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Game over for developers. Video game houses continue to lay off

12 months ago babelfish

Game over for developers. Video game houses continue to lay off

Forced diet for Amazon's gaming division, veteran software house Deviation Games decimated. Video game software houses don't stop licensing

The world of video games is making record profits, especially in China , yet a growing number of software houses are in considerable economic difficulty. Especially in the West. We have talked extensively about Ubisoft's mega red , among the largest and most famous in Europe. Then there are the manufacturers that are already proceeding with the layoffs .

NO EXTRA LIFE, THAT'S THE DOOR…

The most famous is undoubtedly Amazon which has become entangled in the world of video games with a single title, New World , which came out with great difficulty and after countless postponements in 2021 . The group founded by Jeff Bezos has laid off a hundred employees of the Prime Gaming, Game Growth and Amazon Games divisions based in San Diego. This was announced by VP Games Christoph Harmann in an internal press release in which the will to "continue to invest in our internal development efforts" is reaffirmed.

There are three Amazon Games studios: in addition to those in San Diego and Montreal there is that of Orange Country in Irvine, California. The first two would be working on a new video game.

The company, undergoing profound restructuring after the cut of 18,000 workers, which was followed by a second of an additional 9,000 which also partly involved Twitch, according to Bloomberg intends to "capitalize its resources in gaming, also through its Crown channel".

“LICENSING” THE VIDEO GAMES SOFTWARE HOUSE MANTRA

VGC then announced that another development studio has been decimated by the crisis: Deviation Games, which is made up of several gaming industry veterans from teams that have made different chapters of the Call of Duty saga such as Dave Anthony and Jason Bludell (who however left the team in September last year) and made headlines for being working with Sony PlayStation on a PS5 exclusive triple-A shooter.

Firing as if there were no tomorrow, or perhaps to stay afloat until tomorrow: this is the new mantra of many video game companies. DG just asked 90 employees to put what they had on their desks into boxes. Software engineer Kyle Perras, said: "My studio has recently found itself in a difficult situation and has been forced to make a series of layoffs, including me."

The same fate also for many of the boys and girls of Deck Nine Games, the studio founded by ex-Sony Interactive Studios America, including Mark Lyons of development behind titles such as Life is Strange: True Colors and the upcoming The Expanse. In this case the cuts affect about thirty people, in all branches of the company, including programmers, graphics and screenwriters. Among these, there are also several top figures who were not included in the diet but who voluntarily decided to leave so as not to have their colleagues fired.

The studio's former narrative lead, cringey ikari, confirmed the information on Twitter, stating that he had intentionally left Deck Nine Games: “A leader's first responsibility is to his team and this was the best way to protect the most of mine from the wave of layoffs.”

Another testimony, also via Twitter, comes from the narrative designer Elizabeth Ballou who explained this choice matured to protect part of the lower level staff: "When we started, they promised to protect us and they wanted to keep their promise, even at cost of their jobs.”

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/fine-partita-per-gli-sviluppatori-le-case-dei-videogiochi-continuano-a-licenziare/ on Thu, 25 May 2023 04:56:03 +0000.