You don’t need an MBA to know that the goal of a large business is to deliver profit to its investors and that this can be accomplished by cutting costs.
It’s annoying seeing people buy the same copy paste games from AAA companies then complain that games aren’t good anymore. Like no shit, you just preordered it without even looking at a review
Why is it that in my own experience Atlus and Nintendo are the only two companies that provide fun games that run with little to no issues and meanwhile every single other triple A company doesn’t anymore? Look at both of them, Persona 3 Reload, Mario Wonder hell even indie games like Palworld are more fun to play. Wtf is wrong with the gaming industry nowadays?
Why spend millions on QA, delaying games, etc when people buy millions of copies regardless? You get an influx of cash that can sustain further development. If the game sells badly, you saved millions when you sunset the game without fixes. If not, you fix stuff, add content that was meant to be in the game and diehards love it.
People aren’t patient and they buy the next big thing. They don’t want to play a game half a year after release, they want it now. They want fifa 24 or whatever it is, not 22. You wait on Baldur’s Gate 3 - you got to play an excellent game way after everyone. What if the next Call of Duty is as good as BG3 was?
Obviously we all know that won’t be the case, but if gaming is what you do for an hour every week, you probably won’t do a lot of research.
Exactly I waited 6 months for Persona 3 Reload and I am very happy with my purchase just like I was with FES/Portable. These companies need to do better
Nintendo isn’t really pushing the envelope on, well, anything and they are basically the Disney or Apple of video games with hordes fans who can see them doing no wrong.
Might sound like a bit of a conspiracy theorist here, but if all of the big tech companies lay off people at the same time, why could they not hire their recently laid off competitors for a fraction of the cost?
Obviously it drives down the cost of the salaries and lowers the average hiring rate. Huge wins for all these massive companies.
And to prove that they all did this “together” when they all did it a few weeks apart will be rather difficult too.
Maybe that’s just me thinking from both corporations and employees side at the same time, though…
Why would it? I usually get a pay raise when I get a new job.
What’s actually going on is they’re massaging the numbers a bit to get investors to invest more. Salaries aren’t the concern here, it’s just a game of staying on the investing trends to get the most investor capital they can. Employees are just caught in the crossfire.
Have you done this from a position of not having a job in tech though? Having thousands of other employees also vie-ing for that same position with equivalent experience or better?
If you have obligations any job is better than no job from a position of no job, no pay.
Yup. I lost my job at the start of COVID in tech and found a new one with a better salary. I had a house, wife and kids, and I was the sole bread winner. It took several months, but I had cash reserves and found a good position at a good company (I was a bit picky).
I wasn’t part of a huge layoff, but a lot of people were looking for jobs at the same time due to shifting markets. My old company was downsizing due to market shifts, and the new company was expanding due to unrelated, company-specific reasons.
As another poster said, those of us in tech generally get a significant pay bump, significant. Hell, that goes for most people with skills and experience.
I’ve preached before on here, move on, keep moving on.
There’s a hype cycle that companies like MS ride to bolster stocks, during the hype they over hire to give investors the impression that they are doing really well, when the hype starts to fall, they use layoffs to inch out a bit more, because it shows investors that they’re slimming down now that the hype is falling off. One of the interesting things he mentioned is that the hype is more important than the product, the product is just there to increase the hype and justify the hiring, showing investors that something great is on the way.
This. I’ll be the last one to defend any of these megacorps but folks calling it greed are being reductive. These are publicly traded companies which means their loyalty is to their shareholders and their #1 goal is to make them more money than they made them last quarter. So it’s more than greed, it’s their job within this capitalist system. They have to do that every quarter for as long as they exist. The only ways to do it are to increase revenue or decrease costs. If they can’t make enough money they have to fire people. That’s the world we’ve built.
But it’s not only about making more profit than last quarter, but also the amount the profits increased by has to be higher than the amount they increased by the quarter before last. That’s how you end up with companies seeing record profits and still laying people off. They made more than last quarter, but only 2% more. The quarter before they made 3% more so now people have to go. It’s insane.
Plenty of profit to go around. The issue is shareholders expect infinite growth, which is impossible.
Capitalism (when it works best) basically requires occasional market crashes that can “reset” the wealth distribution. But for obvious reasons, nobody wants that.
So every year, shareholders get richer and expect bigger growth next year, but eventually the profits will plateau. And one can only guess what happens then.
When the profits plateau, you look for the next thing the market wants. Sometimes those bets are right, and sometimes they're wrong. In the meantime, people were paid salaries out of investors' pockets while they worked on providing the next potential answer. That's what happened here.
There’s some off-base comments here that ignore why the industry is being hit particularly hard. Note that when it comes to companies like Microsoft, you’re right it’s pure greed. They don’t need to shed those jobs, but that will make shareholders money, so bye-bye livelihood. Fuck Microsoft in particular on this round of layoffs, money for a 65 billion purchase but nothing else, pricks.
But for most of the job losses, it really comes down to high interest rates. High interest rates disincentivizes investing. And the past decade or so has been highly investment based.
A lot of the traditional big publishers like EA and Activision went entirely in-house, so any studio outside of those big ones needed to find funding somewhere. They turned to investment companies.
This works whilst investing is cheap, but when it’s hard to come by, suddenly you have to make payroll and can’t. This is why Embracer has failed, for example.
Why were people laid off by Microsoft? Were they redundant after the acquisition? Were they part of departments that were cut? Like 90% of acquisitions lead to layoffs.
Very true, and Microsoft in particular could have just shouldered the cost of those employees and likely found more work for a lot of them. Some of what I've heard from Jeff Grubb in the past week or two is that ABK expanded by 3000 employees in the past two years while interest rates were cheap, so it was unlikely they did so sustainably; and hundreds of those who were laid off were basically the entirety of Microsoft's physical distribution department, which we'll probably hear in this upcoming business update no longer exists for Xbox going forward.
Funny how all the retarded NPCs cry about greed, over the fact that they think every random idiot is entitled to a paycheck for all of eternity regardless of whether or not anyone actually wants to employ them.
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