The games industry is horribly structured.
I feel like games should have their own shares and the profits of such given to share holders. The devs obviously getting a decent chunk of the shares for... developing the game and the companies for the marketing and infrastructure capital.
Apparently there have been mass layoffs of American branches of Chinese companies all acriss fields so I think this might be more than just a capitalism strikes again to so worrying signs of political consequences.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to be completely ignoring this other major, obvious contributing factor.
Why would a Chinese studio want to deal with operating a small foreign branch in the USA right now in this business/political climate? Especially, when things look like they will just get worse.
Exactly, and a small 6 person support studio that isn't involved with ongoing development is only going to be at best a headache and at worst a major liability in the future.
I'm pretty sure they were under contract from the beginning, like most games now. Outside sources will take their technical lay-off and run with it like so. If they secure another contract again or not depends on the company sooo... hopefully they do.
I can confirm this I have Thadeus Sasser on LinkedIn as a contact and it is legitimate. I don't know what's going on anymore, but we should boycott Marvel Rivals.
Honestly I don’t get unemployment like why not just pay your employees instead of laying them off? Hell why do companies have low wages for employees? Like why not have the minimum wage be 50 bucks an hour? Most companies can afford to spend 50 bucks on their employees you know?
Hey, more info has come out suggesting this particular situation isn't as cut and dry as the initial post suggested. This silly post still holds true for the game industry at large and NetEase still isn't guilt-free, but this situation isn't AS all-encompassing as it seemed. https://bsky.app/profile/stephentotilo.bsky.social/post/3lij3gxn2l22g
I've read and reread this and I still don't see how it isn't. If you are a creator on a massively successful project, bankrolled by the largest, wealthiest corporation in the world, you should still have a job continuing to make things. You should still be able to feed your family.
I actually agree that there should be more security on a successful project like this. It's just that the initial reports suggested the MAIN team was laid off; NetEase is still guilty, and this isn't even the first time they've done this, but I thought adding more context to that post was important.
Sounds like the usual industry bullshit
"Difficult descision" my arse. The most difficult thing they had to do was exert the bare minimum effort to lift the pen they used to sign the paperwork
Wait. I'm confused. This makes no sense. I mean, the game is not only highly successful but I assume still running. So who is going to work on all the upcoming DLC and new characters? Is Marvel Rivals going to be the first actual success game to die within a year anyway?
The actual main dev team and the game's creative director will work on those, just like they have been. They're all Chinese. None of those people have been let go, and they have been communicating on the road map.
A small 6 person support studio that helped on parts of the early game were let go.
No problem. The entire reporting and online posting of this situation has been incredibly misleading and leaning heavily into clickbait. The full details of it are being pretty badly misrepresented.
Striking seems almost harmless compared to a team purposefully dragging a project on for years. Bad managers, turnover rates, etc. already do that as is... so, imagine 😂
I think we're getting psyop'd by the American team that helped work on the game being sacked since they weren't the main force behind the actual game itself.
I saw this earlier and I will try to paraphrase. Right wingers do not feel hatred for the secret evil cabal they think is ruling the world. They feel envy. That is how they want things done.
"Go woke go broke" has always meant "why can't we just make *our* (horrible) ideas so obvious?"
Let's be fair to Valve, when the community showed their presence and aired their grievences, Valve fixed the bot problem. How many game companies respect their players enough to actually listen and act?
from the information gathered from ppl on reddit and just general searching on google. its the director of netease who had slight work on marvel rivals who was under contract. NOT the actual marvel rivals dev team. the team was the R&D department, again under contract. it happens in IT field.
Just so you know, this isn't the game director; he's part of the support side of the game, and they no longer want Americans working on the game, apparently, and they were even told this isn't a permanent job.
The actual game director has already said he's basically lying.
This is horrific. I don’t understand the reason for firing employees that produced a seriously successful game. Especially leads that are responsible for directing its success? This industry is so ugly 😭 It sucks
So, I'm not like an amazing manager, but is it really that hard to organize a studio in a way that there's always a game in the pipeline? Why aren't they working on the next game?
but they are though. the thing is that by the time a development cycle is done:
- they don't need as many folks in pre-production so they scale down
- even if they are past pre-prod, by the end of a game's cycle, a lot of devs have moved into a higher pay tier and they don't want to have such a+
top heavy team (i.e. they don't want to pay all these new seniors/leads/etc.) so they get rid of them and hire anew at lower rates
- another big impetus for the fire-and-hire cycle is that they want to put more money in shareholder pockets lol
Considering the publisher is NetEase, they tend to stick to GaaS and just keeping their studios focused on their own games for as long as possible.... I think.
Like how Joker Studio released Identity V in 2018 and haven't worked on anything else since then
well, you see, there's a new nepotistic failson being handed reins for the next project, and so if course he wants a blank slate on which to tabulate his greatness and vision, you see
You mean the government that is currently filled with children that are running amok and removing funding for agencies they have no knowledge of the importance of?
That's another thing I don't get. If I finished a game, then I don't have to put any more money or effort in it, I get money for people buying it. If I make a live service game, I have to constantly spend on upkeep to have players. How is that better than the passive income of finished games?
Most non live service games have completed their maximum sales peak within 6 months (or much faster). After that the income from them is effectively (on the scales these folks are looking at) nothing.
You can poorly maintain a live service game for a lot longer and get noticeably higher returns.
You can also hire freelancers to maintain many parts of live service games, and freelancers don't get raises, or benefits, or need offices.
An additional bonus, freelancers are less likely to talk back, and the secondary point to all of this is control. They want no artists of any kind in the mix.
You have to retire the notion that folks making these decisions have any interest in making good games, or games at all. This is coming from the investment class. The only value media has to them is how much more it can earn over a period of time than the stock market or a savings account.
as long as they get good severance*, layoffs aren't as awful as we tend to portray. it would simply mean that the content that team is supposed to make is done and they aren't scaling to the moon.
Are you crazy? This is nonsense and easily the worst take I've seen. Even a good severance only lasts so long. Then what? No job = no job. No job means you don't have money coming in and that's a bad thing.
Real talk, this empowers piracy. It's not the only reason you preorder, buy full price, and generally don't pirate, but 'wanting to support good people doing good work' is a big reason why people pay. 'You are hurting the devs' is no longer a valid argument outside of indie titles.
Yes. But a lot of these games are live service games. So you can't pirate them without the entire back end ecosystem. Which is by design. It is one (of several) reasons they make some games live services that have no reason to be so
the purpose of live service games and DLC six months after launch to the industry was supposed to ensure work for teams that would have been laid off after launch because the next thing hasn't spun up yet. that worked for a while, until it didn't anymore
Sadly not a new phenomenon either. The company that made Lego Island fired everyone literally the day before release to avoid having to pay them bonuses. The industry is a fucked up place and I think that's part of the reason most of the good games from the last decade or so have been indie games.
It's pure insanity. NetEase is crashing its own game for the sake of saving a few paychecks and the belief they can string along the current content for as long as possible.
adds an extra layer of funny to the B.C. Piezophile dev being a shitlord by A/B clowning on the Concord devs when they got laid off and acting like he was some kind of special
I saw and I've delved in deeper. Seems it was mainly the DEI portion? Also see people saying it's because of the tariffs? The main studio is in China so while it's not that big of an issue I do hope that the people who were fired can find employment.
Okay but what if there really was too many people? Developing a whole game from the ground up seems like a work for more people than just maintaining it, making skins and gameplay adjustment?
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I feel like games should have their own shares and the profits of such given to share holders. The devs obviously getting a decent chunk of the shares for... developing the game and the companies for the marketing and infrastructure capital.
I hate shareholders and capitalism, too, but there's another fairly obvious reason contributing to this.
Why would a Chinese studio want to deal with operating a small foreign branch in the USA right now in this business/political climate? Especially, when things look like they will just get worse.
Chinese companies have no reason to trust the USA as of right now.
i could not deal with this shit all the time
https://bsky.app/profile/stephentotilo.bsky.social/post/3lij3gxn2l22g
"Difficult descision" my arse. The most difficult thing they had to do was exert the bare minimum effort to lift the pen they used to sign the paperwork
A small 6 person support studio that helped on parts of the early game were let go.
Fucking capitalist america.
Freaking executives.
At this point I wouldn't blame game developers for purposely making a bad game outta spite and to sink these awful companies.
"Go woke go broke" has always meant "why can't we just make *our* (horrible) ideas so obvious?"
OW/OW2= Blizzard.
Concord =
And now Marvel Rivals just fires its staff.
This gerne is cursed.
But it keeps being correct.
The actual game director has already said he's basically lying.
It is always this way, every industry.
- they don't need as many folks in pre-production so they scale down
- even if they are past pre-prod, by the end of a game's cycle, a lot of devs have moved into a higher pay tier and they don't want to have such a+
- another big impetus for the fire-and-hire cycle is that they want to put more money in shareholder pockets lol
Like how Joker Studio released Identity V in 2018 and haven't worked on anything else since then
You can poorly maintain a live service game for a lot longer and get noticeably higher returns.
An additional bonus, freelancers are less likely to talk back, and the secondary point to all of this is control. They want no artists of any kind in the mix.
*unconfirmed if they have good severance
source: i like having severance
Good severance.....
also overwatch is doing fine
they're video games. either play them or don't lmao
the whole whining about games crashing sounds like the ways losers who never play sports argue about sports teams
Am I glad you're not here to see this...
The game industry these days is so horrible, sending hugs to all the people that got laid off <3
They try to make it impossible to unionize on a full development layer, oof.