One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years, GDC Study Reveals
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Can we crowdsource one? I'd throw a few grand into a new studio with the right leadership and governance.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: It's like a 1:100 shot to make something even remotely profitable. You need to pay a team of people (with families sometimes) enough money to eat/pay rent/live long enough to release a game, which could be a year or two. Even with good management and a decent designer it's a roll of the dice.
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Can kick-starter work for funding? Weekend game jam, demo, kick-start, develop, repeat.
Check out Camelot Unchained.
it can happen, but it can go very very wrong.
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Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you're in the US, you'll also need to figure out how you're paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.
Money adds up quick. Let's use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let's say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let's just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let's say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let's be general.
- 1x Gameplay Programmer
- 1x 3D Artist (general modeler)
- 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist)
- 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat)
- 1x Audio Designer
$500k
Expanding that team:
- 1x Animator
- 1x Character Artist
- 1x Environment Artist
- 1x Prop Artist
- 1x VFX Artist
- 1x Lighting Specialist
- 1x Tools Programmer
- 1x Render/Optimization Programmer
- 1x Level Designer
- 1x Narrative Designer
$1.5M
That's a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I'm forgetting about. This isn't anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.
This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you're probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you've done a vertical slice.
Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.
^^^ This is exactly how it works.
You 'can' bootstrap an indie with an Artist and a Dev, but they need to be the best ever at their job and be able to wear a ton of hats, work for nothing and somehow manage to never burn out. The vast majority of games that run that way never see the light of day.
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bitter sweet. hoping that those who were laid off continue developing some great indie games. that’s where the market is headed anyways
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Investment money is not as plentiful as it was several years ago. I've heard it in several interviews with developers or devs themselves. (Game Maker's Notebook, Mike and Rami are Still Here, and a few devs on YouTube come to mind.)
It also doesn't take hundreds of people to make a good game anymore, just a dozen or so good employees (sometimes less). Big studios struggle with justifying their existence with graphics and scope creep. Then, more often then not, management shoves it full of microtransactions or refocuses the game to hit whatever's hot this second. Which often leads to a polished turd of a game.
When you look at the big hits over the last 10 yeas, less than half of them came from big publishers and big studios. With less every year. It's just not a model that works anymore.
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It also doesn't take hundreds of people to make a good game anymore, just a dozen or so good employees (sometimes less). Big studios struggle with justifying their existence with graphics and scope creep. Then, more often then not, management shoves it full of microtransactions or refocuses the game to hit whatever's hot this second. Which often leads to a polished turd of a game.
When you look at the big hits over the last 10 yeas, less than half of them came from big publishers and big studios. With less every year. It's just not a model that works anymore.
I completely agree that huge teams aren't needed. That said I think at least some of that is exactly because smaller studios full of expert talent were getting funded for several years, because those big studios weren't making the games developers wanted to make. And those devs understood that "fun" wasn't the same as "top of the line presentation".
ARC Raiders' Embark Studios has a lot of people from DICE. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Sandfall Interactive has a lot of people from Ubisoft. Even Dispatch's Ad Hoc is a lot of Telltale people (at least some of them by way of Ubisoft.) They knew a lot about their process, but their big companies weren't making the games they were interested in. So they got funding elsewhere (and famously Ad Hpc's funding dried up mid-development.)
I'm curious about Wikipedia's sourcing here. Granted there's the Balatros and Stardew Valleys of the world, and Helldivers did well. But do smaller games really make up half? Year after year the big ones are usually COD, two big sports game, a Nintendo game, another big fps, a big action game, and a few others.
Again I agree with you when it comes to good games. But man, those big ones are huge sellers. I just wish we had clear insight into sales. But that's been a thing for a long time now.
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There's only a handful of companies and the smallest one (itch.io) takes between 0% and 10%. The companies that "couldn't deal with it" are Microsoft (for Xbox, they actually take 12% on PC), Nintendo, Sony.
Look up what a soft monopoly is. In any case, they have market dominance and are abusing it. Steam is currently dealing with more than one anti trust lawsuit, including a 900$ million one in the UK.
It's weird seeing people defend billionaires and their money sucking machine. You could defend Airbnb or Amazon with that same kind of energy and arguments. They haven't lost a single monopoly lawsuit either.
30% is a disgusting cut for a few gb of data on a virtual store front. It's having a negative impact on devs, and it only helps makes rich people richer. You don't get a networth of 9 to 11 billion by being fair and having consumers at heart. Steam and Gaben aren't your friends, they actively treat you and the industry as a bag of money to be exploited. They just have a really good marketing team.
I defend it because I love the service, and have used it for over a decade. I again will wait until the results of these lawsuits, as steam has won every other monopoly lawsuit in the past, and I personally believe for good reason as described in my comment above.
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I defend it because I love the service, and have used it for over a decade. I again will wait until the results of these lawsuits, as steam has won every other monopoly lawsuit in the past, and I personally believe for good reason as described in my comment above.
You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don't directly feel it but the devs do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.
I'm not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.
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Good that some companies can invest in talent. It must be tough to lose a job, get a new job and then lose that one as well within two years and I can't imagine how it would feel like to lose my job three times in two years.
unfortunately the game industry is full of that crap, that's why unions are starting to pop up.
It's basically contract gigs. Someone has a hit on their hands, so they have unlimited cash to get it out the door, someone else's title does poorly in focus groups, they companies just shed their mid tier workers and they hop company to company
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I wonder how close to pre-2020 numbers the industry is currently at. I know several companies increased their employee count due to big game sales during COVID, but once people could leave their houses again sales leveled off and then the layoffs started happening.
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You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don't directly feel it but the devs do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.
I'm not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.
Nah, Amazon and airbndn do not remotely have comparable service to steam, I've personally had shitty experiences with both and know many others who have as well. I have many personal gripes with numerous of their business models, and they honestly deserve the hate they recieve. I've never personally had any negative experience with steam, nor has any singular person I know or have met and talked to steam about. I use the service daily, along with all of my friends, and its has been nothing but amazing, and has provided stellar service to me and all my friends for over a decade. The second a better service comes along, I'd be willing to switch, but as it stands every single other online gaming service is straight shit compared to steam, even Gog is going down the drain. I owe the ability to even play a third of the games I own to the work steam has done with proton. Everything I know and have seen about their work flow is also incredibly respectable, it seems to be an incredibly healthy Democratic work environment that promotes innovation and quality of content over pumping out bullshit. So far, the only reasoning I've seen you give as to why steam is bad is that they're a monopoly, which not only is false, but the accusations have only come on because of how massively successful they are due to having an objectively better service than anything else out there.
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Nah, Amazon and airbndn do not remotely have comparable service to steam, I've personally had shitty experiences with both and know many others who have as well. I have many personal gripes with numerous of their business models, and they honestly deserve the hate they recieve. I've never personally had any negative experience with steam, nor has any singular person I know or have met and talked to steam about. I use the service daily, along with all of my friends, and its has been nothing but amazing, and has provided stellar service to me and all my friends for over a decade. The second a better service comes along, I'd be willing to switch, but as it stands every single other online gaming service is straight shit compared to steam, even Gog is going down the drain. I owe the ability to even play a third of the games I own to the work steam has done with proton. Everything I know and have seen about their work flow is also incredibly respectable, it seems to be an incredibly healthy Democratic work environment that promotes innovation and quality of content over pumping out bullshit. So far, the only reasoning I've seen you give as to why steam is bad is that they're a monopoly, which not only is false, but the accusations have only come on because of how massively successful they are due to having an objectively better service than anything else out there.
Okay, you seem to be missing the point.
It isn't about the effect on you but the effect on the industry as a whole. That's why they are similar.
Amazon and Airbnb both dominate the market. They both have a better product than their competitors. Exactly like steam, they abuse their position and have a long term negative impact on their respective scenes.
The article above is literally about how hard the gaming industry is having it. You would have a good product in any case, because the lion's share of the money being made isn't going to making steam better but going to filthy rich people like Gaben.
They have like 100 employees (the financial Times estimates they made about 11 million per employee in 2021), steam probably only needs to charge less then 1% to cover it's current expenses and salaries. All that money is being taken from devs (less games for us, more bankrupt studios) and being given to the top dogs (Gaben to buy boats).
I don't think there's much more to say. You seem to be really enthusiastic about supporting a billionaire's money extraction machine and can't understand that the effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. You are defending the boot because it's fluffy and soft.
https://archive.ph/dmHDP (FT article)
