Sure you can. Didn’t you watch the video game awards?
It’s felt a lot like that this year - that or companies are seizing the opportunity to get bad stuff done while everyone else is, so they don’t stand out.
This seems to be a common refrain I see since the pandemic. Oh, inflation, they are raising prices so we should too to maintain our profits! Oh, layoffs in the industry, we should too while we can! Oh, live service microtransaction bullshit is making that company money, we should do that too!
Creative Layoffs? In the same year we saw the practical uses of AI blow up? 🤔
The layoffs are largely because of the class war going on, they are a part of essentially a broader collective threat to labor from the ruling class, but also I think the video game industry is blatantly trying to do what the movie industry tried to do with AI it is just there isn’t an industry union to fight it. The execs are saying “we can train AI on all the past and present labor of our artists and then just fire the artists!”. They aren’t stupid enough to commit fully to this strategy so soon after the labor strikes in the movie industry, but mark my words this is just testing the waters.
I think they can particularly get away with this because gamers tend to be the kind of people who will scream “skill issue” or naively parrot a talking point at you if you bring up the political consequences of AI being used to consolidate power in the ruling class. As a result there is almost zero actual solidarity between fans and creators in this industry.
Either workers in the video game industry will lose a historic amount of power (and thus benefits, job security, pay etc…) in the next couple of years or there will be a historic amount of labor organizing. Those are the two possibilities. It doesn’t really matter if the AI actually functions as a replacement for the artists for this happen, the narrative not the truth is the important part in undercutting the quality of life of video game industry workers. Once the damage is done companies will say that they maybe oversold the potential of AI to replace artists to their investors but even when they do they will never reverse the cuts they made to their workers. It will just become the new norm.
Even if in the best case for workers, using AI ends up being a frustrating waste of time for video game development, massive video game companies will force their workers to use shitty AI tools as part of their development process in order to jam reality into fitting the narrative they used to justify cutting investment into their workers. That is a small price to pay for the opportunity to fundamentally change the power dynamics between video game industry workers and the owners of the companies.
Or the much simpler explanation that companies over-stretched in an economic boom and now need to cut costs
Where are the huge losses being posted by gaming companies? This was a great year for games. It is nonsense.
The root cause of so many of these layoffs is overspending. It’s also often, ironically, overspending linked to success. Gaming boomed during the pandemic when most of us were locked up at home with nothing to do, so companies saw currency signs in their eyes and jumped in on it.
Literally discussed in the article. The people’s revolution is not upon us, comrade!
Ok, well retailers are also all saying shoplifting is destroying their profits and causing them to close stores and that is all nonsense. Why should I take these video game companies at their word?
You don’t need to take their word for anything, I’m sure they’ll come up with whatever excuse so they don’t have to admit that they made stupid mistakes and are terrible at business
Yaaaawn. I like how game journalists think they can change the world by talking about the issues and that’s it. I mean those same websites that doom-monger about state of game industry, review and hype the big moneymakers of those corporations.
We as the customers and players are on the receiving end of their rant (this cascade of articles been going for a couple of months), but guess what capitalism will always win against powerless and meaningless virtue signalling in the form of these opinion pieces. This is bigger than video games or entertainment industry. Unless people go out on the streets and truly revolt against the corporations, NOTHING will change. Equal distribution of wealth and fair rights for workers don’t happen because we talk about it. We need to fight for it.
Did you really just claim that journalists can not change the world by talking about issues?
Do you really think they can? Are you certain that in 5, 10 or at least 15 years things will change for the better? I hope so. But think about climate change. Years of reporting, warning, shouting from the rooftops. Nothing. Nothing changed because we cannot do anything when people in power don’t see the need to change.
Yes, we have hundreds of years of examples of journalists changing the world by talking about things. It’s kind of what they do. It’s so wild to see someone make this claim really.