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#industry #games well, expectedly back from the last week rumour, industry coldheartedly get rid of another 1000 people in just two days with Sony and Supermassive. And more we enter the end of the financial year, the more damage will follow, because reports are not good, and even if they minorly are, cuts will happen anyway.

Three things happened through the last 12 months.

1. Industry lost attraction to money, no, it's not gonna be like covid with any crisis "because people play games anyway", because there are no stimulus checks, prices to essential grew up exponentially and money are hedging to liquidity and stocks.

2. Companies, have been cutting external services first, then expensive product people, then management development roles and functions. Decisions functionally go board - exec - opec, and executive and opec will be the last people staying because surprise, they won't fire themselves, they rather will devs. With nothing left to exec and opec in the end of course.

3. Created environment is toxic to it's core at this point, just in a year, decision makers turned market to a place with _zero job security_ for professionals. People who still work are existentially afraid and literally play rabbit in a headlight instead of developing and working, people who left or have been laid off don't want to re-employ until situation changes, motivation to do anything and try to do anything in dev is all time low through the last 25 years.

I really want that to sink in, re-read it few times. No, "we just need to survive through 2024" won't happen, whatever you repeat this mantra in-between the meeting at DICE, GDC and other shows that are honestly saying, produce almost zero business at this point and are rather depressing places to be. It's a systemic crisis and it has to be called out as systemic crisis without BS pretending that things magically will turn somehow fine by themself.

There are ways to solve systemic crisis as well, once it's recognized as it is. Which is not simple, but it can be done. My suggestions (while no one will listen of course) are the following,

1. Let's all take a deep breath, understand that damage is done, and we need to get the sleeves up and begin to un-fuck what has been fucked. Beginning with identifying what studios do best, what type of games, who runs their production best and get right people on the right places to focus on them.

2. Let's again, return to production oriented culture, realistic estimates, adapt pipelines to development-centric effort, cut redundant opec and overheads, set away all those non-essential things suitable for good times aside, like you know, inflated HR, armies of VPs and personal assistants, lean process to be by developers and for developers and at least temporally, call a Defcon MAX on cutting down on redundant bureaucracy and any time killing practices in companies.

3. Game development jobs has to be secure, I mean, what was this name, oh, leaders, why don't you go to your boards and investors and tell them that game development presumes specific time-consuming cycles, you need to make sure you don't lose talent and either you have this, or business is easier to be dissolved. I mean, lead, leaders, otherwise you are not leaders, you are just Linkedin opiniated twats.

4. Stop pretend that trend-following will save anyone, "ecosystemic sales" just means that you want to sell one client 25 things at the same time and there is no industrial client who will buy like that at this point. Its a delusion. No, AI, web3, new economies, hectic multiplatforming of existing titles won't save the day. All of this is desperate and to be honest, very frustrating and somewhat embarrassing to look at. New good games will help. New creative IP's will. Better visibility and distribution will. Better service will as well. All these things will also require specialists, you know grumpy jaded people who don't shine at strategic meetings and don't know everyone useful, but who can actually build a thing or two.

5. Start thinking about new ways of operation, adoption, control, incentivisation, evangelism, scouting and inclusion of more new audiences to get back to positive growth. There are dozens and hundreds of ways to improve there, but truce is, no one want to do that. Everyone are just comfortable with show running, but again, nothing will happen there.

There is a very short window for the fix, I would say 3-4 months, otherwise, it will all explode into everyone's face and collapse will start to be irreversible, and we will be seeing 4-5 years of miserable fuckery round what use to be quite a nice thing to have, game industry as we called it. Also, people who can do the change, need to step up, refuse to play at this point macabre and weird pretending play, and so the change. People who feel themself not necessary in this process, need to find in themself basic human fucking decency and step down, go and open a pub, farm, corner shop or something.

https://www.facebook.com/aleksey.savchenko/posts/pfbid02oLD6bU69u7PG52rPh7HqZUqrU35oshiUqSzLfVu2WHZ5TcrSLbGAmNmhv2JCKLWPl

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