-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Deck Nine (Life is Strange: Before the Storm, True Colors, The Expanse: A Telltale Series) is laying off 20% of its staff
- Thread starter --R
- Start date
OP
OP
OP
OP
This shit never ends. How did the industry survive this long this generation only to collapse in on itself like a house of cards now?
(I mean I know the answer, it's "oh shit we can't maintain COVID numbers forever abort abort abort" from the shareholders, I'm just frustrated)
(I mean I know the answer, it's "oh shit we can't maintain COVID numbers forever abort abort abort" from the shareholders, I'm just frustrated)
View: https://twitter.com/lizbetballou/status/1762595727593656385
2 weeks severance for people working there 7 years.
Fuck Deck Nine's management. The most "optimistic" outcome is they laid off people from The Expanse team that couldn't transition to the Life is Strange team. Which, mind you, already lost some senior level employees last year to prevent junior staff from being jobless.
Fuck everything.
Fuck everything.
OP
OP
And Deck Nine is privately owned.
Infuriating.
Had to add The Expanse: A Telltale Series to the title, which should say something about how they justified throwing employees out of the building.
As shitty as this all sounds it doesn't seem like there was anything else that could be done. Leadership took paycuts and if they're privately owned it's not like they have other sources of cash other than what they make on games or from publishers (this isn't a particularly good time for game investment)
It's both the pandemic & the new younger bigger player base wanting a few select games that they invest in rather than having variety. Not blaming fortnite, but i'm blaming Fortnite.
I wish I could say that whoever signed that limited exclusivity deal with Epic for The Expanse really fucked up, but this was gonna happen either way.
I haven't played a Deck Nine game since Pain before they were even called Deck Nine, but sad to hear it - the narrative games they've moved onto aren't for me but they look really great with a lot of passion behind them. Best of luck to the developers in this shitty time.
Someone really needs to do a deep dive longread into what's going on, but my impression is...
a) Industry wasn't that healthy going into this generation
b) Budgets ballooned exponentially with this generation
c) The pandemic provided a temporary reprieve and convinced publishers (wrongly) there was an endless appetite for live-service-y stuff
d) Once lockdowns ended, the chickens came home to roost hard
e) High inflation and interest rates made the situation even worse
f) AI and the procedural generation built into stuff like Unreal Engine 5 was supposed to keep the cost of making current-gen AAA games reasonable, but it hasn't really panned out.
g) There's a huge glut of indie games so smaller devs are feeling the pinch too
I don't think the current wave of layoffs are exclusive to video game/general tech industry. A quite number of my patients got laid off in the recent months and none of them were working at a tech company. I mean, one of them was working at a hotel and the chain just shut the location down, a hotel isn't something that could possibly have profited off the covid pandemic.
hot take: games as a service are replacing games as an artform
They just don't want to admit it's because all the cool kids are doing it.
That and taking responsibility for bad management decisions.
Yup, and it's why everything in media (not just games!) is doing cross collaborations nowadays. People are terrified of launching something new and standalone. They'd rather just insert their stuff in something that is already out there.
It's certainly a bit of a weak cop out to put the blame squarely on that in this post, but it's not without merit — the industry is not growing "enough". https://www.matthewball.co/all/gaming2024
Hearts out to the devs, that 2 weeks severance is awful.
interest rates are high and growth is flat. —-> it's much harder to get funding.
so if you overhired during the pandemic...
I'd like to know too. It's not like the video game industry is crashing and sales are like 90% down. So what's happening?
The article linked above does a decent job at explaining some of the issues with the AAA/AAA-adjacent market. Basically, spiralling production costs vs. stagnant retail prices, low growth relative to other markets, and a higher interest rate environment. It's not just AAA either - getting funding for indie and mid-sized studios is a lot harder than it was a few years ago.
