Creative Assembly's extraction shooter Hyenas is filled with anarchist sentiments and Sega merch, but it's also a pretty tight online FPS.
2023 has been perhaps the biggest year in gaming in a long time, but the constant lay-offs and greed prove no success is ever enough.
“constant lay-offs and greed”
It’s almost like gaming is controlled by a few giant corporations and not a bunch of great folks who are your friends.
I think that for consumers this was a pretty solid year. We have some bad releases (UE5, in particular, has been rather shit), but we also have some amazing titles and there are still a lot of good things scheduled for the end of the year.
For developers and aspirant developers. It was a very shit year, the gaming industry has never been seen as a good environment. But the huge number of layoffs, closers, budget cuts, etc. Sort of cemented it as a terrible industry to invest your career in.
As soon as microtransactions and "online passes" became a thing it's been downhill ever since. And honestly at this point I've only been excited for like 2 games this whole generation. Ratchet and clank, and Dragons Dogma 2. There's been some other good stuff, but those are the only two where I felt genuine glee and real anticipation for.
I'm hoping Spider-Man 2 makes me feel that again, but all this talk of special exclusive pre-order bonus suits and powers is already putting a bitter taste in my mouth.
Layoffs and studios getting shut down were always a thing. They just happen to be talked about alot these days.
When you have a cash cow like Fornite have 800+ employees gone Hyenas cancelled and jobs most likely being cut there. The slew of live service shut downs and lay offs that happened earlier this year also.
It's a mixture of greed and a saturated LS push games. Why not bunker down and create compelling single player games or SP with multiplayer like the old times.
Though that's easier said than done because Immortals Of Aveum has decent scores but also suffered lay offs because the game didn't sell that well. Then again Aveum struggled to get into the conversation of anticipated games. It released at a bad time and overall interest and coverage for the game wasn't there and if course being a new IP and that's always a uphill battle.
This industry is interesting. Go off on your own and gamble with your livelihood and possibly get eatin alive and struggle to get your game in the limelight or go with a mega publisher and sell out your creative freedom to investors share holders, bosses who only care about money all while still knowing you have no job security.