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Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers (kotaku.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Departments ranging from art to production were impacted, but the majority of those laid off worked in quality assurance testing. The sources said at least 25 developers were part of the downsizing. Full-time staff do not appear to have been part of the cuts.

Sources tell Kotaku that no severance is being offered for those currently laid off, and that impacted developers as well as remaining employees are being pressured to keep the news quiet. Their contracts won’t be officially terminated until the end of October and they’ll be expected to work through the rest of the month.

If I'm understanding right it sounds like only part-time contractors are getting cut. Do part-time employees usually get offered severance packages or is this (kinda ghoulish) business as usual? I wonder how much work those people will get done for the rest of the month

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do part-time employees usually get offered severance packages or is this (kinda ghoulish) business as usual?

by design part-time employment usually does not confer the benefits of full employment, no. that's part of why so many unions seek to either upgrade part-time workers to full time workers or limit the number of part-time/subcontracted workers that a company is employing--otherwise you basically have an underclass of people who can get totally fucked at any time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure if the game industry had different standards to other fields for that kinda stuff. Sacking a bunch of QA agents does not sound promising for the games they're working on....

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

QA people being mistreated is very, very common. They'd likely rehire some when required or use contractors.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Part time usually doesn’t receive any benefits. Contractors never receive benefits unless stated in the contract, severance is usually not included in said package but an early buyout might be.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

one curious sidenote to these cuts is the TLOU multiplayer game, which seems pretty much dead at this point:

Despite hit ratings for the recent HBO adaptation of The Last Of Us, a multiplayer spin-off for the zombie shooter based on the first game’s Factions mode has struggled in development. Bloomberg reported in June that Sony had diverted resources away from the project following a negative internal review by Bungie, the recently acquired live-service powerhouse behind Destiny 2. One source now tells Kotaku that the multiplayer game, while not completely canceled, is basically on ice at this point.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

:( very sad to hear that. Naughty Dog has made 3 of my favorite online games of all time (Uncharted 3, Uncharted 4, TLOU) and so I was really excited for the announcement of a new multiplayer game. I feel like historically Naughty Dog has done a good job of finding the parts of a gameplay loop that feels "sticky" and give it some grease to make it feel better in subsequent games. There were a few parts of TLOU that could have used improvements; Clans representing some really interesting and incredibly infuriating ideas in multiplayer games, for example. I expected it would still be a niche game, but sad to hear it is probably going to die in development hell after years of me getting excited for it.

sigh oh well, not much you can do about it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

The last multiplayer mode for The Last of Us was designed to keep you playing long enough to not trade the game in. This one is aiming to be a game that has no ceiling on how much you play or spend. I'm not convinced we need another live service game that's inevitably going to get shut down and disappear off the face of the earth in just a few years. This definitely sucks for the people losing their livelihoods, but hopefully this is indicative of the live service model no longer making financial sense.