Par for the course after a release at many studios. The positions needed at various steps of production vary. Unless the studio is big enough to be working multiple projects simultaneously and can shift staff around to various teams, hiring and firing for each phase of production is normal.

Being “normal” doesn’t make it okay.

I never said it did, but at the same time the fact is that those people probably aren’t needed anymore. And they may not be for a year or more for another project. That’s the nature of development like this. A lot of game development is very specific and people are hired for that specific need. Unless the studio is large enough to be handling multiple projects in various stages of development, keeping all those developers on staff that have no work to do for months or years after release doesn’t make sense.

Just pointing out that it shouldn’t be taken by anyone as an indictment of the game or development team, how it was received, or necessarily any future plans. It’s par for the course.

why would anyone work in that industry?

It shouldn’t be. It’s an unsustainable and fucked up way to run a business.

Without employees rights, all jobs are merely gigs

This is a special kind of scummy. Typically you get a so-called “AAA” studio laying off people even after a really successful release that made them a lot of money.

In this case, it was successful, but their contract had a no royalties stipulation so they weren’t getting anything more based on the games success and yet apparently they pushed their employees really hard to go above the quality expectations, got what they wanted, and now fire them… This was about boosting the company name at the expense of the employees…

Owners are always scum…

Maybe the devs will learn not to work for a piece of shit multibillion company like Zenimax. Oh well

It’s not like Devs can afford to say “Hey, you! No, not you, the other one… hire me now!”

If you want to employ staff that way go for freelance with a fixed duration contract and an increase wages to reflect the temporary nature of the work. This is how it works in the rest of IT, at least anywhere sane.

Yeah knowing when you’re going to be out of a job years in advanced would be so much better than this. You can at least plan around it if you know for sure this job is temporary.

Cool. Glad Microsoft was allowed to make that acquisition.

My ps5 primarily plays the same games I did on ps4.

We’re hitting a plateau where hardware isn’t improving the ux.

I fully expect within 10 years individuals will be able to use AI to build decent to good quality games in relatively little time.

In a similar vein I expect people will be able to generate their own media; specifying everything from the plot, actors, music, ip, etc.

These big companies replacing human talent with AI are just making themselves obsolete.

Right after they fixed up a bunch of performance issues and bugs. oof

passion and naive hopefulness

In a similar vein I expect people will be able to generate their own media; specifying everything from the plot, actors, music, ip, etc.

No one sits around a campfire telling stories to themselves. No one wants to have to put labour into their own entertainment time after work.

I fully expect within 10 years individuals will be able to use AI to build decent to good quality games in relatively little time.

You vastly overestimate the ability of AI, vastly underestimate the complexity of making games, of both.

At this point, developers at such studios are basically on contract position instead of full time one. It’s sad

Well, if you’re ready to live without a backbone you got to be ready to take the hits and then not cry when you’re left used and abused

Nah. All you “AI slop” crybabies are severely underestimating where AI is going.