Recent layoffs at Microsoft point to excessive game budgets as the likely culprit. (Photo by … [+]
The recent and massive layoffs at Microsoft they are further proof that big gaming budgets have not been sustainable for too long.
I’ve already covered this layoff situation in gaming, but it’s clear now that Microsoft’s recent layoffs show that this has far more to do with unsustainable gaming budgets than anything else.
While I cited issues with inflation and Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs as contributing factors in my previous article on the subject, the fact that this has now happened at Microsoft and on such a scale indicates that budgets are the main culprit.
Factoring in 1,900 layoffs at Microsoftnow we had about 8,000 layoffs in total throughout the western gaming industry. This is more than just a hiring fix due to COVID and is indicative of a clear structural problem facing Western game production.
The reason for this conclusion is that if this was an industry-wide problem, as in a hiring correction due to COVID, we would see these layoffs happening on a global scale. In short, we would see similar numbers of layoffs in Japan as elsewhere.
That didn’t happen, and while Japan certainly has stricter employment laws, it’s not unheard of for large companies to lay off staff en masse.
The main reason this hasn’t happened in Japan is that, overall, Japanese games cost much less than their western counterparts. In general, Japanese game companies are more careful with their spending, except for a few extremes.
Now, we may still have some gaming layoffs in Japan, but I don’t expect them to be similar to what happened in the US and Europe.
But what angers me most about all these layoffs is that I’ve been warning about the dangers of unsustainable budgets in gaming since 2015.
Furthermore, the architects of this situation are not the ones being fired. It is mainly the developers who bear the brunt of this poor decision making. People who had no input or control over the inflated budgets in the first place.
My only hope is for the thousands of people who have been laid off to start their own gaming studios and show their previous and completely incompetent management how it should be done.
For now, though, this is a financial fix that had to happen for gaming to survive, but the cost of it is being paid by people who weren’t responsible for any of it.
Follow me Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I can do it too Mecha Damashii and do game reviews at hobbylink.tv.
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