Vaporstrike

horrifically depressing year to be trying to find a job in games or tech

Seeing people on Resetera trying to argue semantic with "it HAS been a good year for games, just bad for devs" without realising you don't get one without the other was driving me up the wall.

It fucking sucks!

Really never ever want to buy AAA games (and lower-profile-but-still-pretty-big games, too) because of this hellscape of an industry that'll just go "Anyway, you don't have any workers' protections in this economy and we've deemed you unnecessary/too expensive, bye" and instantly fuck over anybody it wants to. I just. Why the fuck can't companies/game studios generally treat devs/creatives with respect (it's because they don't have to, obviously. Thanks regulations that may as well not exist) (to say nothing of the way the industry treats devs/creatives while they're employed to begin with)

Vibes are atrocious this year.

Here’s another one to add to your list that flew under the radar: the studio I worked at laid off 12 people (~half its staff) not long after releasing Convergence, the LoL spin-off game with Riot
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:7087502666091638786

Another righteous post. I love the provocation, Kaile. Thanks for writing this and speaking to a really interesting contradiction that it seems very few are noticing.

I think that was a great article and thing to share and mention! I would just like to add this event that happened to a indie studio that made the game Neon Echo near the start of the year that was juat depressingly sad.

Just to note the game did seem to sell pretty well for a new IP and a first game from a indie team and pretty unknown publisher and at launch it was very lostivley recieved by steam users. So you can have a succesful indie game which is a lot of work to achieve and still get fucked over by all this shit.

This indie team released a pretty cool looking 2D roguelite early access game Neon Echo that they have been working on for a while. People seemed pretty happy with it at launch. Not even 2 to 3 months into the games early access the games publishers said your game isn't making the big money like our other AAA/bigger games.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321210/Neon_Echo/

https://youtu.be/v03mQZCUCFo?si=5Z8pq40tQkS_xF-r

From this they instantly fired everybody on the team,apparently the indie team were working for the publisher directly and they paid them a salary. What this means now is they can no longer and are not allowed work on their own game, their game will never be finished and was only just at the start of their early access with a lot of content left to add.

All their time money and effort they invisted into coming up with the ideas for this game and making it are wasted and unuseable gone now. Their game launched with very postive steam user rating and now it will forever have a neagtive steam user rating to their game.

I saw this graph about how many layoffs were happening every week in game dev a couple days ago and went, yup that's why things feel bad all the time.