Is that really motivational? Seems more depressing to me than anything.
It basically seems to me like "I'm extremely skilled, qualified, disciplined and hard working but I still can't get shit in my field and I'm having to work two shitty jobs just to live. But this is totally motivational because on the end I said that it's resilience and I'm not giving up."
Of
course, I'm a cynical bitch, so I'm bound to read it that way, but
still. If you look at it for its objective reality and not his personal
view on it, it's just bleak.
LOL I've been around the block a couple of times, I'm actually coming up to half way through my seventh decade alive (heh existence more like) next Feb, when I'll essentially hit the BIG 65yo - feckin!
I'm just your average bloke with a penchant for arty farty stuff so indeed seen and done a bit. For instance some parts of my employment history reads like a nightmare, practically populated with robust dangerous industries where you're paid absolutely sweet fuck all risking life and limb, either being shot at or jumped by drunk dickheads while on 12hr night shift foot patrol or long hours construction laboring work at height or heavy machinery factory relocations, where one tiny lapse of concentration you'll likely end squished under a single 200 ton stripped down Leichhardt industrial printing press component...etc basically you do what it takes to get by.
At the moment due to collecting assorted knocks-bumps-injuries sustained over decades, fortunately landed in a single studio apartment which is part of a large self contained care facility + independent accommodation village setting, that are dotted around Melbourne for ex-military/forces personnel, I was eligible having served 7yrs in the Australian army throughout 1980s and it's overarching charitable organization has been running these veteran/ex-service residential care homes for 80yrs.
Thus, currently survive receiving a fortnightly temporary Veteran Payment allowance via the DVA, after lodging a compensation claim 2022 for mental health issues I believed incurred while serving, had lost a few mates during my enlistment but these bureaucratic arseholes drag your application through the mud, re-traumatizing applicants by forensically picking apart submitted first hand evidence apparently without any ounce of humane secondhand thought. Already rejected twice, in fact once on appeal even-though I've been diagnosed with PTSD for fuck sake, anyway given I think it's a forlorn hope the second scheduled appeal next year in terms of final verdict will be accepted is probably slim, at best.
Hmm...really dunno why I'd shared an extremely abridged life story, maybe I'm just an eternal optimist, oh well quite possibly some sort of cathartic release triggered after reading your above response, however here's an unsolicited piece of lived experience subjective advice.
Take it from me, if an opportunity positively perceived should present itself grab and don't let go because life's too fucking short - my only regret at this latter stage is not initially choosing a creative path 40 years ago but as the old adage goes...
Is that really motivational? Seems more depressing to me than anything.
Kind Homeless Man Builds Prosthetic For 3 Legged Cat - Click Here For More!
I've had more 3d artists contacting me on Linkedin asking if I had any leads than recruiters asking if I wanted an interview these past two years, it's pretty bad. If I were laid off tomorrow I'd definitely be looking elsewhere, not this industry, for work.
Oh don't get me wrong, I respect his hard work, but....I feel bad for him, and his kids. Can a guy working two jobs and studying even get to see and spend any time with them? Basically, it just feels kind of strange to me. That thing where people will describe something terrible but then spin it as positive. I think on Reddit they have that "orphan crushing machine" one for it.
Outcome of the Xbox job cuts as mentioned above. A number of projects getting cancelled + studio closure. Overall 4% (global) employee headcount reduction at Microsoft, ~9000 people affected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPAU5nk3ndU
I'm hearing through friends, acquaintances, and former teammates that Turn10 (Forza Motorsport) is essentially gone. Most upper leadership, the entire environment team, the whole IT / tools / internal support team. Basically all that's left is anybody that was directly supporting Playground Games and their work on Forza Horizon. Looks like what is going to happen is that any scattered remainders will be folded in under Playground, and Turn10 as a separate entity will cease to exist.
Boy, Alan Hartmann sure didn't hold back on screwing his former underlings to the max, the minute he got moved upstairs.
So, we, as an industry, are going to learn from these layoffs and stop working for weird selfish people right? Maybe start our own indie studios? Maybe work towards a sustainable future for developers, rather than green candles in the stock market?
It's like watching PvP sweats (executives) gank the shit out of PvE noobs (developers) right now, and the annoying part is seeing it happen in slow motion since 2015. It's why I declined an offer for working on Diablo 4. You lend your eyes, ears, and hands to a project, and they'll cut them off. People need to do some background research on the companies they want to join before applying to them. An interview goes both ways.
Scrolling my Linkedin feed is absolutely disheartening right now.
Absolutely, but in an industry where people are often very desperate to get in, especially during times when things aren't doing so hot, it can be VERY hard to say no to an opportunity.
I really think it's often as black and white as, you work for who will have you, or you find a different industry. Except during the best of the best times, or if you're a superstar.
That's the same logic a drug addict has. It's a destructive downward spiral. Our access to more powerful developer tools has never been more plentiful, and free. Look at what these nerds were using back in the day, there's probably more processing power in my phone than in that entire office https://youtu.be/hrQ9loo42dQ?t=31
So, we, as an industry, are going to learn from these layoffs and stop working for weird selfish people right? Maybe start our own indie studios? Maybe work towards a sustainable future for developers, rather than green candles in the stock market?
It's like watching PvP sweats (executives) gank the shit out of PvE noobs (developers) right now, and the annoying part is seeing it happen in slow motion since 2015. It's why I declined an offer for working on Diablo 4. You lend your eyes, ears, and hands to a project, and they'll cut them off. People need to do some background research on the companies they want to join before applying to them. An interview goes both ways.
Scrolling my Linkedin feed is absolutely disheartening right now.
So one of the problems we're up against is that there's fundamentally two halves to the industry. Creative, and financial. We're the creative half.
The financial half does not look at making video games as art or as companies. For the people who provide the funding, they look at game production like financial products or investment trading. To them, a game is a like an oil futures contract that's less of a sure thing and harder to get to, but a way higher upside if they do strike it rich. Historically, when costs were lower and risk tolerance was higher, the financial side was willing to fund projects that were a more ambitious or nebulous.
As labor costs have risen (because of inflation et al) and risk tolerance has gone through the floor, they've moved towards things that have a more reliable return in a shorter timespan: live service, microtransactions, yearly releases with reduced changes (I'm looking at you, EA's yearly sports titles).
The core of this is that the people with the money in this industry don't want to spend that money. They don't want to put it towards US/CAN/EU-level game artist salaries for multiple years in high-risk projects. They want to pay Indian and Chinese overseas artist salaries - and I've seen the numbers, nobody in a western nation can live off those numbers - for projects with quick returns and minimal risk levels. They've just watched multiple high-profile train wrecks eat *several billion dollars cumulatively* over the last few years, and they were already getting really risk adverse before that.
Either we on the creative side are going to have to find a different economic model for our projects, something like the old Gathering of Developers alliance-funding, or we're going to have to figure out something else. I don't know what that something else is. But the era of getting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to pay an US/EU team of 20-200 people US/EU salaries for 3-6 years to make a game that isn't a super-low-risk service model product is effectively over.
The financial half does not look at making video games as art or as companies. For the people who provide the funding, they look at game production like financial products or investment trading.
Exactly, this is precisely why we're in this mess. The financial side isn't interested in running sustainable businesses, they are interested in getting rich quick via gambling, and if they have to fire entire studios of talented people to get what they want, they absolutely will. I've said this before; game companies are being strip mined, top to bottom. Here's the wikipedia article to strip mining, for those who don't know what I'm refering to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_mining
I hope that what we're seeing today - and also over the past several years - is a massive fucking lesson to anyone interested in game development to not let these kinds of people into positions of power. This is something we should have learned long ago already when Morhaime handed the reins over to Activision, and literally named his new studio 'Dreamhaven'. A safe place for dreams.
I wouldn't go as far as to claim it has the answers to what's happening, but it surely have some answers.
A few choice quotes:
A lofty player target was set for Glacier: 100 million players over a set period of time that included post-launch.
"Obviously, Battlefield has never achieved those numbers before," one EA employee told me. "It's important to understand that over about that same period, 2042 has only gotten 22 million," another said. Even 2016's Battlefield 1—the most successful game in the franchise by numbers—had achieved "maybe 30 million plus."
(...)
Despite the big ambitions of the new leadership team and EA executives, "very few people" working in the studios believed the 100 million target was achievable, sources told me. Many of those who had worked on Battlefield for a long time at DICE in Stockholm were particularly skeptical.
This is not a goal, this is a bet. They didn't get past 30m players in their most popular title just because they didn't feel like it, it's because they don't know how to given their constraints. Setting the latest title scope and the budget with this as a concrete goal is absurd. And what they're staking on it? The devs jobs, people who understand this is out of touch but get ignored and sidelined.
As the project approached gate three and then alpha, several people within the organization tried to communicate that the game wasn't on footing as firm as the top-level planning suggested. One person attributed this to the lack of a single source of truth within the organization. While developers tracked issues and progress in one tool, others (including project leadership) leaned on other sources of information that weren't as tied to on-the-ground reality when making decisions.
"Development of games has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years," said one developer. The new arrangement excites investors and shareholders, who can imagine returns from the next big unicorn release, but it can be a less creatively fulfilling way to work, as directives come from the top down, and much time is spent on dealing with inter-studio process. Further, it amplifies the effects of failures, with a higher human cost to people working on projects that don't meet expectations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This other article is also interesting. I'm not from the US and wasn't aware of this, but I guess it's another (and an important one) piece in the puzzle of what has been going on with mass layoffs in recent years.
How a little-known tax change sparked a tech layoff surge
For nearly seventy years, US companies could immediately deduct the full cost of their research and development activities, from engineering salaries to software development and contractor fees. (...)
That landscape changed in 2022, when a provision from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which had been delayed, took effect. To offset the cost of lowering the corporate tax rate, lawmakers required that R&D expenses be spread out, or amortized, over five years for domestic activities and fifteen years for foreign ones, rather than being deducted all at once. (...)
The impact was immediate and severe. When companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules, they found themselves unable to offset their R&D spending against taxable income fully. For cash-strapped firms and those not yet profitable, the result was a sudden and painful increase in tax bills, just as venture funding was drying up and borrowing costs were rising. The financial pressure forced companies to make tough decisions, and in many cases, the largest and most flexible expense – headcount – was the first to be reduced.
This has to have a chilling ripple effect on the industry, not only due big players firing people. People getting laid off don't spend on entertainment and the US is a huge market with global impact.
This other article is also interesting. I'm not from the US and wasn't aware of this, but I guess it's another (and an important one) piece in the puzzle of what has been going on with mass layoffs in recent years.
How a little-known tax change sparked a tech layoff surge
For nearly seventy years, US companies could immediately deduct the full cost of their research and development activities, from engineering salaries to software development and contractor fees. (...)
That landscape changed in 2022, when a provision from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which had been delayed, took effect. To offset the cost of lowering the corporate tax rate, lawmakers required that R&D expenses be spread out, or amortized, over five years for domestic activities and fifteen years for foreign ones, rather than being deducted all at once. (...)
The impact was immediate and severe. When companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules, they found themselves unable to offset their R&D spending against taxable income fully. For cash-strapped firms and those not yet profitable, the result was a sudden and painful increase in tax bills, just as venture funding was drying up and borrowing costs were rising. The financial pressure forced companies to make tough decisions, and in many cases, the largest and most flexible expense – headcount – was the first to be reduced.
This has to have a chilling ripple effect on the industry, not only due big players firing people. People getting laid off don't spend on entertainment and the US is a huge market with global impact.
Good find! That's usually the kind of stuff that really matters in the larger picture.
2017 and an effort to lower corporate taxes at the expense of all else? Sounds like a Very Stable Genius move.
Replies
Kind Homeless Man Builds Prosthetic For 3 Legged Cat - Click Here For More!
I've had more 3d artists contacting me on Linkedin asking if I had any leads than recruiters asking if I wanted an interview these past two years, it's pretty bad. If I were laid off tomorrow I'd definitely be looking elsewhere, not this industry, for work.
https://www.ign.com/articles/ea-cancels-black-panther-game-closes-cliffhanger-games
https://sea.ign.com/xbox-series-s/229584/news/xbox-staff-brace-themselves-for-yet-more-layoffs-as-microsoft-cuts-reportedly-set-to-continue
Boy, Alan Hartmann sure didn't hold back on screwing his former underlings to the max, the minute he got moved upstairs.
I really think it's often as black and white as, you work for who will have you, or you find a different industry. Except during the best of the best times, or if you're a superstar.
So one of the problems we're up against is that there's fundamentally two halves to the industry. Creative, and financial. We're the creative half.
The financial half does not look at making video games as art or as companies. For the people who provide the funding, they look at game production like financial products or investment trading. To them, a game is a like an oil futures contract that's less of a sure thing and harder to get to, but a way higher upside if they do strike it rich. Historically, when costs were lower and risk tolerance was higher, the financial side was willing to fund projects that were a more ambitious or nebulous.
Oh, and once they're finished in the west, here's what they'll do in Asia.
I hope that what we're seeing today - and also over the past several years - is a massive fucking lesson to anyone interested in game development to not let these kinds of people into positions of power. This is something we should have learned long ago already when Morhaime handed the reins over to Activision, and literally named his new studio 'Dreamhaven'. A safe place for dreams.
What’s wrong with AAA games? The development of the next Battlefield has answers.
EA insiders describe stress and setbacks in a project that's too big to fail.I wouldn't go as far as to claim it has the answers to what's happening, but it surely have some answers.
A few choice quotes:
A lofty player target was set for Glacier: 100 million players over a set period of time that included post-launch.
"Obviously, Battlefield has never achieved those numbers before," one EA employee told me. "It's important to understand that over about that same period, 2042 has only gotten 22 million," another said. Even 2016's Battlefield 1—the most successful game in the franchise by numbers—had achieved "maybe 30 million plus."
(...)
Despite the big ambitions of the new leadership team and EA executives, "very few people" working in the studios believed the 100 million target was achievable, sources told me. Many of those who had worked on Battlefield for a long time at DICE in Stockholm were particularly skeptical.
This is not a goal, this is a bet. They didn't get past 30m players in their most popular title just because they didn't feel like it, it's because they don't know how to given their constraints. Setting the latest title scope and the budget with this as a concrete goal is absurd. And what they're staking on it? The devs jobs, people who understand this is out of touch but get ignored and sidelined.
"Development of games has changed so much in the last 10 to 15 years," said one developer. The new arrangement excites investors and shareholders, who can imagine returns from the next big unicorn release, but it can be a less creatively fulfilling way to work, as directives come from the top down, and much time is spent on dealing with inter-studio process. Further, it amplifies the effects of failures, with a higher human cost to people working on projects that don't meet expectations.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This other article is also interesting. I'm not from the US and wasn't aware of this, but I guess it's another (and an important one) piece in the puzzle of what has been going on with mass layoffs in recent years.
How a little-known tax change sparked a tech layoff surge
New R&D tax rules upended the tech sectorFor nearly seventy years, US companies could immediately deduct the full cost of their research and development activities, from engineering salaries to software development and contractor fees. (...)
That landscape changed in 2022, when a provision from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which had been delayed, took effect. To offset the cost of lowering the corporate tax rate, lawmakers required that R&D expenses be spread out, or amortized, over five years for domestic activities and fifteen years for foreign ones, rather than being deducted all at once. (...)
The impact was immediate and severe. When companies filed their 2022 tax returns under the new rules, they found themselves unable to offset their R&D spending against taxable income fully. For cash-strapped firms and those not yet profitable, the result was a sudden and painful increase in tax bills, just as venture funding was drying up and borrowing costs were rising. The financial pressure forced companies to make tough decisions, and in many cases, the largest and most flexible expense – headcount – was the first to be reduced.
This has to have a chilling ripple effect on the industry, not only due big players firing people. People getting laid off don't spend on entertainment and the US is a huge market with global impact.