, but the grunts doing the work? Fire and hite them back when needed, often on short term contract.
Interestingly this is the reason so many companies are focusing on using Unreal. It's easier to get new people every x months after layoffs, if they are all using the same tools (vs the past where basically every big game studio had their own engine).
Tldr:
Unreal is slop and enables this behaviour.
Unreal is or more likely was a decent engine for any games that fit into a common template. It's easy to learn, has a powerful rendering engine, good support and reasonable monetisation. From what I've heard it's fallen off a lot since 5 but it's still possible to actually optimise if you know how and have a reason to. Unfortunately a lot of companies are incentivised to just not. That being said Godot is catching up fast and if you know enough about graphics you can get something looking decent in it instead for a much lighter footprint.
Because capitalism doesn't seek perfection, and it's far from a fair system
It only makes sense if the company is getting paid to make the gaming industry worse.
Layoffs always lead to loss of tacit institutional knowledge. In other words, they end up firing the people who know how shit really works.
Games are creative projects, so this is even more of a problem. They fire people who made the first game and knew exactly why the game was made that way, and it comes as no surprise that the new hires end up making the sequel completely different way. The new people can see the big picture but not the reasoning behind the tiniest details.
MBA types have never experienced tacit instructional knowledge because they just sit in their offices all day misinterpreting numbers to make themselves look good.
spot on. these people's salaries are chump change compared to rsu awards. They dont care about making their core product, they care about the stock spiking periodically so they can sell. The stock price can even creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much to them. They really just need a yearly surge in price to sell based on something that looks like strategic competence. They arent paid to consistently uplevel the stock so much as they are paid to enable a pump and dump on their own companys stock. I work in one of these places now and have worked for several. They are believers in getting paid.
If it's not "spreadsheet-able" it doesn't exist. -- typical MBA.
Three Months Later
"Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI's are in the toilet all of a sudden."
Part of the issue is also scope and budget. Games are becoming needlessly massive and overly complicated, overshooting estimated budgets. It’s unrealistic for these games to make meaningful bottom line.
So why don’t we reduce scope and go back in making simpler and fun games? Cause layoffs is the easy short term solution.
no! every game must be hyper realistic and break graphical boundaries ! it's the only way we can sell our game ! (seriously we're out of ideas)
/s
Meanwhile Nintendo provides lifetime employment. It's why they can pass down institutional knowledge to the next gen of employees. Hence why every entry in series like Mario and Zelda are almost consistently great.
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computer + business = layoffs Don't you know?
Business+Business = also layoffs.
B2BLO
"you undercook chicken...layoff, you overcook fish, layoff, you charge too much for a sweater, layoff..."
TBF undercooked chicken would deserve a layoff.
It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.
Don't worry all the rage is outsourcing now, so they can lay an entire studio off and ideally that studio gets another contract somewhere else (most don't).
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Replace gaming industry with any white collar work in general these days, I feel like we are all just training the AI models until they get good enough to replace us all these days
yeah we have to stop working for these people.
i think they're onto something... oh wait!
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