Their name has now been changed to Stellar Mass Games.
How big was the ceos bonus last fy?
Their CEO quit end of June without any reason stated. Sounds like he was the first one to get laid off.
Well that’s good.
Most of these layoffs are VC groups pulling funding from gaming companies to shift to AI investments
Yeah because they think that AI will make the games in the future.
Have you seen AI make games they’re terrible. They objectively work but they’re not good games because AI has no creativity.
I doubt they even care, VCs are there for investment returns, they don’t give a shit about anything else
Most of these VCs are funded by old boomers who will fall for any tech hype. LLMs are the most successful grift of all time.
the best I’ve seen are shitty clones of simple games like frogger or flappy bird - anything else is about as interactive as a slideshow or vaporware.
“redundancy consultation process” I hate newspeak
Its a british thing. If a company wants to lay off a large amount of employees, they have to go through a process called consultation. This obliges them to sit down with your trade union rep (if you have one) and tell them why your job is being cut.
Not sure how much difference it makes in practice, but at the very least it guarantees a 40 day period between announcing redundancies and actually firing people.
Honestly consultants are overrated
Individuals get fired when they fuck up, companies layoff workers when they fuck up. Large scale layoffs are the outcome of poor planning and organization. You can’t predict markets completely, suppliers charge, etc which accounts for small # layoffs, but large, mass layoffs should be accompanied by replacing executives and leadership roles like board members first to prevent such poor management.
it’s cheaper to hire in bulk and fire “low performers” or whatever than it is to put more effortinto hiring.
and even then, tmk, it’s really only so common in amerikka because worker protections are practically non-existent. if it were more expensive to fire people…then maybe the corpos would plan/hire better
Would that be good though? How is a small company realistically going to test if someone is worth hiring or not.
Oh yeah, have you got 10 years experience in the same role?
How is a small company realistically going to test if someone is worth hiring or not.
we got into this stupid market because we spent decades neglecting training. When you don’t train for what you need, you don’t get good at identifying what skills you really need in order to succeed.
So this question is already too far gone. If someone has most skills but is missing one: train them for it. Even if the training is as informal as "give them a few weeks in a low stakes environment to work on less valuable (but less risky) work.
You can’t train someone who can’t be brothered
well that makes the hiring or trial process much easier, no? I don’t think the problem here is “I can’t tell if my employee gives a fuck”.
And I can tell you that passion is not something lacking in the games industry.
Ah man, the layoffs are hitting the developers of hit 2013 game “Walking with Dinosaurs?” What is the world coming to??
Layoffs are hitting the developers of hit titles such as the Dark Pictures Anthology and Until Dawn.
For a second, I thought this was supergiant games, and had a heart attack
Who?
They’ll soon have to rebrand to “fairly large games”.
Their games are probably not easy to make and definitely not cheap if you hire these famous actors. Sure they are not s-tier level of actors but they are definitely not cheap. I bet many of those actors can ask a higher pay than the games industry’s favorite called Troy Baker.
Also the market for interactive movies probably isn’t mega huge either. Every interactive movie series they released was published by a different publisher. Doubt they were massive hits.
Based on what I’ve seen Directive 80211 didn’t seem to sell as well as their previous games, probably because they dropped the “Dark Pictures” stuff from it (or kept it hidden, as it were)… Hard to believe a single mis-step caused this but I’m not in the industry so take that with a pinch of salt.
They’ve released a bunch of non-Dark Pictures games, The Quarry, Casting of Frank Stone and Little Nightmares 3 recentlyish.
Removed by mod
They are to blame so it’s no surprise they want to make it sound inevitable and unpredictable
Once again, this demonstrates just how volatile and uncertain it is to be having game development as a career path. Especially as venture capital and equity deciding the fates of companies they buy out.
