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The story
A large-scale survey reporting that the majority of people laid off from the game industry still haven’t found new jobs became a hot topic on 5ch’s hardware/industry (Geha) board. Commenters pointed out that Western development studios typically hire on a project-by-project basis, so when a project wraps up, layoffs tend to follow directly, with little in the way of job-placement support. The thread split into two camps that refused to budge: one arguing “if they were truly talented, another company would snap them up,” and the other countering “cutting staff even while profitable is a management problem, not a reflection of people’s abilities.”
Large-scale survey finds “a majority of those laid off from the game industry are still unemployed.” Is the road back to work especially rough in the West?
Source: share.google / Original article here
What people said
They're cutting loose people they hired, so you've got to call that serious — and on top of that, they're not even offering job-placement support.
They keep saying there's a labor shortage, yet they won't hire anyone.
No way anyone's going to scoop up a bunch of incompetents.
But they keep hiring and dumping people over and over? You'd think they'd know what they're getting before "buying," right? Maybe the development environment itself is just bad. In the first place, IT grunt work ("IT construction laborers," i.e. rank-and-file devs) is just following orders from managers and leads — this has to be one of the industries where the useless cream rises to the top and only the higher-ups stick around lol
Exactly.
There must be plenty of talented people among them.
Maybe it's about time you dropped that outdated way of thinking?
Companies cut staff even while profitable all the time, everywhere.
Executives who dodge responsibility are the real dinosaurs here lol
And how exactly do you judge talent?
FH6 (Forza Horizon 6) was fun though
Resumes can list credentials, but they can't judge actual ability.
Even among "IT grunt laborers" there are plenty of people with real knowledge and skill.
And on top of that, Japan has this image of clueless people getting into the field, but isn't the West mostly college-grad level in that line of work?
It's not about whether they're incompetent, it's about whether there's a replacement.
If replacements are plentiful, it doesn't have to be that particular person.
There used to be a false image to protect — "PlayStation respects creators" — so even the PlayStation fanboys wouldn't go that far.
It was more like, "That's normal in the West, duh — they just move to another company, it's basically like a reassignment."
But once a source like the one in Re: #1 comes out, they end up forced into the forbidden move of criticizing the staff themselves.
Same pattern as with Kojima back then.
If you're going to say that, then there are plenty of replacements for upper management too.
They're just treating people like slaves and stacking them into a hierarchy.
This dumb "labor mobility" thing isn't even necessary
and doing it
is exactly why we keep getting nothing but garbage games lately.
A company that develops and protects its employees is really the right way to do this.
Overseas, people work on a project-by-project basis to begin with,
so there's no concept of nurturing and protecting employees.
Upper management stays because there's no replacement for them.
Well, if a replacement did show up, they'd get swapped out too.
Back in the day there were fewer people, so it was probably easier to get there,
but now with so many people it's got to be tough, right?
How's someone at the bottom supposed to show off that they're talented?
Realistically that's just not possible, is it — you're stuck doing whatever work you're assigned.
In that sense it's already a hierarchy.
The people at the top started out at the top from day one.
Not that I really know, though.
That's not something unique to the game industry.
The ones deciding on layoffs aren't
the people actually making the games
but the folks sent in by the shareholders' meeting from companies
that have nothing to do with gaming —
people who've probably never even played a game in their life.
The sheer number of titles being released has exploded though.
It's still at the research stage
— it's not like it's affecting big-publisher games yet.
At best indie devs are plugging it into spots where they're short-staffed, just to fake their way past quality gaps.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Mass layoffs in the game industry have been hitting major Western publishers one after another since around 2023, and in the overseas development system where people are hired on a project-by-project basis, a project ending or shrinking tends to translate directly into layoffs. Because the premise differs from Japan’s practice of nurturing and holding onto full-time employees, the thread saw a clash between a self-responsibility argument (“if they were truly talented, they’d get picked up elsewhere”) and a counterargument (“this is cost-cutting driven by shareholders and management decisions, not a matter of ability”) — and the two sides never found common ground. Some voices pointed to AI’s impact, but as the view in reply 116 suggests — “it’s still at the research stage and not yet affecting major publishers’ games” — that impact may currently be overstated. It’s also worth noting, since it’s easy to get wrong, that a point raised in the thread was that Nintendo’s “second parties” are external contractors with no capital ties to Nintendo, meaning Nintendo itself has no authority to lay off their staff or dictate bankruptcy.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “[Despicable Sony] People laid off from the game industry — a majority are still unemployed.“
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