culled
a new piece from overdriven — a new series focused on hot takes
A pair of true statements
- Microsoft should not have bought dozens of studios, only to turn around within a few years and shut them all down.
- Being laid off is a very painful, scary, and in some ways even a traumatic experience, in a country where your healthcare is tied to your job — I would know because it happened to me in 2023.
and one more
- Almost every modern western game studio of note is extremely bloated, inefficient, underdelivering on output, and full of people showing up for an easy, mostly remote job, and collecting an enormous paycheck.
That is not to say that these studios are filled with the “wrong kinds” of people. I do not buy into the common chud argument that women in development roles are ruining gaming for everyone. Women have played an important role in the history of gaming, from early pioneers like Roberta Williams of Sierra, to modern leaders like Shannon Studstill and Amy Hennig. If we want modern games to reflect the breadth of the human experience, women are a necessary and invaluable inclusion to an industry that could frankly use a woman’s touch in some areas. The user interface design of the PlayStation and Xbox both reek of being designed by teams of nerds that haven’t left their respective tech campuses in thirty years…but Nintendo clearly employs women on their design team that have broader interests, including tangible consumer goods, and real-world aesthetic design.
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Where are the leaders who stand up, and say, “Look I’m sorry but we don’t need a community manager at a studio like Naughty Dog who only makes single-player games”. Where are the leaders who standup and say, “this many layers of middle management is unacceptable, and we need to deliver a game in four years, instead of seven”. I’m sorry, but the adults in the room need to stand-up in the face of the man-children infecting many of these studios and say, “We do not allow full-time remote work here”. Or “Yes you can work remotely but we are going to pay you less and avoid promoting you”.
These things are totally acceptable and the kicking and screaming in the face of RTO changes and other policies that serve to increase responsibility and focus, I think exposes a weak underlying work ethic and tips your hand, that you might be more interested in the unreasonably high salary that many of these gaming and tech related jobs are known for. You do not have to work at these places.
Nobody on earth is getting paid more to do less, than your average non-technical worker at a big company like this , like a community manager, social media person, or web producer— nobody. It almost makes me suspect that the reason so many of these employees will decry all CEOs, and executive leadership, for doing little and being paid exorbitantly, is because they are projecting their own guilt. They know they are guilty of a similar crime, albeit on a different scale.
The common grifter sentiment is essentially, “Libs and minorities and women are ruining true gaming for the rest of us”, and I don’t buy into that…but it is the duty of studio leadership, and the larger publisher leadership to step in when things are getting out of hand, and stomp down on anything that isn’t contributing to a quality successful project. Building a memorial for your coworkers who got laid off, isn’t contributing to the goals of the company. Starting a union, and demonstrating on the front lawn of the office, isn’t making the game any better. Get back to your cushy desk, scooter over to the (free) cafeteria to get a lunch, and get back to work or you can look for another job. This isn’t fascism, it is having a job in the United States, where we expect you to come into the office and work for a living. If you want to take the entire summer off, go live in France or Norway. You are earning $150k/yr, and have ridiculously great benefits…act like it! Do you know what an electrician in the middle of the country would do for that kind of money? Your ancestors, who not that long ago were praying for the ceiling of a forty-hour work-week, are now cringing as they watch you decry any non-remote computer work as the tyrannical oligarchy.
In exchange for their hard-work, employees should be handsomely rewarded…and the often unreported reality is that employees at many studios receive enormous bonuses and significant time-off after a major game ships, and they’ve been crunching…but you never hear this side of the story. What happens now is that one employee is asked to work five hours of overtime in a given week, and they go running to Jason Scherier, who reports on the horrible working conditions at Studio X, and then they have to issue a public statement about how they’re going to try and be better…and essentially now every studio leader can’t crack the whip, or else they become the target of the entire intelligentsia of the industry.
The industry is in the process of self-correction right now. The budgets have bloated, and thus the games are not profitable. The studios are right-sizing back to a place where they can get a game out the door for less than $50 million, and in three-years instead of seven. Of course, this necessitates letting people going, trimming the fat, and cracking the whip — so the common sentiment among the Intelligentsia is that “gaming is dying” or whatever…their friends in the industry that got paid a fortune to do literally nothing lost their jobs, and therefore the sky is crumbling. Why is there a well-established and well-known pipeline of IGN PlayStation editors getting jobs at the studios that received 10/10 glowing reviews? Chris Roper, Andrew Goldfarb, Jonathan Dornbush all went from being on Podcast Beyond to cushy, dream jobs within PlayStation. The whole thing is a joke on all of us that pay their huge salary, wait seven years between games, and let the whole charade continue. Everyone knows what’s happening here.
I’m all for people getting paid handsomely for their contributions, and taking care of your employees and making them feel valuable. But in return we should feel that the studios are being properly run, producing a quality product at an efficient clip, and not being infected with total leeches. Leaner and more efficient studios benefit absolutely everyone — when a game costs far less and come out more frequently, you can afford to take more creative risks, and often these are the titles that truly make our heart sing. What is the point of advancing and advocating for a western industry that just makes bad Halo sequels, Horizon spinoffs, Marvel tie-in games, and Battlefield?
Another thing to think about — why doesn’t Japan have this same problem? Why are the big Japanese gaming companies making modern, quality titles at such a strong cadence? It’s because the average game developer in Japan is making like the USD equivalent of fifty-grand a year, and is absolutely putting their all into development every day. I do not think these employees are unionizing, making memorials for their laid-off coworkers, or doing things that generally do not contribute to the game getting out the door. They have not adopted the California mindset that has rocked most of the big AAA developers. This is true of many game developers in less developed nations like Eastern Europe, (CD Projekt) who are seemingly able to get these projects built much more efficiently than their USA counterparts like Bethesda. It’s so blindingly obvious that the management of these US studios is the entire problem, when you look at it from a global perspective.
The whole thing reminds me a little of a scene from John Carpenter’s “The Thing”…the one toward the back half of the movie where all the suspects are tied to chairs, and being threatened with a heated copper-wire. Everyone in the room knows that the creature will screech out and reveal itself is poked with the hot wire…and they are trying to sus out who is the monster.
In this analogy, the crack of the whip is the hot wire, and the industry leeches are crying out and exposing themselves as the malevolent force.
