I’ll explain this as quick as I can. Basically the bourgeoisie that own the major studios are so obsessed with profit that they make blatantly unsustainable decisions like overmonetization and shipping unfinished games every few years. Now look what’s happening, the studios have no choice but to lay off employees to recoup the costs they inflicted upon themselves and the worst affected are the fired employees naturally.

This is honestly infuriating and insulting as someone who’s been a massive video game fan since 2019 because the franchises I took a liking to (especially Halo) had countless labor and talent (stretching decades in some cases) have been completely gone to waste publishing cookie cutter generic dogshit games for the c suite’s next payday.

Indies are no better. They also suffer from the problem of shipping unfinished games but unlike their AAA counterparts, they suffer from genuine lack of time and resources to deliver games in a timely manner. So the whole “go indie” is basically lesser evil.

Come to think of it Capitalism actually enables and rewards such incompetence as long as profits are high.

  • alicirce
    7·
    3 months ago

    Exactly. And this is true of all aspects of our lives, too:

    No matter if you’re passionate about cooking or basketball or videogames, if you pursue your passion thoughtfully and honestly enough, you eventually develop a serious awareness that capitalism is making everything worse for the sake of profit. (source)

    I think the trick is to recognize that the solution is to move past capitalism into a collective model of ownership, and not bemoan some idealized past where small creators were able to create good game — a reactionary, petty bourgeois fantasy. As you highlighted, indie games are not above the pressures of capitalism.