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.
OK, layoffs might have been a bad example, here’s a better one. A company choosing to do 0-day DLCs, which might increase their profits in the short term, but wuld do damage to their image and game long term. Or a company choosing to include micro-payments and microtranscations in their game (Diablo 3 and 4), which in the short term looked good cause of profits, but in the long term made people less excited for the game or new installments, basically killing the game. So rather than continuing to release a good game they can sell to a lot of people, they chose to make as much money as possible on the current edition without thinking of future profits with subsequent installments of the game.
I certainly take your general point about 0day DLC’s and MTX being bad and detrimental to games as a whole. I’m not sure about D3/4 as examples of this, their monetisation is limited to paid cosmetics that aren’t even substantially better than the free ones. The launch reviews were positive, the current reviews are positive, it has maintained a player base. The main current points against it are raised by engagement farmers, to farm engagement.
That’s all beside my original point though - OP post uses the title “capitalism ruined gaming” to make a specific point about the current round of industry layoffs. But the layoffs aren’t a product of capitalism - they don’t truly serve anyone’s interest or profit motive, including the developer/publisher. It’s just weird arbitration of profits for no real reason - the inability to sit on their hands when that is the most profitable course. It’s a practice only really done in the US, resulting from that gaming is excessively profitable (i.e. risking some long-term profit isn’t of major consequence) and that a huge proportion of employment in the US is on an at-will basis (i.e. laying people off for any reason carries little if any risk). So while we should retain the goal of an ultimate dismantling of capitalism, that isn’t necessary to stop the issue OP is lamenting - just do what the rest of the capitalist world does currently and have some kind of baseline employee protections.
What do you mean? Layoffs are the quickest way to have a larger bottom line, because they reduce labour costs in the immediate term. It is very easy to then hire more people again once the quarterly or year-end review is over. It’s all about pleasing the shareholders and making yourself look like a good executive.
Precisely.
First you say it’s not capitalism’s fault but then you suggest that capitalism should be reigned in a bit as a solution.
The attempt at mitigating the appearance of investor risk in the company via reducing spend is neutralised by the resulting compromise to their production, at best leaving the company as attractive as it already was. More likely they will lose some resources along the way due to loss of trust, the best hires being picked up elsewhere in the meantime, etc.
If execs game the system to receive a bigger bonus by tricking investors into thinking company finances are better than they are, this doesn’t serve the company. Its base intent is to reward the exec for adding value to the company, which in this case is imaginary, or a result of defrauding investors. The exec in this scenario is more anarchist, working to extract excess profit from their employer, than a capitalist.
That we live under capitalism was not secured by capital owners short-sightedly arbitrating their capital in ways that aren’t really profitable.
I think if we put it to the American people, as capitalists they would be happy to create laws against this kind of blatant worker exploitation, because that’s what is best for business. I certainly don’t mean it as a solution to anything other than OP’s issues that caused the post. But it would solve that, and is something we can achieve today to improve the lives of workers, so yeah we should try it.
But it’s not “gaming the system”. Companies do lay off workers so that they can show a bigger profit to their shareholders. This isn’t some conspiracy or “trick”, it’s recognised practice.
https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layoffs-compared/
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/28/1227326215/nearly-25-000-tech-workers-laid-off-in-the-first-weeks-of-2024-whats-going-on
Right, doesn’t sound like a conspiracy to game the system at all.
It’s not “gaming the system” when it is actually how the capitalist system works. They’re just being good capitalists.
The capitalist organisation is the entity being exploited. In Marxist terms, it is not from each according to his ability, it is to each according to his ability. Specifically the ability to fire people without cause like they are playthings. That describes anarchy, not capitalism.