It’s been said countless times already but it can never be said enough: 2023 was an amazing year for games, and a horrible year for the people that make them. It is unconscionable that the same game companies that reported record 🐓profits this year can also lay off thousands of developers, many just before the holidays. When you look at a game like Destiny 2, which is listed as one of the highest-earning games on Steam this year, and try to reconcile that with the fact that Bungie laid off 100 people because it missed its annual revenue target by 45 percent, it’s clear that there’s something very wrong with the business of video games today.
It’s never been more important to understand how the games we buy are made. The game industry’s labor issues have been mounting for decades without solutions, and are now becoming even more dire thanks to mass consolidation. Mass layoffs ar𒁃e just the most recent problem game developers are saddled with, while issues revolving around crunch and discrimination have lingered for decades. The industry was long overdue for a reckoning even before 2023, and now the entirely new problem of generative AI looms on the horizon. As these issues of ethics converge and come to a head in 2024, it’s crucial that we as consumers are aware, engaged, and prepared to support the people that make the games we love.
🧸Starfield Dev Complains Of "Disconnect" Between Industry 🍸And Gamers
A lead Bethesda dev comments on Starfield hate: "Funnꦜy how disconnected some players are from the realities of game development".
There’s no debate to be had: the contrast between the quality and financial success of games in 2023 and the mass layoffs that followed are proof that the industry is unsustainable. The propensity for crunch within the industry was a decades-long warning that the industry needs to find a healthier, more ethical way to develop games, and now there’s a direct line between the disregard for workers d༺uring crunch and the mass layoffs that occurred throughout the year at studios of every shape and size.
For years, the triple-A development model has consisted of rapid expansions w𝓰hen new games ‘spin up’ into full development followed by big layoffs post-launch, which has forced developers to live a semi-nomadic lifestyle, jumping from studio to studio to follow jobs wherever th🎀ey may be. But now they have even less security than ever before. Uprooting your life to move across the country for a game dev job you may get laid-off from in less than a year is not enticing, but this is the reality of the game industry today.
Consolidation has rapidly accelerated this problem and left devs in an even worse position to advocate for themselves. Holding companies like Embracer Group and mega-publishers like Microsoft and Sony are rapidly gobbling up every studio they can, and disposing of them just as quickly. Consolidation of studios means less competition between companies, since a small group of companies now own practically all of the studios. This means that workers have less bargaining power, since most of their options for studios they can work at are all owned by the same company. If you feel mistreated by the policies or culture of one studio, moving to another local studio might not help you if they’re all owned by the sam🐬e company with the same policies. The bigger and ﷽more powerful these companies become, the worse the conditions are for the workers.
The best solution for game developers is to organize a union, something the industry is long overdue for and has only become more necessary ꦯafter the events of 2023. Progress has been made in slight ways with small QA teams unionizing at specific studios, but the strength of a union is in its size - that’s the point of organized labor. The game industry may need to follow the film industry and create an industry-wide union in order to protect themselves from the adverse interests of the companies they work for.
And, as part of that effort, AI needs to be addressed head-on, before it spirals out of control and does irreparable harm to the industry. The most vulnerable workers today are actors (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:as The Finals clearly demonstrates), artists, and writers, but so💧on enough there won’t be a single discipline within game development that isn’t at risk of being replaced or, at the very least, compromised by AI.
This is going to be a major issue facing the industry in 2024. If the execs and shareholders have their way, the entire workforce will be replaced by free AI labor, so it's imperative that developers are proactively protecting themselves from this eventuality. If you care about the people who make the games you love, it's important for you to pay attention to this stuff too. Avoid games with AI-generated content, use social media to speak up for developers when they’re mistreated, don’t sit by and watch as corporations extract as much value as possible from the people who actually make the games, then cast them aside for machine-made garbage. Don’t buy into propaganda about the ‘democratization of art’ that AI will provide when real artists are made victims of that so-called democracy.
The game industry is on the precipice of major change. If we all stand by and simply watch as the biggest, most powerful ▨companies decide what direction to go, we’re all - developers and players - going to suffer for it.
