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
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.
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 capitalism doesn't seek perfection, and it's far from a fair system
It makes perfect sense if you view employees as cogs in a machine. Human Resources.
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.
🤓 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
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
"you undercook chicken...layoff, you overcook fish, layoff, you charge too much for a sweater, layoff..."
TBF undercooked chicken would deserve a layoff.
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.
Three Months Later
"Hmmm. I wonder why our KPI's are in the toilet all of a sudden."
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. It can creep down in between sells and it doesnt matter much. 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.
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.
On the other end of this, Pokemon is still being developed by guys who can't develop in a modern engine and are just coasting on the popularity of the franchise. I have Scarlett and I got about an hour in before shelving it for other better games, and I was so into Pokemon I've played through about a dozen ROM hacks.
Pokemon is not developed by Nintendo though. They are only the publisher.
My dad works at Nintendo!
Leg end
Cool 😎
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).
computer + business = layoffs Don't you know?
Business+Business = also layoffs.
B2BLO
i think they're onto something... oh wait!
Everywhere I look, problems are coming from rich assholes removed from actually doing work making decisions.
It’s called capitalism. This is the result
somewhere along the way the csuite forgot about or devalued institutional knowledge. they think of people like expensive hardware theyre renting, that they can just fire and rehire at no cost. they ignore the fact that the majority of the knowledge and expertise they need is stored in peoples heads and nowhere else. when they do a huge layoff theyre throwing all of that away and essentially starting over from scratch the next time. i suspect this is a large part of why games take way longer to develop now. the teams have to build up the knowledge and working relationships basically from scratch on every game, which is a slow messy process in the best of times but is made waaay worse by delusional schedules and excessive hours. these corporate douchebags keep literally cutting off their nose to spite their face over and over again like its a functional business strategy.
They think only in the high-level and then only the most self-aware of them even wonder why they don't understand the low-level. "Throw man-hours at it" is always the solution. It's fucking maddening.
Csuites of all industries are becoming like nobles from feudal eras. The only difference is the lack of in-breeding happening, but give it a decade or more and it'll start.
They assume that they have right of rule despite having no actual commitments, then they throw a fit when they aren't fed.
They already have apps for dating amongst themselves
Back when I supported HR at a hospital I built these ultra detailed employee turnover reports, which included average cost of turnover (metrics for what it costs to cover shifts until the position is filled, cost of recruiting/posting positions, cost associated with hiring, separation cost of the employee leaving, etc etc). And of course they would focus primarily on nursing roles. They spent about 5 years doing just about anything they could; hiring bonuses, incentives, referral bonuses, various outreach programs and tuition assistance for nurses. After those 5 years they found no noticeable reduction in nursing turnover. What they did eventually notice, however, is a steady increase in turnover for all other non-nursing positions.
After another year or 2 of bullshit excuses and throwing whatever paltry perks they attempted to throw at us the only thing they found actually lowering their turnover figures...reinstate annual 3% raises. Because they found out paying their employees was actually cheaper than the annual cost of turnover.
Its like when tech-bros re-invent trains or taxes or something
"Does anyone have any ideas on how to boost morale that don't include pay raises?"
Not an uncommon question in meetings, if you'd believe people on the internet.
It's like trying to figure out how to grow a plant without water. Pointless from the beginning.
That's pretty much business 101 though. It's almost always cheaper long term to retain employees (especially high performing employees) rather than getting rid of and re-hiring. But when you are at the edge of bankruptcy or can't afford to keep people (sometimes simply for 'profit') then short term it's a better idea.
Companies are not ethereal, so there are always going to be short term decisions made that hurt long term.
i see what youre saying, but i think youre missing some stuff here. companies being "on the edge of bankruptcy" is usually also the fault of csuite douchebags. where do you think all the money companies make goes? it goes to the obscene csuite salaries. those fuckers make these ridiculous short term decisions that only benefit them while taking credit for every success and claiming every failure was due to "market forces" completely outside their control. yeah companies are responding to the situation of the moment, but how the fuck do you think they got there in the first place?
the last place i worked had this problem constantly. management makes a dumbass decision that hurts the business for no benefit, then we get in a tight spot because of it, and management makes another decision that only really hurts the actual workers with the justification that they have to because the company is in a tough spot. rinse and repeat. no accountability, no repercussions, and nothing meaningfully changes except for things get worse for all the people doing the actual work.
dont just swallow their propaganda without thinking.
This has to be the best meme I've seen in a very long time, made it worth logging into Lemmy. Thank you :)
Only a single rule is needed. If mass layoffs need to happen, the top person responsible, the CEO, must also leave the company in the same fashion.
Without a golden parachute.
..B..b.ut the yacht can stay. Right??
Some bilionare
What about a trial by combat clause? CEO has to fight one representative of the workforce. In America this could be a whole new genre of reality tv! We could call it... Luigi's Mansion.
Funny because it’s true. Painfully true.
Got free time for making memes? Guess what...
It kinda baffles me that people still apply for jobs at EA, Activision/Blizzard, etc. We need more disenfranchised developers making their own studios like Supergiant, Respawn and Embark, who go back to making quality games that are passion projects instead of sloppy money churners. I simply don't understand why anyone would buy a game, then spend more money to not play the game in order to progress/level up/whatever.
Just to be clear I'm well aware Apex Legends could be thought of as a money churner, but it's still a free-to-play, quality product that just sells cosmetics so I personally don't see it in the same light as CoD, FIFA or Madden.
Because when starting your own studio in the garage you and your family has no money or insurance.
Men, you're lucky men. Soon you'll all be fighting for your planet. Many of you will be dying for your planet. A few of you will be forced through a fine mesh screen for your planet. They will be the luckiest of all.
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