Yesterday, I read about layoffs at Epic (makers of Unreal). 5 days before, UbiSoft laid people off at RedStorm. These may not seem related, but they indicate something larger to me. You see both those companies are a few miles away from each other. In North Carolina there’s a place called Research Triangle Park (RTP). It’s where Cisco and IBM are based. Around it are the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Cary (where the two game companies are based.) They’re all about a 20 minute drive apart.
Cisco was the NVidia of the DotCom bubble burst. They were the most highly valued company on the stock exchange ever at the time the bubble burst. IBM, and many other companies in the area are suffering from LLMs stealing their business.
Why is this important? Well because RTP is one of the few large tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley. (Austin is the other one.) It’s also one of the few places you can get a game programming job outside California - or at least it was. (Austin is again, the other one.) Epic and RedStorm were the two largest video game employers in RTP.
Neither of those game companies claim LLMs had anything to do with layoffs - and I don’t think they did. Instead, it’s a games market that is not so friendly to AAA game companies these days. It is now a market that is ripe for indie developers like you. Perhaps ironically, Epic and RedStorm were once small indie developers themselves.
I don’t know what this means for the game industry as a whole, but I see it as a worrying trend. Of what it portends, I cannot tell. Maybe nothing but the death of gaming companies in RTP.
To most obvious symptom to me is :
It start preparation for less revenue, and first line is always employees .
With higher prices of other goods , energies , it will likely less be spend by consumers on entertainment.
Mass layoffs are unfortunately pretty common in the industry, and job stability is low. Rockstar pulled some particularly nasty shenanigans last year, suddenly terminating everyone who had discussed unionizing, and the legal case for the employees wasn’t looking good last I checked… it’s a high-competition, high-risk industry.
Incidentally, all of my friends and former colleagues in “real” game development have subsequently (generally after having kids) moved on to making junk software and simple casino-style games because that’s a safer industry. I lasted about 5 years as a producer, then became a librarian
There was a case where Ultima Online support employees sued EA in the 90s. Basically UO had all these people who were helping people in-game as volunteers. They were working full time hours and wanted to be paid as employees, because the game couldn’t run without them. It’s why MMOs don’t have live in-game support now. It just isn’t cost-effective to the developers to pay a support staff like that. Typically, they only have one paid support person to manage a group of volunteers for things like forums.
I spent about 5 years in the game industry too before I moved to “normal” tech so I could make enough money to support my family. I wanted to be a librarian when I was in middle school. I settled for volunteering at a library a few years ago.
And Nortel. Don’t forget Nortel powered a lot of the early intarwebbies. Managed to crash and burn as the Internet was exploding in popularity, taking a lot of private investments and a cut of our public taxes in its downward spiral.
While I have sympathy for the developers who have lost their jobs, the companies they work for lost my business a long time ago. Boring concepts, predatory practices, and atrocious quality are not an incentive for me to open my wallet.
Small development houses and solo developers are where I go for games these days. They offer much better value for my money, likely because they don’t have to pay bloated executive salaries and keep stock prices up.
I can’t speak for video game consumers as a whole, but given what is going on in the world today, I suspect that the people who do have money to spend on entertainment are also looking for value. Video games offer hours of entertainment for a relatively modest price.
That’s why I think the video game industry as a whole will be fine. There are plenty of people out there (likely even some who are reading this post) who are producing quality games that offer excellent value for their price. My favorite new game this year was made by a group that came from a company that was mismanaged to death - and I view it as superior to anything their old company released.
I would not be at all surprised if the people who were laid off from Epic and UbiSoft do something similar. They still have all their skills, and now they are free from the corporate constraints that dictated what they produced.
Would love to work in Canada. Mark Carney, the prime minister, has given some amazing speeches recently. I hope Canadians are as proud of his dealing with the US as I am. Wish I had moved there when I was younger.
It is not a trend, it is status quo for tech industries in general. You brought up the DotCom bubble burst - I suffered through that. I settled for working in shipping/receiving during that time.
It’s not a trend. It’s a repeating pattern.
The industry is ripe for indie developers, but at the same time, the market will not support the effort.
You would not want to work in Canada. Speeches do not equate to standard of living, and quality of life. But, hey, you keep on eyeing that greener grass on the other side.
I mean, I suppose that depends on your definition. Mine includes a massive stock market crash. The only three I’m aware of are the Great Depression, the DotCom Bubble burst, and the 2007 mortgage thing that screwed the markets for 5 years. (I dunno if it ever got a name.) Interestingly from a historical point of view, the conditions for the both the Great Depression and the DotCom bubble burst are both visible now, so this market crash could be bad.
