Day[9] Rant - Recent Layoffs in the Gaming Industry
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
- It's a tough time in gaming, so here are my thoughts.
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I think this Charlie Brown guy makes a lot of sense...
...good grief! 🙄
wah waah wah wah waaah wah waah wah
@@Enjoyurble This is what Day9 sounds like to me these days.
He keeps pretending to be a game dev, I wish he'd just play the game.
@@KnownAsKenji pretending? I kinda assumed he was a dev 😂
Big budget AAA games are mostly just sandbox worlds filled with chores.
I could make one of those that is far more useful…
“Welcome adventurer! The kingdom of your room was hit by a natural disaster. Can you help by collecting 5 items of clothing and putting them back where they belong?”
“… good job adventurer, but your work has revealed a grilled cheese sandwich that ‘someone’ forgot about… cough… if we do not act fast the kingdom will be overrun by mold! Travel to the merchant Walmart to collect the enchanted gloves you will need to handle this cursed item and see it removed from the Kingdom and indeed… the continent of Your parents house!”
@@davfree9732 You just described how I trick my ADHD butt into doing things.
forced hires practices has fostered and manufactured this incompetence crisis
I want a low budget 2d rts, similar to wc2, but with all the problems that game has solved :).
@@davfree9732interesting concept but without a daily log in bonus I can't see myself playing for long
Honestly the thing I hate the most about the industries proverbial gold rush for "THE NEXT HIT MULTIPLAYER GAME" is how many video game developers set out to make a hit eSport. Live service is one thing, but the thing you'll quickly notice if you look at the most popular eSports is that virtually none of them launched in an even remotely balanced or god forbid "professional" state. But guess what, they were fun to play! And even if some things were critically unbalanced or at times blatantly unfair, the games were so good and attracted such a large audience that even if the balance was a complete mess, there was inevitably going to be a sizable portion of the player base that wants to compete to be the very best like no one ever was.
Like I know it's derivative to just say "Make fun games lol", but it feels like the industry forgets that in order to have a thriving player base that loves a game so dearly that they're willing to spend thousands of hours across several years playing it, you kinda have to make playing the game enjoyable first.
It's not entirely their fault. Some of the blame lays on the players as well. It's honestly not enough to make a good and fun games. Lots of good and fun games have come and gone. But with the sunk cost fallacy, good luck ripping players away from something like league of legends or dota where they've dumps thousands of hours if not dollars into that game. The bar is so high they need to make a smash hit to get players and keep players. It sucks on both sides.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 I think putting the blame on the players there is unfair. they've found a game they find *incredibly* compelling. how much of that can be traced to sunk cost or financial investment, it doesn't particularly matter. the idea of making a game to capture that player base in a similar way that isn't *significantly more compelling* than what they already have is a fool's errand. likely, whatever next big thing that shifts that market sometime in the future is *not* going to come from the seed of "how do we make LoL but better", but from some completely different direction
@@crushycrawfishy1765 That's not the blame of the players. It's a huge gamble trying to make a game in the exact same niche as the most popular or established title. When it is too similar people don't have any reason to risk jumping ship. It's like a lot of executives think they can make the next fortnite to the proverbial PUBG's out there, completely oblivious to all the factors that went into fortnite overtaking pubg.
@@Silas_MN I sort of agree with him. If all your friends play it, it's popular on twitch, content creators are there, and, well hence money is there, it's very hard to get a slice of that market. When a new game releases, it's a limited player base, new ones don't just spawn in. You have to take them away from other games, which means yours can't be just as exciting or just different - it needs to be way more to make people break their habits.
@@nanotech2080 Exactly. THis is why smite succeeded and every other MOBA failed. People loved MOBAS but hated the isometric view. Enter smite, a MOBA with 3rd person view and now you have a game that isn't like anything else on the market.
It's not enough to make a slightly better version of LOL or even objectively better version of LOL or whatever game, that's been going on for years and still regularly churns out content.
Players/people will always stick to the familiar than pick something new. Not unless that new thing is a ball pack homerun right off the bat and continues to be.
I just love the Warcraft 2 ost. There is definitely much wisdom in your words, but my mind just keep wibing with the music. 😇
I was wondering why I was hearing the pet battle music from wow constantly. Didn’t know they reused the WC2 ost
I can feel that, at least. Wish Day9 would stop talking about concepts outside of his field.
My 2 cents. I went and studied 'game design', but it was a misnomer, it was game development.
I learned, to some extent, animation, sound design, coding and time management.
At no point did the teachers or tasks discuss 'Fun' as the ends of our means.
I think too many people see “game design,” and their mind goes to sitting in a small meeting room with some snacks, saying, “wouldn’t it be cool if our game did this?” Not really knowing that the “idea guy,” is not a real job.
I mean if you go to an art school or something you wouldn't be learning about the exciting stuff at first but the bare basics
"If you don't know your destination port, no wind is favourable."
Very true in any work / grind context. I'm currently realising that with life things the opposite might be true sometimes :)
Loving the rants, always very worthwhile!
It's a nice quote, it's also interesting that if you're ok with many different ports then almost any wind at all is favorable
Yep; gold rush by an industry. They bought the best shovels and hored the best miners but there wasnt quite the gold in those hills that they thought
They did not hire the best miners at all. They hired a bunch of skinny women and theyre surprised they cant mine very well.
@@MrDezokokotar And they constantly distract the actual miners from doing their job, and protesting to have more "worker rights." Not only contribute they little to nothing, but they make negative contributions to overall productivity.
@@brianviktor8212 and when they found gold, they built a latrine over it...
@@MrDezokokotarnot always. Theyd sometimes hire one of the best miners then make him work with a puny budget, a skeleton crew and extremely limited time. Not to mention very little creative freedom.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Yeah but that has always happened. Hiring miners who obviously can't even lift a pickaxe just to look inclusive and diverse is new.
Your brother had a video like this but from an esports perspective. All the outside money came in and ROI wasn't there yet. The money pulled out and a crater left in the wake and basically had to rebuild.
People want fast returns. They don't want to stick things out or push through hard times. Those who succeed in life are willing to fail, learn, fail again.
Sure you need to know when to cut your losses. But those that succeed are willing to push through where others turn back.
@@Hebdomad7 that's very easy to say when it's not your wallet on the line. Imagine you've never heard of this brand new trend everybodies talking about called "klemp hopping" (made up word) you have no idea what it is, there's over 50 teams and growing inside of it, there's a ton of different ways to do klemp hopping and it's taking the world by storm. So you invest 20 million dollars into the biggest names in Klemp hopping that everybody knows. And then you lose that 20 million in the course of 6 months. Are you really going to throw another 20 million at it because other people are promising you it'll turn around soon?
@@crushycrawfishy1765 I think he's saying you need to be more proactive. Throwing money at something is not enough. You need to build it from the ground up.
@@andrewadami3920 Build what? Money comes from outside and has nothing to do with the developer. Almost all games come and go, only a few stay around for long enough to be worth investing in (cs, lol, dota, fortnite, maybe valorant). That's pretty much it. Even sc2 ran its course.
@@nanotech2080Then don’t invest massively in something you don’t understand or care about. Not every game studio loses money. Yes the people making the investments are not often the developers themselves, but they still need to be educated enough to make wise investments.
The "be interesting every 10 seconds, whether that's you or the gameplay or whatever" is, well...very interesting. There used a to be a channel called "Pre-Recorded" from some of the red letter media guys (Jack and Rich). They were extremely interesting to listen to, since they would cover all sorts of nerd media as they played, from comics to tv shows to industry news. Really good stuff that was were I got like, 90% of my media recommendations through. But they ended up stopping the channel because they were getting tired of playing games all the time and tired of trying to find new games to play - which caused some funny reactions from the community which was basically "We don't get a flip about the games you are playing - it's basically just background noise. YOU GUYS are the interesting part!".
So yeah, I just thought it was funny that it's kind of the reverse of the situation Day9 outlines, where they themselves were super interesting, but thought the games were the ONLY thing that had to be interesting! I know there's a few other reasons they wanted to stop Pre-Recorded (busy schedules etc.), but I always thought that was interesting to reflect on.
Just want to say thanks for bringing up previously recorded I just found this channel an have a hell of backlog to get through
I am a consultant/application developer and like game dev, the direction and requirements for a project is so crucial. That includes management. In a world of AAA gaming, it is driven by smash hits and the corpo suits are seeing only that.. It is not sustainable at the moment.
My main hobby is gaming and I can't imagine working in games. Even in the indie space. It is so scary to me. I highly recommend the Psych Odyssey docu series for Psychonauts 2 if you want some perspective. It is the most transparent view into development I have ever seen. It is crazy.
So true Sean. This is something I see a lot, people going into an industry with a skewed perception. I blame the social media and news for this. The one that get the most attention and view is the success stories, or the abysmal failures, the middle ground dont get as much traction. All the stories about studios and publisher making a hit games and net millions give the impression that making game is easy. I often get asked about breaking into the game industry, but the thing is, you don't need to ask anyone, just go to artstation and you see the quality and skills you should be aiming for, it is long, hard, and tedious hours of work and practice, and it still come down to luck if you get a job or not. Making games isn't easy or glamourous as people thought it is.
Making video games wasn't originally about trying to create the next big hit. For most people it was a passion project. To say yes I successfully made an interactive piece of entertainment for people to enjoy. The simplicity has become a distant memory.
imagine if metzen gather a dozen developers or so and make a 2d retro graphics warcraft 4 rts for 10 bucks. Insta-buy.
Speaking as a game dev I can say that no one sets out to make a mediocre game, it’s usually just that you run out of money and time. I’ll also say that most games don’t find the best way to make everything work to be “fun” until the very last minute, so you have to strike a delicate balance between improving what makes the game great and actually finishing off the whole game. Planning is impossible simply because no one knows what will actually be fun until you make it, and estimating how long things will take is a notoriously impossible task for developers. The only way that teams of developers get better at making games is to make more games. So even making mediocre games is progress on the way to making truely great games. So this wave that has ultimately stopped many game developers from actually practicing making games, I doubt that will be a good thing for people expecting the quality of games to increase
absolutely true. This is why it's so frustrating when gamers go "just make a game fun, how hard is that?" And it's like "dude, you have no idea how hard that is"
This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of mediocre games never turn around regardless of time or effort put in. It almost always comes down to design: if the actual game is good, players will slog through even horrendous technical issues to play it and those technical issues will eventually be fixed, if the game is mediocre, they won't. Very, very few games actually ever change their design-quality trajectory (the big example people throw around is FFIX but that had a full organizational reboot.) When a game comes out to mid or poor reception, it's usually because of underlying deal-breaking issues that the designer or multiple designers actually thought was good.
If you really want a final verdict, just look at the first patch. If the first patch efficiently addresses the problems people are reporting in a way that demonstrates clear vision or direction, then the game will be good 10 patches later. If the first patch flounders around, not really hitting any real problems outside of naive or simplistic changes just chasing reddit/streamer feedback then the game will be bad no matter how many more patches drop.
The idea that everyone is super competent and good at making games defies logic. Most stuff that people put out in any domain is just not great. Making a great game requires passion, talent, and timely inspiration. This is just a rare thing and that's okay.
@@woenilyksYeah, this 100%. The game being good is the number one priority, and the most difficult standard to achieve.
A great example of "technical slog but game is good" for me was Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. That game on release was full of crashes, bugs, horrible performance issues, and half of the features weren't even finished. But God damn if it wasn't fun as hell. Me and my buddies stayed in our rooms during COVID lockdown playing the shit out of that game because at the end of the day, the gameplay was so good that it was worth all the issues.
If your game is mediocre, no amount of polish will save it.
@woenilyks the vast majority of games don't get the additional development resources needed post launch if they launched as a mid game because the studio doesn't want or can risk more money on it turning around. But there are examples, things like the legion wow expansion that was given extra dev time which turned things around for blizzard and resulted in a new evergreen feature, diablo 3 with reaper of souls, cyberpunk, no man's sky, gta online..
Another problem is that older games and indie games make the industry much more competitive. No one's that interested in the next 7/10 triple-A release when we have a decade old backlog of masterpieces we've been meaning to get to that are all 20 bucks or less. Any full price release pretty much has to be Elden-Ring level for me and my friends to consider buying it.
In 2005, a new release basically only competed with other new releases. Now a new release is competing with all the top hits from 2010 onwards.
Yes. Back in the day you basically couldn't go back because graphics had moved forward leaps and bounds (obviously we do retro gaming but you get the point) now since around the Xbox 360 era everything has playable graphics/sound and it's easier and easier to make an indie game with decent graphics/sound so now it typically boils down a lot to mechanics, and it's way harder to systematically create good mechanics than it is to systematically create good soundtracks and graphics. And like you're saying, the pool is also just way more vast
So the gaming industry finally gets a taste of the book industry
Clicked for the rant
Stayed for the Warcraft 2 OST. Great game.
"How do I become a content creator???"
Make content people wanna consume.
Pretty good advice. Pretty good.
I think the bigger issue that people arguably miscategorize as "greed" is that the ownership and management structure of the vast majority of game studios strongly incentives short term profits and trend-chasing over reliable long term planning.
In a universe where more game's companies were worker-owned, hiring 20-30% more staff than you need would be rightfully seen as a colossal failure on the part of upper management to correctly manage long-term risk, and c-suites responsible for those failures would be out of a job if they couldn't turn things around without layoffs. But as long as share prices are maximized in the short term, there's very little reason for stockholders at big companies to consider layoffs a real management failure. And the result isn't just layoffs, but more cancelled projects and worse games overall as developers are further overworked to cover for these failures.
Just a deplorable state of affairs, and one I've heard is pretty common in the wider software industry as well, sadly.
Yup, layoffs do happen for a variety of reasons, but when the reason is because of mismanagement and the people making these mismanagement mistakes aren't also being fired that's when people get upset. The incentive structures for companies need to be reworked to align management with the long-term perspective.
that's just "greed" with more words tacked on.
It's even more insidious in that layoffs are seen as a necessary and good tool to boost your company's valuation by corporate management. It's one of the strongest levers in their arsenal to boost stock price, because that need for exponential growth is difficult fulfill by consistently creating new and good ideas. Suppressing wages and cyclical layoffs is much easier by comparison unfortunately.
The part about investors isn't really accurate. Shareholders overwhelmingly prefer a long-term stable company with consistent profit over a company that tries to cannibalize itself for some short term gain or exponential growth. Investing in a company a few years to get short term profit is considered an idiot-level mistake that no one really does.
The problems you're thinking about come from management not having a stake in the company. If a CEO makes 1 million a year no matter what, and they want to get a better ceo job in 5 years, trying extremely risky and stupid things is a good idea. If it works, you get a better job, if it doesn't, you get a similar job and blame the failure on other factors.
The solution to this isn't to make things worker owned (there's lots of negatives for employees and job creation if this happens), but to make sure management compensation is directly tied to long term company performance.
This is also why companies that are owned by the founders have much lower instances of these types of problems.
Edit: also mutual companies seem like an interesting model for entertainment businesses over co-ops.
Investors see layoffs as cost cutting, and they like cost cutting. When Hasbro fired a bunch of WotC people close to the holidays, their CEO made sure to say in his corpospeach memo that they were looking to be a "leaner company", that company was already understaffed before they did that. Firing people at specific times helps you prop up your books, not unlike writting off entire movies you spent considerable money on for tax reasons before they even see the light of day. That only makes any sense in a system were the target audience for those decisions isn't the consumers, is the investors. All we can do about is choose to not get invested in properties that belong to teh souless open megacorps, and focus on things that are created by people that are at least somewhat indepedent and passionate instead.
Hearing the Warcraft 2 soundtrack again... man it's so good.
pet battle music
"What happens if they're building toward an unclear target" sounds like the Stormgate slogan.
Sean brings up a very good point about 7 out 10 games not being good enough.
Right now on my PC I have ready to play: FFXIV, Trackmania, all of the Souls games, Risk of Rain 1 and 2, Terraria, BG 3, Talos Principle 1 and 2, Armored Core, etc etc. All of those are 9 and 10 out of 10 games. A bunch of them I haven't finished. Why in god's name I would play shit like Suicide Squad or Starfield.
it takes a lot of mental effort to start a big game such as a souls game, on the other hand some of the games you can just jump in and play. Not everyday a person can watch a masterpiece movie, you spend time with mediocre tv series and watch really good stuff just time to time
Hi Sean, I'm curious, are there specific micro and macro strategies to dialogue content and delivery of speech that you take (or avoid) to maintain such high content quality?
I've been watching your stuff for years Sean! It's great that you are introspective about your own performance and appreciate the brutality of numbers. There are always gold nuggets in your streams that seem to spontaneously come into existence. Much love and respect.
And very nice quote!
You are very on the point here, many investors or managers do not seem to know what makes games appealing, they just know what might sell them. They might even calculate with that risk, but not the human cost or prestige cost if one fails, because they can only see investment vs payoff. Also, the industry is still a highly unregulated and union-soft, so exploitation and gambling is done before respecting the people that make the games. It's exists in many industries, that disconnect between the investor, or shot-caller and the actual craftspeople, but in games it certainly amplified with the technical challenge vs how dependent on steady employment it is.
Something I see streamers do that I think helps them is being informative, opinionated, talking their thoughts out loud, and they usually play a game that doesn't require complete concentration on the game. The last point I made is especially crucial due to the interaction time needed for their audience's chat, whether answering questions or just reading chat out loud. It's nice to be seen and have one's voice heard online.
As a perfect example to this, we have Day9 able to pause his game to interact with his stream and give all those points I listed, which I find awesome and crucial in streaming.
This is why he's so awesome when playing Hearthstone, but less interesting when playing WC2 because I find he's quiet a lot of the time
@@BlockheadJiujitsu wc2 is a massive nostalgia trip though.
I don't disagree. Though when it comes to AAA studios I think there is a big problem of investors having a say in what the game should be. Investors invest for the sole purpose of return of investment, this often results in following fads and innovation stagnation since they want to make money as efficiently as possible, because they benefit from it. I believe the moment a studio listens to investors is when a great studio becomes mediocre and bland at best. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. This also relates to layoffs, lay off people before the yearly report to artificially inflate the margins (or whatever the exact statistic they use).
I work in the industry. It's really not complicated. First, less money is being spent on movies and video games nowdays and companies are dumping more money for making them which leads to number two; games are becoming harder to make for multiple reasons. The pandemic has change the way we make game. Game company are trying to having employees back in their studios. This is why Indie developper are doing so well. They often have tighter control on the outcome, less employees to manage and communication is easier that way. Lastly, it leads to what is being discussed; quality. The quality of video game is going down on average because of number 2.
I think the biggest problem is the mentality that is driving the direction of game design. One game does something fun and innovative and thus has success from it. Then the investors see that this thing did well, so they need to replicate it ad nauseum. Game design decisions are being driven by sales data and marketing surveys rather than actual game design principles. And this problem has been going on for *decades.*
I want to note that a 7/10 game from an individual or a super small team of people can actually be "good enough" in the sense that if a small audience thinks its a 9/10 it will pass with them and do well. Only once you have big teams does the game need to be killer to be worth it.
The reverse of this has also been common! Many live service games that are poorly handled and badly marketed have enormouse loyal fanbases despite it all. Guild Wars 2 feels like one marketing disaster after another but its core gameplay, especially its combat, are so fun that it's become completely unkillable
I used to believe that, but sadly what he was talking about applies to gw2 at its current state.
@@jancuq2585 Nah, it's still extremely fun. But people do eventually get bored of everything, and burned out mega-grinders are the source of 90% of the complaining about that game imo
The music is somehow timed perfectly with this rant
It's exactly how you described it. I was affected by a recent layoff in the gaming industry (not AAA, but mobile-gaming) and people just saw the gaming industry explode during the pandemic. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie and studios popped up left and right. I still remember when it came to making our games the actual effort that went into the fundamental gameplay was maybe 20%, while the monetization made up 80%. That's just not how you make good games.
"what's the easiest way to make this thing make a bunch of money" is a mindset that's really creeped in and poisoned so many wells in the industry
Copying only gets you so far, have to differentiate your product from its competition
@@TreesPlease42it's simply cheaper to copy the ideas of a game, monetize it heavily, get whatever profits you can get then shutdown the studio you funded. You still get a piece of the pie. Trying to make something actually innovative means larger expenses, risks and volatility - everything a good investor hates
You have some good points in here, but I don't know if those points support your conclusion that well.
While what you're saying makes sense regarding how to make a fun game, that only makes all these layoffs remotely justifiable if you assume the premise that either 1) a better game equals a more profitable game, or 2) the people in charge care about the quality of the product more than they care about the profit they make from it.
I find it very hard to believe in either of those.
I believe the solution starts with DIRECTORS. Movies are similar, where money can put the production together, but you gotta have a good vision and direction to execute. And this needs to come top-down, from a good creative leader that people can follow. None of that bikeshedding or design-by-committee junk. I think too many gaming companies have been putting Executives and VP's at the helm of their production rather than great creative people with good track records. This is something that some Japanese game companies are getting right.
Not always. There's plenty of people with visions and dreams. It's just that their vision just sucks.
That's probably cuz the Japanese companies can't fire their devs wily nily like the western ones. Nintendo has like 98% employee retention rate (sounds like socialism I know)
Is day9 playing the old warcraft games? I have always wanted to play Warcraft 1 and 2, is therw a legal way to do so?
Blizzard got GoG to make them available for digital download some years ago. They are the experts on getting old games to run so that's normally where he goes to play old games anyway.
I got them few days back when day9 started them enjoying the hell out of them reliving my childhood fully recommend
This really helps me stay confident in talking about Infinity Wars feature of making a card game where you get all the cards and not being pay to win like basically every other card game out there, instead of hyping the stuff you mentioned. Thanks Day9!
What a great "mini talk" from Day[9]. Does anyone know whether we can find this in transcribed form, or at least w/o the loud background music?
This is completely unrelated but I didn't realise so much of the original HS soundtrack was just remixed WC2 music
You're not going to make the next big thing if you're only ever chasing is the last big thing - and yet this is what game companies do, endlessly
How many CEOs were laid off from the major studios? How many of them took pay cuts?
The purpose of these layoffs is to reduce labor costs so the executives and shareholders can take that money
Owners and shareholders want to make money you say? Wild...
CEOs don't make money if the company stops making money. Can't make money if you are making bad products that don't sell. Not everything is "muh greedy capitalism"
The money companies make is not a vacuum that goes directly into executive pockets. They have to actually continue to make money and grow the company, otherwise they fail. You don't have that responsibility, you have it easy as the peanut gallery redditor
It's not **that** cut and dry, but you *are* right in several ways. There's some big companies that absolutely had no real reason to lay off anyone besides reducing labor costs because it looks good for earnings.
I'd say a lot of the less big companies really did just make poor growth decisions, they realized they can't support those assets, then they cut them off. That would be good, if the people making the decisions were the ones who were punished. But, nope.
@@slipperysteve8thats not actually true, there are a lot of companies, especially in the tech industry, that operate at a loss but make tons of money for the board and higher ups through the stock market
Hey, i discovered your chanel with asmon, i wish you the best and hope to get more insight on game dev from you! Thanks!
Man, I no longer watch Day9 regularly, but every time one of his videos pop into my feed I don't hesitate to watch it. He is just so articulate and makes excellent points. I always learn something about the industry.
Thank you !
eyyyyy , never knew that the in-game pet battle music in WoW was from WC2 at 6:15 ish
You have no idea how apt that sailing metaphor is. While working on a project that went nowhere, we were asked every so often on what kind of seas we were sailing (yes literally that). Anytime someone would mention that they didn't understand the full vision yet, couldn't see the fun in there, etc. We got told "you don't have the full picture yet." There never was a full picture. Leadership was sailing without a course and without a map. Getting told by investors what the next feature for the milestone was going to be. We would make a half finished feature, show it to them and then move on the next thing they requested, while never finishing the previous thing. By the end it either gets canned or rushed out the door as a mediocre product that nobody wants. I have gotten more experience working a crap than working on actual games at this point.
This is a nice rant.
its not just layoffs in gaming. lots of businesses, especially the banking industry, are firing their work from home employees expecting 30% of them not to return to the office by force. if businesses can, they try to get people to quit so they dont have to deal with the political fallout of layoffs.
They also like to clear-house only to rehire the same positions. This is to mix things up, weaken employee power, and form new loyalty.
@@TreesPlease42 long ago back when i was homeless and working at a gas station, i could overhear the owner bitching to my manager that the employees dont quit enough. she didn't want to have to pay the people that had been there for years the base wages plus their yearly raises and mandatory benefits. (back then an employer only had to provide healthcare options after an employee was there for a year) so funny to me that the owner would entrust me alone in her business with the key for barely more than minimum wage but that wasn't enough. the manager was a great lady, believed treating people with respect would lead to its reciprocation. she was the only reason that place didn't fall apart.
There's a lot of dumb executives and people with money who don't understand the value of their human resources. New hires are expensive in time wasted getting them up to functional.
@@Zraknulthey are not dumb it's simply by design. If your company is profitable you'd want to expand it otherwise you are wasting potential and falling behind. If you expand and you start incurring losses you have to stop the bleeding somehow (layoffs are an easy option). If you don't expand then you fall behind and sooner or later you'll lose enough market share and then have to close shop. Both lead to the same outcome
@pramitpratimdas8198 if you're mass hiring and mass laying off all the time you're literally burning money because you're not getting employees familiar with your business long enough to earn you money. Software isn't unskilled labor, it takes time to get up to speed.
Can we get Day9's top 5 must read books on business, creativity, and gaming?
Great analysis and /agree 100%
Why is it so hard to yeet incompetent management anyway? And what are the executives doing for their ridiculous salaries and bonuses?
the music lol
We need more rants to the Warcraft 2 soundtrack.
Dude - as a game dev I have been saying for years that if a game isn’t massively successful, it’s not good enough. Anything worth while will find its audience and spread like wild fire.
What's the criteria for success? Sales? Plenty of great games that sold poorly. Critical response? Cult classics like Pathologic got poor reviews on release. Hell the initial response to Demon Souls in japan was lukewarm at best (as opposed to near universal acclaim it got in the west much later)
I've played too many incredible games that didn't get huge sales to believe this. There are also so many bad games that have tons of sales.
You have to make literally the best game of the genre and have the genre be massive, things like Minecraft and Stardew valley come to mind.
Realistically if you want to make big games consistently you need marketing. Good marketing and an 7/10 will outperform a 9/10 in most cases. I guess your counter is to make a 10/10, but that's not realistic in terms of being consistent
game development has always been volatile; you're always gambling on your next project - it can utterly flop and you are either 1) screwed or 2) going to be screwed on the next flop. There's always an element of luck involved (regardless of your planning, etc) that eventually the house always wins. The bigger your budget the more flops hurt.
If your goal is to get better returns and you measure success based on sales alone then it's probably true. If your goal is to make a good game, then even if it flop, atleast you've made a good game. There are plenty examples of great games with poor sales but end up as cult classics
Fantastic points
Very good take
What other people think is always secondary. What matters most is the thing you're actually making. That is the fact of reality that everything you do should be grounded in. What other people think is important, but you cannot expect to make others think well of you time and time again, if you never actually deliver, because all you're selling is a big bag of air. That's called fraud.
Also, the games that make the most money aren’t the 10/10 games
1:10 - it's so much more than that though. It's not just the gaming industry. It's the entire tech industry. And funnily enough - it's largely nothing to do with the industry or the companies involved.
It's a macro-economic issue stemmed from the fact that these companies or teams were created during times of cheap debt (pandemic) and (relatively) lower cost of living. Now, interest rates are up, debt is expensive, cost of living is through the roof (which applies pressure to companies to increase wages) and companies are stuck in the middle of two very severe pain points. The playbook exists for a reason. If you need to clear up $10 million in debt, the easiest way to do it is to remove 10 people from your company. People are your most expensive assets.
Now imagine you have $500 million in debt...
AAA companies have become complacent in business and are no longer aiming to produce anything but a marketable product. From the top down they have baked in the culture of marketability, reach and growth instead of fun, community and future.
Bro, I see Warcraft 2, I give a like and subscribe. Now I’m gonna look through your list and see if you’re streaming Warcraft 2 campaigns.
More compelling is seans take on broadcasting. He has a very unique viewpoint, as hes professionally trained for it.
I think 'being entertaining every 10 seconds' is a very dangerous concept.
Much like the games industry argument, there are a lot of very popular Streamers who provide little to no useful information or quality gameplay, but survive simply by acting for views.
Twitch has an interesting dynamic, since skilled professional players have a default audience that will show up just to see their skills showcased regardless of that players personality.
Sadly, this feels more rare in modern times, and extreme skill tends to be eclipsed by extreme clowns
it always hurts to see studios shut down that make *actually good games*. but they do either way.
what about hi-fi rushes studio, that game litterally got praised into heaven for being the work of love that it was. That studio being shut down just hurts to watch.
It doesn’t matter how praised a game is if it doesn’t meet sales expectations.
It could be the best game ever... It needs to meet sale expectations on top of a future game in the works that's planned to do better.
That's Microsoft for you. If you owned by MS anything can happen.
I watched a documentary about a game franchise (idk what it was atm), they got bought by MS and the new boss killed an MMO that was already in development because his job appointment would end before the release of the MMO, so he would only get the costs and not the earnings. The man had a quota.
Tons of games get praised into heaven without being excellent. Hi Fi Rush wasn't an excellent game
@@icechingu hifi rush IS an excellent game. legit the best game released by a big studio in years.
Shit this makes me want to watch your stream
Omg Warcraft 2
As someone w/o Sean's unique industry-specific perspective, I think I'm more inclined to see this as a broader phenomenon and disagree with his assessment...The problem with saying, "The industry just needs to do better; it's really competitive out there" is that other industries are showing this is an oversimplification and that socioeconomic conditions dwarf the influence of 'creatives who plan better'. Are Marvel movies getting worse because filmmakers are getting worse at writing? (Or for my IT pals, did VMware staff get laid off in droves because the software is suddenly unusable? cough cough corporate merger cough cough) I think not. As profits rose, we didn't see better movies coming from the big studios, did we? We saw corporate consolidation and a WRITER'S STRIKE! IMHO, this is about the failure to proportionally reward employees for the increases in revenue that they are ultimately responsible for. The mandate for C-suite execs in unfettered market capitalist environments is to ACQUIRE and GROW, not create. These incentives encourage the company to produce the 'expensive-looking, mostly broken, Kevin Hart-voiced title', buy smaller studios to cover the inevitable deficit when that game flounders, and the PLAN adjusts so they can do it again and again (and if I'm doing my job as the contract defines...am I really being "greedy"?). All that fresh blood in the games industry? Makes it really easy to PLAN to fire and re-hire >80% of the team for each project, REGARDLESS of result. Increased competition across the market SHOULD drive up the total volume of games that fail. But to act like that's the reason for a dramatic uptick in layoffs (the likes of which can be observed ACROSS industries) is to miss the forest for the trees... TLDR - Trust-busting is dead, this is all Nixon's fault, and 'blind optimism' from the market is nowhere near as damaging as anti-populist government policy.
What happened to your hair?! The Legend still lives!
one really important thing to remember is that even the best authors / game developers / creatives have their flops / misses; with game development if your budget is always big you are guaranteed to fail eventually (at a smaller scale - like for an individual author; if you have a crappy 2-3 years you just don't release your crap work, for a multi-million dollar project that's impossible).
I strongly agree. There have been a lot of games in recent years where you hear about it and are like really? You had no idea what you were doing for that long? Like with mass effect Andromeda, there's this huge development cycle and people are like wow. Thats what you made? But really they kind of fucked around with procedural generation for a really long time, seemingly fruitlessly, and then they reached a point where higher ups finally were like ok we need an actual, real game. And then Andromeda was pieced together mostly in like 2 years give or take. This isn't an uncommon story in the industry even for large games. I'm not 100% sold that this is the only issue but it's certainly a very large issue.
I'm also curious where some game ideas are really coming from. You see a title like suicide squad which was very negatively received when it was first shown off. A title that was in development for quite awhile. And you cant help but wondering how they were insulated from that response.
there are things that fit into a management / investement level overview, and then there are things that actually determine whether the game is good, subtleties, synergies, polish, etc, and there is no overlap in the venn diagram. so the management / investment puts their energy into tuning and cranking all the levers that exist at their resolution, but none of them are actually meaningful levers, and by manipulating the project in this way they disempower the actual designers and engineers whose work will actually determine the outcomes, its almost as funny as it is sad
The industry over-hired in the pandemic and expected infinite growth. The AAA industry is too big to succeed, they cannot adapt to the fast changing market
WOW, that question, "Why don't they just make good games?" LOL How are people this ignorant?
I mean, it is a legit question.
Movie games, bad writing, terrible characters, absent gameplay or worse, boring rote 3rd-person "action" gameplay in the Ubisoft mold, boring worlds, boring worlds adapted from people's boring D&D campaigns, the list goes on and on. The project leads and people greenlighting projects are taking a fat dump on this industry while the technical and art folks take the hit. This liquidation phase is necessary but the wrong people are getting punished. We need fewer and better games.
9:57 lmao based question
I disagree with you on your perspective, I don't think that people are angry because companies that make bad games get closed, they are angry because even if you make a good game, you still roll a dice if you get fired or not.
First, your example of voice recording is not really fair, most people do not like the sound of their voice so obviously they would not like it. The way to overcome it is practice, and the same is true for videogames/streaming/any skill. It's also holds true for videogame development, but how can you gain that experience if you get fired after one bad performance? It feels that there's a knowledge drain, every time you layoff a team and create a new one you start from square one and it affects the quality of the product.
And more importantly, there are absolutely unreasonable expectations for the game performance. Look at Tango Gameworks, you may not like some of their earlier games, but here's hi-fi rush, it was well received, it got multiple awards, people liked it and the studio still got closed down. Look at Square Enix, FF7 remake sold millions of copies, and the company reported that the game 'did not meet expectations'. There is this gaping maw of 'expected sales' and unless you game is literally fortnite you cannot overcome it ever. Add to that less than acceptable working hours, crunch times, kinda bad salaries (at least for the amount of effort people put in) and no job stability.
Current state of the videogame industry is a meat grinder, it has been for decades, and it should not be the standard we strive for.
Good doesn’t matter. Good doesn’t pay your salary. Sales do
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re talking about irrelevant shit.
Money talks. People are not buying the products.
Making 1 good game doesn't recoup the millions Tango has cost their owners in order to sustain their failures.
Bethesda / Zenimax has been a money pit for YEARS for Microsoft.
Starfield failed.
Fallout 76 has repeatedly failed.
Elder Scrolls is still too far out.
New Fallout is still too far out.
Arkane has repeatedly failed.
Tango Gameworks has repeatedly failed.
That entire conglomerate of studios has REPEATEDLY failed. You don't get to constantly underperform and not expect to be cut eventually. You have racked up 10's of millions in debt, 1 game FINALLY being "good" doesn't mean you are in the clear.
More than likely, Tango wanted to dip back into their failed franchises again and had no action plan that could show they could repeat success. I wouldn't put my stock into "Well Hi-Fi Rush was good, so maybe NOW they will finally make a good Evil Within game!"
Doesn't work that way.
@@WeinerTouchy except that it's entirely on Microsoft for pulling that shit.
Yes, make a studio that never done a co op shooter make a co op shooter. Don't even do a cheap KI community showcase tournament because they don't want KI being hyped for a potential sequel. Do zero promotion for HI-fi rush, a game that people completely didn't see it coming, then wonder why sales aren't up to snuff.
Skyrim is one of the best selling games of all time. Arkane has repeatedly made critically acclaimed games and cult classics. At one point you have to wonder why these developers who were supposed to be some of the best suddenly start making shit games following mergers/shift in corporate leadership. Instead of blaming the leadership they are simply laying off the devs @@WeinerTouchy
1) its sad and ironic that Sean is discussing this over Warcraft considering where Blizzard went (RIP).
2) Since when does Sean have a wife
Sean's wife confines him and his cats to the room at the end of the hallway
The whole discourse around the layoffs, and the fact that a lot of the media suddenly realized these stories are great for clicks, has just been weird. It's been a frenzy of feeding "emotional garbage" to an uninformed audience. Did some of it warrant the attention it got ? Probably. But never in my 20-ish years of following the industry has there been an inkling of similar attention to the business side of studios and publishers.
I guess it got primed with the whole MS acquisition debacle last year, but no one used to care or pay attention to stuff like this unless it was some big shot leaving or getting fired or a darling studio getting shut down. EA had a run in the noughties and 2010s where they were buying and shutting down studios all over the place, and sure they got some flak but it was nowhere close what we've seen this year.
If they weren't making great games, then good shut em all down
Every tech company has laid off last year or two. Unless someone is in AI companies aren't interested.
didn't expect you to be based, i guess the gamefest presenter script was just really bad lol
The economy is in shambles, what do you expect?
I wonder how Riot Games layoffs fit in this narrative.
Wonderful to see these idea floated in a mainstream space. Hubris and ignorance are way more responsible for the deluge of awful coming from, as said, most/all creative fields these days.
Diablo 4 anyone? Millions of people behind it, legendary studio and IP, current generation everything! And nobody bothered focusing on making the game any good, then they decided to delude themselves into thinking it couldn't be their fault, it must be their customers who just don't know what they like. Now they're apparently still trying to fix it but frankly anyone still giving them attention at this point is part of the problem.
Yeah, I don´t beleive for even half a second that most of these layoffs aren´t just the usual slimming down of companies after they released something as to make it more profitable on paper and then sell it. Laws that make such layoffs possible should be changed, how can you live like this? How are games being made AT ALL?
the most popular games aren’t 10/10 games though
The poor planning / management of this video is having the background music blasting in the background.
He could go on forever :D
You're interesting every 5 seconds Day9 :)
Sean, working in tech generally, I've seen such incompetence at the level of leadership. It's just a real shame.
too many games being released
So, less filler. Got it. :)
whats crazy is y ou look at the sea of thieves announcements and it very much is like what people compared it to at release. they would call it nomans sea because it was so much like nomans sky in promising a lot and delivering nothing. but bugs and programing incompetence aside sea of thieves has so much to offer now. though porting a 6 year old insanely buggy game to a new console without at least finally fixing 6 year old bugs is kinda... weird. but hey they werent planning to be nearly as successful as they are so
There's also this really odd cultural influence that creates an expectation in the employees mind. Generations ago, it was common to get a job, and keep that job for 30 years. There are still some industries like oil drilling, mining, manufacturing, where you really become a lifer because it's all you know how to do. These jobs required training, there were other social and cultural reasons where people defined who they were by what they do "I am a plumber" or "I am a mechanic" or "I am a teacher". Defining ourselves by what we do means we tend to put a lot of our self worth into our current job.
Consequentially, society tells us that if you lose your job, it's traumatic, you did something wrong, you should have done better or you should have been more talented or been a better fit.
What I've come to realize and has helped me through a half a dozen layoffs in my 15 year career in the games industry and what I tell people who struggle with the trauma, something they don't like to hear, but it's their sense of entitlement that is causing them pain and grief. You are not entitled to a job, you're not entitled to the one you had or the next one you'll have, you don't have a god given right to have a job, you have to contribute to society in a way that is productive, and by doing so, you overall will have a career. Stop playing a victim because the job was never yours in the first place. It was an opportunity for you to trade your time, skill, effort, ideas etc for money, period. You will have more if you like, but you have to work for it, and what you choose to provide as a contribution to a productive society, will determine the "security" of your job. If you picked "games industry" and not "medical doctor" guess what, you never should have expected to have job security in the first place. Adjust your expectations and move on.
As a doctor let me tell you even a career of a doctor isn't going to be super secure in the coming years.
You're kinda ignoring examples like Tango Gameworks that put out a fantastic game yet still got shuttered for seemed to be purely quarterly-line-go-up corporate ghoul reasons. There was no failure at any point there but they still got axed. And then there's Embracer Group's CEO suddenly needing to find a few billion because a verbal deal fell through.
Overall, Sean seems to be putting a "survival of the fittest" hopeful smiley-face on a situation that is just arbitrary and bad, because it almost demonstrably doesn't matter how "fit" you, your team, or even your game studio are when some Microsoft VP needs to so much as make a least significant digit round up instead of down.
Releasing 1 great game doesn't change the fact that Zenimax is a bloated and poorly managed entity.
You're ignoring the fact that every. single. closure that Microsoft recently did was targeted at Zenimax.
Starfield flopped.
Elder Scrolls 6 is still far off into the horizon.
New Fallout is still probably even farther.
Arkane flopped multiple times.
Their mobile studio was closed down now that Microsoft owns an even BETTER mobile studio that has a strangle hold on the mobile market.
Fallout 76 is just not starting to find it's footing after MULTIPLE years.
How many times are you expecting Microsoft is going to let Zenimax get away with failures while trying to justify their massive costs to support all these studios that make ONE good product out of 10?
And let's not forget that even Tango itself wasn't THAT great of a studio. The Evil Within isn't a blockbuster franchise, it has a cult following but the games are below average. Ghostwire was decent, but nothing really to go crazy over, and they had ONE hit with Hi-Fi Rush. Does that mean Microsoft should greenlight Evil Within 3, just to let it have middling sales? Should they take a risk that Tango can make the same magic happen with a Ghostwire 2?
Does Microsoft take the risk of greenlighting another Hi-Fi rush, just for people to say it's too similar to the first and get middling review scores and sales?
Having 1 break out game after 3 lukewarm ones doesn't justify the costs of keeping the doors open and the lights on. The success of Hi-Fi Rush doesn't wipe away the millions of losses Tango built up over the years in development costs.
Do you realize that Hi-Fi Rush wasn't made by Tango Gameworks as an abstract entity, it was made by talented people who worked at Tango Gameworks? And that those people left the studio to go work elsewhere after the game was released? Why should a hollowed-out studio be kept alive when the people who made it successful are gone?
Have they tried releasing good games that don't artificially cost 900 million to make? Don't remember asking for Hollywood celebrity voice actors. Do you?
If you make a boring game, it won't sell well.
I feel like this fundamental truth is lost in a sea of "Games are art!" and "Investors love DEI!". And while both of those statements are true, they don't lead to a good game inherently. Gamers have a built up resistance to DEI because it's in everything now and it mostly comes across as tokenism and patronization. And for the first statement, games are as much a science as they are an art. It doesn't matter how beautiful your game looks if it runs at 15 fps peak. And it doesn't matter how incredible your music design is if the gameplay is literally an empty open world with the most robotic NPC's imaginable.
Every game should start with a "gameplay first!" mindset and plan, and then build everything else on top of that. Sadly that isn't the case these days. Also what's with the writing in like... everything? Movies, games, TV shows... I feel like writing quality in entertainment has fallen off a cliff in the last decade.
Of course this only really correlates to AAA these days. Indie devs have been killing it for years now.
DEI is marxist ideology, it’s hot garbage.
Deserved :)
It seems unlikely that so many studios would have "bad plans" at the same time. Its not only game studios either, we see the same in movies and TV.
Its not just the plan.
Individuals are in fact often incompetent, because lately there has been a lot of hiring based on arbitrary characteristics such as gender or how progressive someone is rather than how good and accomplished they are.
Add to that the pressure to make games "inclusive", with artists and writers bending over backwards to make their work diverse, inoffensive, appeal to everyone etc., stifling creativity, resulting in bland characters and stories.
Overmonetization is a big problem, but its far from the only problem. People in the industry should start speaking up about other problems too even if its unpopular or the layoffs will only get worse.
Yes, wokeness is ruining everything, and Sean is wrong about the money aspect, it's about sending the "message". Money doesn't matter (Since they are "losing" trillions of dollars) when you own the banks and therefore the billionaires, millionaires and the average joe's money, we are paying for our own "decline".
Was tango gameworks fired cuz they hired based on DEI or their game was too "woke"? You are simply arguing in bad faith, refusing to see the fundamental issues with the industry and instead focusing on silly, superficial culture wars
@@pramitpratimdas8198 I dont know about Tango but yes there have been companies that were shut down because of failed products that failed because of woke pandering. Luminous productions of SE that made Forspoken for example, same with Arkane Austin, Rocksteady has been laying off, and many more.
It obviously doesnt just happen for one reason, but woke crap that players reject is one of the reasons.
It's not always a problem with the quality of the game. Take Tango Gameworks for example, Hifi Rush was critically acclaimed. Microsoft still killed the studio because it didn't meet sales expectations, despite its high quality.
That just isn't true.
Aaron Greenberg (Vice president of Xbox marketing) is on record saying that Hi-Fi Rush met expectations for Xbox and players.
The only thing that can be assumed about Tango being closed is that they were either 1). Consolidating workforce into studios that needed it. 2). Tango had no feasible roadmap for what they wanted to create next. 3). Xbox cut Tango to cut loses, giving Tango the opportunity to come together under a new indie umbrella and make what they want to make.
There are MULTIPLE reasons that could be why they were closed, but to go around and go against what the Vice President of marketing for Xbox has gone on to say himself is just ridiculous.
"It's not the result of greed" is a weird conclusion to arrive at after describing people with money entering the gaming space because it can be connected with crypto.
You missed the part before that. The studio's being shut down wasn't necessarily because of greed. If the business ain't making enough money to keep the lights on.... well the lights are gonna be off. So regardless of whether or not the people entering the market and footing the development costs are greedy, if the game the studio is making isn't good there's no studio.
You are either misinformed or arguing in bad faith. Ff16 broke sales records yet the studio was disbanded. This is not a gaming only trend but thoughout the whole tech industry. Companies are setting record profits while simultaneously laying off huge chunks of its labour force that were responsible for the profits in the first place. It has nothing to do with keeping the lights on in the studio, it never has @@jackinthebox301