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Employees Say ‘Sizable Portion’ Of Gearbox-Owned Studio Has Been Laid Off (aftermath.site)

submitted 10 months ago by simple@lemm.ee to c/games@lemmy.world

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Today on "the gamedev community literally can't catch a break"...

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[-] technomad@slrpnk.net 91 points 10 months ago

As someone who always thought about getting into gaming as a career, i'm so glad i didn't... it's a shame that game developers are having to suffer through such a toxic industry, and that there aren't more protections in place for these people that create the amazing experiences that we all love so much.

I hope that they are able to find new and better places of employment.

[-] Gloria@sh.itjust.works 89 points 10 months ago

Unions. If we want to stop the suffering of exploited game developers while the gaming industry rakes in more money than the movie- and music industry combined, we should push hard for unions to protect the well being on creative potential of these workers. Idgaf if EA loses 10-25 million a year to additional wages. That money belongs to the workers in the first place.

[-] IMALlama@lemmy.world 21 points 10 months ago

It's probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it's still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they're a, "we're doing something" but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 5 points 10 months ago

According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.

Making games is expensive, you guys.

[-] TigrisMorte@kbin.social 10 points 10 months ago

And what was the board's compensation in comparison? No, making games costs what it costs. What is expensive is the marketing stupidity and the corruption and self serving in upper management.

[-] MudMan@kbin.social 6 points 10 months ago

Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.

But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.