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[-] PKMKII@hexbear.net 35 points 10 months ago

I think part of it is the industry got itself into a mini-bubble over the promises of the Games as Services model. They thought every game could emulate Fortnite in terms of constant revenue streams from season passes, cosmetics, loot boxes, etc. So while sales were good, the failure of that fantasy to materialize for the overwhelming majority of games that tried to push that model meant projections weren’t met and thus layoffs to bridge some of that gap.

[-] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 44 points 10 months ago

projections weren’t met and thus layoffs to bridge some of that gap.

Was this year not once again the most profitable year ever for the games industry like the last few were?

Fuck I hate capitalists so much. They shouldn’t be allowed to know how much profit they made, just “yes” or “no”. If you made $0.01 in profit that means you succeeded. That is a successful year. You paid all of your employees including yourself and didn’t have to dig into the company’s savings.

If you make one single cent in profit and lay off so much as one single person, whoever decided to do layoffs should be fucking shot.

[-] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 40 points 10 months ago

And to be clear this isn’t me just going “capitalism bad,” this is me going “capitalists are the dumbest people on the planet and aren’t good at capitalism”

As a capitalist, you should hold these beliefs, because chasing after ever increasing profits is obviously unsustainable and will destroy capitalism. Steady profits year on year is what you, a capitalist, should want, because that’s how you keep capitalism fucking going.

If I heat my home by burning logs, I want them to burn at a steady rate and keep my home at a consistent temperature. I don’t want to make sure every day I can burn more logs than the day before and get the house hotter than it’s ever been. If I do that I run out of logs and/or the house burns down.

[-] CriticalOtaku@hexbear.net 45 points 10 months ago

As a capitalist, you should hold these beliefs, because chasing after ever increasing profits is obviously unsustainable and will destroy capitalism. Steady profits year on year is what you, a capitalist, should want, because that’s how you keep capitalism fucking going.

The problem is that if you settle for steady profits, your competitors with no scruples will outdo you. If they outdo you enough times, they'll buy your company and/or drive you out of business, and then you'll have no profits.

Most rational system big-cool

[-] axont@hexbear.net 24 points 10 months ago

Capitalists are in competition with one another to maintain their position, which means they simply can't have steady profits. Unless they're selling something niche that will always exist, from day 1 they're on a shrinking treadmill with other capitalists in their industry praying for their failure.

They only have class solitary among one themselves when it comes to keeping capitalism around or keeping labor cheap.

Video game studios are in another bucket of worms where it turns out the most profit comes from selling garbage on a subscription model, or just taking a percentage of what other developers make (such as what Valve, Epic, Nintendo, Sony, etc all do).

Companies that make a steady, tiny profit are gonna be bought out or their workers will find somewhere else that promises more long-term stability. Look at the tragedy of what happened to Raven Software and Treyarch, forever doomed to work in the CoD mines.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 22 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There's a "Dragon devouring it's own tail" element. You might be a smart capitalist, but shareholders aren't, and they hold your leash. You could try to develop a stable, powerful, robust company, but if you're not return-maxxing and profit-pilled the shareholders will pull their investments and go to someone who promises a higher short-term return.

Individual firms, unless they're privately owned, often can't pursue a steady, stable position even if someone in the C-Suite is Marx-brained enough to understand how this whole nightmare works. They're in the hands of forces beyond their control, the great god Capitalism who thirsts for the blood and bone of humanity.

In the US due to an utterly insane theory of "Shareholder Value" the C-suite is legally required to maximize sharehold profits at all costs and ahead of other considerations, and they can be removed or sued if they do not.

the TTRPG Eclipse Phase kind of goes in to this. The feral anarchists who write the thing posit that after late-Capitalism will come hyper-capitalism, where all the big firms break down in to "agile" and "flexible" hyper-corps, the evolution of mega-corps. Hyper-corps will assemble labor and resources for months or even days at a time to squirt out a minimum viable product leveraging every kind of labor-strangling technique they can. In the Eclipse Phase world that's countless millions of "infugees", refugees from earth who uploaded their brains in to cold storage to escape the apocalypse and are now utterly at the mercy of Hypercorps who buy them as de-facto slaves and only break them out of cold storage to put them on a project in a vastly accelerated simulated spaces. The infugees are desperate for any time in the waking world and take contracts that last days or months of real-world time but might be years of simulation time. If they're very lucky they might be able to buy clock-cycles to keep operating as a digital consciousness after their project ends, but most of them get tossed back in to cold storage, essentially frozen in time, until, if they're very lucky, their quickly aging skill set is needed again.

The anti-capitalist moeities out beyond the Belt are in a cold-war with the in-system Hypercapitalists, and part of that is spinning up as much compute time as they can to rescue as many infugees as they can manage, then cranking out minimally viable cybernetic robot shells so they can at least put people in simple bodies that can participate in the physical world while they wait in the long, long, long queue for a biological human bodie, or at least a partially biological synth body. Some people are fine being a free or mostly free digital consciousness and living in the data networks, or embodied in simulations, but most people want to have meat bodies that can be part of the "real" world again.

It's a cool system. It goes hard in to what trans-humanism might mean for us in the near future, investigating both the wonders (nearly-unlimited bodily autonomy for wealthy hyper-capitalists and well equipped anti-capitalist societies) and the horrors (terrifying new kinds of slavery made possible by speculative and emergent technologies).

[-] hglman@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 months ago

That's still too framed inside the idea of capitalism. We should, as a society not be afraid to change what we do. That is incredibly important to learn. What that requires is a deep and fundamental decoupling of job and access to material well being.

[-] ClimateChangeAnxiety@hexbear.net 6 points 10 months ago

Oh certainly, I just find it interesting that the capitalists can’t even manage capitalism in a way that it won’t fall apart. They’re a serpent eating their own tail and can’t even listen to the people pointing out they can’t possibly do that forever.

[-] hglman@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago

The capitalists only care for the system to work for their lifetime. Collapse beyond that horizon is moot.

[-] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 20 points 10 months ago

Projections weren't met so we cannibalize our own company by laying off our employees (yk the ones that make the stuff that makes profit) in order to meet projections, then next year/quarter they make even greater projections with less workers 😂 and thus the cycle keeps going. This is what happens when shareholders run the company.

In my eyes, whenever a company goes public (selling shares in the market) it is implicitly announcing its death. That is the precise moment that a company should get nationalized.

[-] PKMKII@hexbear.net 10 points 10 months ago

Especially as a lot of these publicly traded companies aren’t video game specific companies but rather media/software conglomerates (Microsoft, Warner Bros). The C-suite and board members don’t really understand the video game market, they just see money printer.

[-] greenskye@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago

People at the very top are unfamiliar with how any company works. In that I mean they don't understand how to make or perform a service for a customer. They only know how to manipulate capital to their benefit and at no point does it matter what the company theoretically does at all. Make wigets or polish shoes or serve burgers, none of that matters, only their valuation and quarterly earnings report matters.

[-] peppersky@hexbear.net 17 points 10 months ago

That and that there were historically low interest rates and the fact that gaming and tech in general saw a huge boost during COVID that has started to subside last year added to the obvious bubblr

[-] RION@hexbear.net 6 points 10 months ago

Exhibit A: Embracer Group

Sucked up a ton of studios when it was almost free to do so, but now they can't afford to actually do anything with them. And since the Saudi deal fell through no one wants to invest in a sinking ship

[-] zifnab25@hexbear.net 16 points 10 months ago

I think part of it is the industry got itself into a mini-bubble over the promises of the Games as Services model.

Its the same bubble they got into with MMOs. This isn't a new approach to selling software (particularly gaming software). But we're at the point where hardware isn't improving fast enough to demand radical new changes in the platform/engine. And there's an expanded workforce abroad who will do the grunt-work of game production far cheaper, particularly now that all the hard work of engine design is done and you're just rolling out new shapes and colors for the hogs.

It isn't as though EA or Activism/Blizzard can't bring in tons of new revenue every year (particularly with the glut of sales post-COVID). Its just that they need less labor and from less-skilled professionals, while they are far more invested in sales and marketing in order to move units after go-live.

Not every game needs to sell like Fortnite to turn a profit. And even Fortnite doesn't need to work too hard to keep the wheel spinning, now that the underlying mechanics of the game are in place. So all that excess labor can be dumped, while investors vacuum up the profits.

[-] Frank@hexbear.net 10 points 10 months ago

I'm excited for the extraction shooter bubble. Frugnk the Caveman pick berries. Frungk run from predator. Frungk make it back to cave, fashion berries in to machine gun with extra poison damage. Life good. Frugnk happy.

this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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