The layoffs at one of your studios most able to ship games is a bonkers, stupid decision; but pivoting Obsidian to making a new Fallout game is a good business decision if you don’t care about what your creatives feel led to create.
The layoffs at one of your studios most able to ship games is a bonkers, stupid decision; but pivoting Obsidian to making a new Fallout game is a good business decision if you don’t care about what your creatives feel led to create.
I don’t know why anyone would work at one of these studios. Obviously people are staying because the jobs are still lucrative but who is it that’s walking into these super unstable jobs under a company that’s been doing nothing but layoffs and shutdowns for the last few years?
Anecdotally, I was illegally fired by Microsoft in December 2024 because I helped form a massive union earlier that year. I want my job back because I want a union contract.
I have friends at Zenimax that stayed because they have a union contract. There are currently 14 unions at Microsoft actively negotiating for their first contract. The thousands of people who are protected by a union stay because they have a union.
I’ve been laid off from Microsoft before (you just collect unemployment until they hire back in three months. No union) but I have a feeling these are more permanent layoffs.
Being a part of a union is absolutely a good reason to stay. If it guarantees you a paycheck.
There are several ways a union protects jobs. Because of certain rights during contract negotiations, not a single job was lost at any of the unions that are currently in negotiations.
During layoffs with unions, the company is required to bargain for affects to the workers, which sometimes reduces the amount of people that are actually out of a job.
I’m still friends and organize with Microsoft workers, and there are rumors swirling that parts of the layoffs may constitute Unfair Labor Practices at units with unions. This can only be caught because of workers that are also dedicated to fighting for their union.
Sometimes, people leave a company and move to another one, only for that first company to buy the company they moved to…
Knew someone this happened to.
Someone with that skill set who wants to keep making games, looking for any port in a storm.
Yup.
With the crazy number of layoffs from the AI frenzy… for those people, some money is better than no money. Even if the job won’t be there in 6 months.
I mean, if it’s with the intention of making enough money, experience and connections to go indie, I can respect aspiring developers who are doing the best with the hand they’re given.
The entire games industry, and software development in general, is unstable right now. The few companies that are still stable aren’t hiring. If you have a job, you try to keep it. Because trying to get a new job will be an absolute nightmare. I’m in that situation myself right now.
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of situation.
The games industry has a lot of shitty business practices in general. Job security is almost nonexistent unless you manage to get a key position at a successful studio. Otherwise, you’re more likely to be hired for one project and then let go just before release, so you don’t get to collect the sales bonus. Some contracted employees are even omitted from the credits, so you don’t even get much of a portfolio boost out of it.
Larger companies like Microsoft are shitty in their own ways, but they don’t tend to do the hire-fire cycle of game dev as much as other studios may. So it was seen as stable work for a lot of these studios that were acquired. Especially for the former Activision studios that were falling apart at the seams while being rocked by a sequential train of scandals.
And by all accounts it truly was good times for a lot of developers at Xbox, where they were given resources to develop whatever they wanted with relatively little corporate oversight. But then these teams that were previously given carte blanche on their projects suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them by new management. They suddenly care about results, and that’s apparently now the developers’ fault for just doing what they were told was okay before.