this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Yeah, so... being in the gaming industry really sucks right now.
Go give a hug to your local gamedev. They probably need it.
I've been 10 years in the industry and honestly. This feels familiar. I feel like there was mass layoffs about 4+ years ago. There was also the Boston Games collapse around 2013. I've been told this industry has a very direct pattern. Expand, contract, expand, contract. What you want to do is to get into it when it's expanding and hope by the time it contracts you have enough experience to be vital to a project.
And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.
It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.
I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.
The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.
In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.
Loyalty to a company is silly. A lot of people in games learn that quickly in their career because they want to go work for some huge name-brand company that they grew up with just for them to either harshly reject or if they actually get the job, they end up in a crunch cycle trying to prove themselves.
That said people do have loyalty, to other people and to projects. People are passionate about working with people they like and on projects they care about. You only get to make like 20-30 games in your career. Even then that includes all the games that didn't release. It only really allows for 2-3 years per game whereas lots of games are 5+ years. Projects and people matter a lot and it's important to not just chase money. Otherwise, you end up working at Google Stadia or Amazon.
Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.
So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.
That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.
My local game Devs are Creative Assembly.
Yikes. You're gonna need a bigger hug.
Yeeeaaahhh... >.>'