2023 closed with more than 10,000 layoffs of programmers, QA, sound designers, and artists. Days into 2024, 2000 industry workers were laid off from Unity and Twitch. 6 months into 2024, the total industry layoffs surpassed 2023's total of 10,000. In 2023 and 2024, there were major job cuts from Embracer Group, Unity Technologies, Microsoft Gaming, Electronic Arts, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Epic Games, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Sega, and Riot Games. Some notable company closures are Firewalk Studios (Concord), Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Prey, Deathloop, Redfall), London Studio (SingStar, EyeToy, assisted in Killzone 2 and LittleBigPlanet), Riot Forge (a Riot Games publishing label), Volition (Descent, FreeSpace, Summoner, Red Faction, Saints Row, Agent of Mayhem), Ready at Dawn (Daxter, God of War, Lone Echo), and Game Informer. View or download this table and CSV of game industry layoffs for post ideas. https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2024 What gaming companies likely flop their sales and shut down before 2030?

Their Ass Cred won't bail them out for 5 years.

<another thread about bad sales and flops cool >>940732 we didn't >>1054553 have enough >>1005109 already >>1021279 A lot of studios that closed down last year were support or mobile studios, a ton you never heard of like Neon Koi. There were only a few serious closures like the ones you listed, but many of those studios were struggling for years. Volition didn't release a genuinely successful game since Saints Row 4 over ten years ago. You didn't mention them, but Piranha Bytes had been releasing samey mediocre games since Gothic 3. London Studio hadn't even released anything in years before their closure. Arkane Austin had the vast majority of their original staff quit during Redfall, becoming a zombie studio. Perhaps the only surprising shutdown was Tango Gameworks, and that ended up being reversed when Krafton offered to purchase them. No clue what MS was thinking there, you have a studio releasing popular and successful games so you decide to shutter them? Bizarre.

>>1059858 It's a prediction thread about what gaming companies shut down before 2030, unlike your links. Two literally are Concord and Star Wars Outlaws threads.

What's a cheap, fun game I can make that'll please the masses?

>Thoughts? The article concluded that multiculturalism and the jewish refusal to consider anything other than finance to be "capital" is the cause of the industry's failure. Thus, the industry will continue to fail because it's illegal to oppose multiculturalism or financial capitalism. There's nothing we can do short of "fedposting," and it just reaffirms (after paying people to do a "formal study" on it) everything we have already known for decades.

>>1059841 It's 100% large team sizes. Past 20 or so people, you basically need dedicated accountants, perhaps a legal advisor or two, someone to clean the office, someone to keep the internet running, advertising/promotional people, hell even product designers for any merch. Most people are pretty specialized, so guess what department gets added to manage and hire all those support roles. By this point you probably have doubled in size or more and have 3 stages of management, with middle management's role being to draw blood to satisfy upper management's deadlines.

>>1059871 Nice Taomon ass

>>1059841 >Thoughts These are not new problems and have been know about for decades as that's how production works. The more money poured into a project, and the bigger it's size, the more middle management exists. So you begin having to create projects that need to be approved by a cavilcade of supervisors who honestly don't do anything. The "theory" is that it's suppose to reduce the amount of problems and help expiladite workflow, but the reality is that only the most sanitized garbage makes it to the final stage and any issue that occurs is never resolved as each person expects someone else to solve the problem. This also creates a system that naturally breeds corruption, laziness, and confirmation bias. >>1059871 A simple addictive mobile game that is easy to pick up and play, and can enertain someone for any length of time. Just consider all the truely popular games of the past like Tetris, Angry Birds, Tomogachi, Flappy Bird, Warioware, etc.

>>1059871 Make a clone of a simple game, but with a twist. That's it. Its cheap both financially and effort-wise to design, make, playtest, market and with a good enough gimmick(s) it'll attract both the original game's audience [who want something familiar but also something fresh] and new audience [who aren't into "X-like" games but will be piqued by the gimmick(s)].

>>1059871 A Balatro clone.

>>1059841 Big teams because of big=good, programs with schools and universities that have to be maintained for PR, marketing, licensing fees, property taxes and utilities (if game companies pulled out of some areas, the real estate markets there would collapse), union contracts, paid vacations, secondary studios, disability features, translators (who all have guilds), HR (an extension of guilds), writers (also guilds), QA, benefits, and voice actors (guilds again) drive up development prices. As you said, there are also people-level problems. Many game companies don't have people with solid ideas of the game they want to make at their heads or in their staffs. There's a complete lack of unifying vision, and developers get lazy because they can always fix issues with Day 1 patches, DLCs, and other post-release content. Combine this with live service, where you don't even expect the game to be playable from start to finish at launch, and you get a disastrous business model that requires government bottles and consumer diapers through astroturfing, nostalgia, and whales. The same issues exist in movies and music. It's why executives have been trying to push AI. While not necessarily bad, the industry doesn't have the current talent to both properly prompt and train models and edit their outputs while holding themselves back. The other option is to license to indie companies or B-teams, who can't complain about "crunch" or "overtime" because they actually manage to make games that people like and have visions for the games they're making, even if the game is some shit about telling stories through Indian cuisine. Licensing to Indians and Chinese is another alternative, but then you're playing a different ballgame. If you want to see a similar market, look into American manufacturing and infrastructure. Already built machinery is shipped to factories so it can be disassembled and reassembled, and it can't ship without that. Elevators have to meet size requirements held nowhere else in the world because EMTs and cripples with their handlers need to use them comfortably. Cars need a million different sensors and crumple zones and cameras and GPS tracking features and telemetry to prevent liability and be able to be sold on the American market.

Big budget studios don't make games anymore, they make interactive movies with (teachable lessons) designed by development committees which are then overseen by several other branching committees all of whom want to project their design beliefs and personal agendas onto

>>1059926 Already happening with pachink.

For posterity, everything above this post is jumbled replies to two OPs.

>>1060035 Is there a Yahtzee Balatro? Balatzee? Yahlatro?

>>1060039 Make one anon, sell it for 5 dolaridoos on steam. But you gotta strike while the iron is hot because right now streamers are willing to play these for shits and giggles for a segment but in the future they won't, so it's a guaranteed purchase from some of them That is, if you don't fork out shitloads of keys for these games like most devs do to gain traction.

>>1060050 What are your thoughts on sungrand studios?

>>1060035 looks like roguelike + cute graphics + ludopathy is and will be the new meta in the indie game development, already have found several games like this in itch.io.

>>1069567 Rougelite is an immediate blacklist to me. The few games that understand how to do it are completely eclipsed by a torrent of unfun pointless shit that doesn't understand what makes the genre fun. And then ruins games that could have been actually successful with handcrafted levels like Metal Slug Tactics. To this day I still don't understand what took so much time to make that mediocre shit.

>>1069602 >unfun pointless shit that doesn't understand what makes the genre fun. yep i see this a lot too, the generic "select one of this three cards" or "top-view game with thousand enemies coming in waves" and now reacently to add "casino-like" elements to this games sadly there are a lot of overused cliches in this genre.

>>1059841 >I think some of the positions at Riot start at $35,000 per month. <Can't balance their fucking Game <Can't fucking fix their client and shitty Game <Can't Even fucking Make a fucking fighting game after 6, nearly 7 fucking years in development Man... Honestly, i want to work there just to do Jack fucking shit, and make some mad cash

costs so much because people pay for it, simple as

>>1059841 >$35,000 PER MONTH jesus christ they should hire me, I can sit around and do nothing for half the cost, then I could afford to eat more than raw onion and butter sandwiches

>>1069805 Simple as what? I think you accidentally hit Reply before you finished typing.

>>1059841 This article is bullshit for blaming dev wages or bad management. I thought by this point everyone knew that total budget distribution for modern AAA/AA titles is something like: >60% Marketing/advertising >17% CEO salary >10% Copyright licenses, overpaid voice actors, etc. >10% infrastructure costs, dev labor/wages, testing, etc. >3% Sweet Baby Inc.

>>1059841 >Why so many games cost so much It's easy No reusability of models or textures because everything has to be bloated in terms of manhours or otherwise stakeholders won't invest the big bucks required to make glitzy headlines Forced DEI practices requiring that for every competent developer in any department there's like five paper pushers and coffee guys "Marketing first fun later" mentality that has to sell some downgrade as a genuine new experience IPs, patents and other assorted copyright and devkit bullshit means a ton of cash is spent acquiring licenses rather than actually making the game itself Aside from auteur producers, no clear vision since there's so many cooks spoiling the broth, resulting in feature creep and unoptimized, buggy game mechanics Games no longer cater to one specific hardware setup or console, they just make up requirements as needed and expect the consumer to just have a 5k gaming rig laying around collecting dust The tech bubbles that come and go force developers to adopt whatever newfangled trendy crap is being spouted around social media the most to attract even more investors rather than players Studios set up in unsustainably expensive areas like SanFran or any other globalist city, really, and somehow still forcing people to show up to work to justify the costs of expensive cubicle infernos Union voice actors ballooning costs, doesn't help that now you have to make the fictional character of your fictional world be played by someone who has the same exact genetic and sexual makeup, even when it makes no sense (fuck you ProZD you're the reason for all of this) Most importantly, there's no gamers in positions of power. You cannot get a good industry going if the people sellling you the product won't have a taste of it themselves. Would you trust a butcher who's a vegan or F1 pilot who gets carsick?

>>1076483 >Forced DEI practices requiring that for every competent developer in any department there's like five paper pushers This is probably doing a lot of it. Everyone knows these game studios are massively bloated. So how does it get that way? A chain of incompetent hires bringing in more & more diversitards all taking high wages while producing very little as they lack the ABILITY. So the whole operation gets more bloated & more costly. Federal government has the same issue & is currently undergoing a purge to address it. I saw some crazy figure like 70% of graduated black woman are employed in Federal jobs, as though the Gov exists to employ them. No one is exaggerating when they claim that poison is ruining games root & stem. What is produced now is worse while the costs to produce it gets higher & everyone can very clearly see that.

>>1076527 I mean, I hate Elon MusX as much as the next guy, but he was 101% in the right when he acquired Xitter. Firing like half the entire workforce didn't alter one iota the (non) functionality of the site. Getting people back into the offices to give him feet massages, not so much.

>>1076527 >I saw some crazy figure like 70% of graduated black woman are employed in Federal jobs, as though the Gov exists to employ them. Oh, so that's why they're such a damn issue in military industrial complexes.

>>1076625 This is a political issue that does not directly relate to vidya, but it's true that private companies are basically hiring based on cred rather than merit. If the Sweet Baby Inc. interview is to be believed, this has been going on for far longer and may have only received some pushback because the industry used to be extremely nerdy and insulated until the dudebro apocalypse of the 2000s and Steve "Ligma" Jobs ruined it for everyone else. >>1059858 I agree that a merger is needed

>>1076543 People like Rossmann tried acting like the faggots fired were these innocent victims. When in reality they make more money then most of us do in two years and were actively using the site to censor.

>>1059841 Ah if only I could trade my technical skills for scam artist social skills.

>>1076717 Rossmann has been spreading lots of misinformation lately, he's about as bad as that grummz fellow at checking his sources, especially if it's stuff he doesn't know anything about like videogames.

>>1077064 I wanna like Louis I really do but he keeps doing retarded shit. Even in cases where he has a major point (See the Linus shill tips drama) he still fucks up by having a NYC brain.