
More than 1,000 jobs lost to video game studio closures over the past year - kosei
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-1-000-jobs-lost-to-studio-closures-over-the-past-year
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kyriakos
In the PC gaming world has also experienced a big drop in quality lately. A
lot of games are released prematurely and feel like Betas, lacking polish and
filled with bugs. Online delivery of Games made things worse, there's no
reason to wait to make things right when the game can be patched easily. I
believe this will have a big impact on game sales in the near future if it
hasn't already with many consequences for the industry.

~~~
taurath
Because TBH when that last 10% of the game is going to take as much time as
the first 90%, you can release the game at 90%, make up some money, and
hopefully finish the game if its good, or at least recoup some of your
investment.

There are more good quality especially indy games coming out right now than
probably ever before, but the envelope pushing games and especially those with
new an interesting gameplay is lowering. Genres are starting to really find
their limits, and a huge amount of games are just hyper specializations of one
mechanic or another, and the rest are playgrounds for many many different
mechanics (but most/all of them already invented). Games then need to lean on
maximizing story, art style, or precision mechanics and production quality to
set themselves apart. Online delivery has made "light" publishers possible
which is only a good thing IMO. Games like undertale, minecraft, stardew
valley, rez, etc would have been extremely difficult to get going initially
without online delivery.

VR can open up some new pathways for sure, but we'll see how that goes.

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crtasm
Is that some other game called Rez? I know the PS2 original got a port a
couple years ago.

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mcphage
I _think_ that was a typo for Fez, which fits what they’re describing more
accurately.

~~~
crtasm
Oh! Of course, great game and soundtrack.

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partycoder
Games are risky. Only very few people are competent enough to create an
entertaining game that is viable from a technical, creative and financial
perspective in a sustainable manner.

Hundreds of quality games are released every day. You could be releasing your
game, and simultaneously, a similar and superior game is released and claims
all of the user base.

A studio can produce a hit game, have a large hiring push, then fail to follow
up with another hit and go under.

~~~
beerlord
Risky, true, but also one where outsized profits are taken by the platform
holders - Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Valve all take 30%.
Whilst the console makers do deliver subsidised hardware to the masses and a
lot of technical support, the PC and mobile commissions are pure cream.

If a decent PC store game through which mimicked Steams' featureset and
charged only 12%, I think you'd see a renaissance in the industry. Hopefully
Epic can deliver this on the back of Fortnite's success.

The good thing about software development is that there are basically no
capital costs, mostly labour and rent. I'm surprised there aren't more games
studios in Asia and Eastern Europe, where those things are cheap.

~~~
Hasknewbie
Sadly this is unlikely to happen for anything above indie/niche games, unless
the newcomer has some sort of groundbreaking advantage: first, these platforms
also act as ad/exposure for game studios with limited advertisement budget by
giving them access to a massive existing audience, which you're just not gonna
get at this point from a new platform, and second (and more pernicious) they
all have some sort of price matching clause, so if you want to take advantage
of lower fees to cut the prices on the new platform and attract more people
there, by contract the incumbents can adjust the price of your app
unilaterally, cancelling out this move. There is also the fact that not all
30% are equal, so to speak : for example, Steam gets a lot less bad rap than
the others due to the amount of tooling/services they provide. There is no
easy fix to this situation.

~~~
beerlord
I'm not aware of any price-matching clause. None of the key resellers would
exist if that was the case. Retail stores would be unable to offer sales.

For Steam and Mobile, you need to create your own playerbase. Merely launching
onto the platform will get you nowhere. If you are putting a huge effort into
advertising and PR to generate an audience - you must think, why not direct
them to a platform that charges me less than 30%? Android and iOS are
effectively closed shops, but for PC I think its simply that no decent
competitor has ever come along.

~~~
Hasknewbie
I can't find a source for the price-matching clause (I'm on my phone, sorry)
but have read it several times. The lower-priced keys typically come from
cheaper markets/regions (e.g. Russia), which AFAIK is kind of a grey area
depending on jurisdiction, or from time-limited offers.

I base part of my reasoning on this article, where the author points out there
are already cheaper options with good tooling such as itch.io, yet they do not
attract a lot of titles: [https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-
compete-with-...](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-
steam/)

~~~
beerlord
Keys from those regions are almost always region locked.

What about the Humble Store? Those are mostly Steam keys.

Itch.io has even less curation than Steam. It has less of a feature that
people want.

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ntock
How many new studios and jobs created? A Unity study from earlier this year
looked at over a thousand studios and almost 50% of the studios were less than
2 years old. Sounds like an industry with high turnover and fluidity, which
makes sense given the nature of games.

~~~
giobox
Anecdotally the number of incidences of zero severance pay on being made
redundant in the game industry seems way above the software industry norm to
me. You read so many accounts of young people who love games building
relatively risky careers fuelled by their passion being really pretty badly
screwed over.

Just this week Telltale games announces a major studio closure, assured fans
that one of their popular product lines will see further instalments all the
while again paying zero severance to the humans who formerly made the game in
question. It’s not a good look.

Another pretty bad example is the whole “will I actually get paid this month?”
fiasco that dogged Crytek for years, repeatedly failing to meet payroll on
time over and over again.

This wouldn’t be half as bad if the working conditions were reasonable, but it
seems like working in games dev almost inevitably leads to constant crunch
time to hit shipping deadlines.

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jason_slack
Honestly asking. Is 1,000 a large number when I read it takes 1,000 people 5
years to make a game like Red Dead Redemption?

~~~
dogma1138
The development teams even for AAA games are nowhere near 1000 people.

The whole of Take Two Interactive is 4000 people Rockstar is just one
subsidiary.

Rockstar San Diego which developed RDR has about 150 employees.

~~~
jason_slack
This was a stat in "Indie Game: The Movie", IIRC at least.

~~~
dogma1138
I have high doubts that a quarter of Take Two was involved in the development
of RDR even if you count all the internal testers, marketing and non technical
support staff.

~~~
jason_slack
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V)

First line: "An approximate 1,000-person team developed Grand Theft Auto V, an
action-adventure video game, over several years."

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kosei
Last few years have been incredibly rough for the industry, after the amazing
growth with social games and mobile games. Will be interesting to see what the
industry looks like 3-5 years from now...

~~~
diminish
I think closures are linked to that.

Game houses are still shifting to casual mobile games and some fail to do so
succesfully.

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kthejoker2
And nothing of value was lost?

Not personal to the jobholders, but the market has clearly shown a healthy
appetite for hastily thrown together games on every platform. There's no need
for artistry or polish or craft.

In the digital age, there's just one big landfill and every eyeball and click
is monetized equally.

Just wait until we can synthesize all music and video in a blink.

