To bad for those who had jobs there. Also read somewhere that Linux is up 5% in U.S.
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I work at an affected company. My department was cut by more than 1/3. As for "in trouble," it's not. They're just trying to increase margins to please shareholders.
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Sorry to hear that.
I think it's a dirty trick to please shareholders by "playing" with other peoples lives.
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I assure you, everyone employed and formerly employed here agrees.
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Buy it all up and then start the gutting process. Sucks to hear.
I hope everyone can go off and find a small game studio and work on something they want to work on, and hopefully earn a living off of. The vast majority of good games nowadays don't come from the old guard as it is, so I'm always looking at the small, obscure releases anyway.
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The difficulty there is that the cuts in the industry have been huge and more or less non-stop across the board since 2023. We need new studios to hire all these people, but the market is so crowded as it is that discoverability is a nightmare, and except for standouts like Minecraft and Stardew Valley, the small efforts don't generate the funds needed for significant hiring. The things people can accomplish without investor capital are largely "yet another pixel art game," that even if it has a gameplay loop that's unique and interesting, has a really hard time standing out from the crowd. And of course, if you take investor capital... well, it's possible to stay private, but you have to stay very careful about how things are done to maintain control.
Edit: What we really need is deconsolidation. Every time a studio gets bought, there are new redundancies in responsibilities, and those are jobs waiting to be cut. Every time the company doesn't NEED to be publishing lots of games to survive, the question changes from "will this pay our employees and fund our next game?" to "This isn't going to be as profitable as that, so let's cancel it after all."
Any time a big company buys a studio, it's going to get worse.
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I don't disagree there. The ways that games have to market are such that trying to even get people to realize that you've released a new game is basically impossible unless you've got some backing.
And I'm sure i'm in the minority in the games I play because I recently replayed Myst and Riven (the new versions) and couldn't be happier with them. But I know for a fact most people don't even know what these games are. I'd love to see someone big put out a new game in an old genre that's basically dead to get people to realize there's more than what we're being sold right now by and large.
But like you say, we would need deconsolidation for that. We would need risks to be taken on a game that maybe not 10 billion people are gonna play. And god forbid that happens.
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I think this is true of Software in general. Just one example, Corel absorbed Painter and made it look awful, similarly, JASC Paint Shop Pro has a much clunkier interface than it's original offering. And back to MS who bought out Skype and turned Skype for Business into appalling Teams. When I initially was required to run Teams for Linux in lockdown System Monitor identified it as 'Skype for Business'! I had such a bad experience that I insisted that work use Jitsi Meet, which they did, or I could not attend.
I also had a news bite that 400 Million users left using Windows last year.
This is the very reason why I love small gaming studios.
PROS:
You can do what you want with the project, without a boss yelling down your back, dictating choices by how much money is going out.
You can work at your own pace, its done when its done, like Zorin OS 18.
You don't feel like your in a employee competition with other employees, desperately trying to get your employee bonus. (Valve) AKA, toxic working environment.
You are not fueled by monopolistic tendencies. (EA) As such, you make choices to make a quality game, not a cheap garbage with overpriced price tags. (Games made off of movies)
CONS:
You don't have the huge budget from a large gaming studio, as such, you rely more on donations during the demo/early access period.
You don't have a marketing budget either, so you rely on Steam to get the word out on new games, which also includes positive press in the reviews section.
You have a really small team, so its common to take several years to make a quality game, & bug fixing takes a long time as well.
If your the owner/founder, you don't get paid till the game is released, and you earn a profit. In other words, you better keep your day job, your indy studio aint gonna pay your cost of living.
CONCLUSION:
Despite some of the cons of a small gaming studio, I still prefer them over large studios, due to the lack of corruption, and a strong drive to make a good game. One particular studio I'm following, is manned by only 2 people, a guy and his wife, & he's making the best Starship Simulator I've ever seen!
https://www.youtube.com/@StarshipSimulator/videos
Oh, and for those of us who love Star Trek Voyager, you might appreciate this small dev project too. Note: That dev will require a license from CBS before the demo release however.
PS: Small studios have people with a passion and devotion, to make a great game, with money as the last priority. Large studios have a make money as first incentive.
I've been where I am since we were around 100 people, which would be considered small...ish. Big enough to do some good stuff technologically, but small enough almost everyone knows each other, and the passion is definitely still there. To be quite honest, I miss that size. I wouldn't have wanted to be at a studio much smaller than that, but even before the one I work at was bought up, each time the executives pursued fast growth, it felt like the wrong choice to me. I started saying "There's a term for uncontrolled growth: cancer."
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