@danmillwall1131

6 months ago

It’s multifaceted. The economy is currently at a point where the money isn’t flowing as freely as it was previously. Those hires now exist with “disproportionate” salaries (I don’t agree with that assessment) and you can’t go back on those contract but you can fire them and in six months rehire them when they are desperate enough to accept crap wages.

Games cost more to produce, audiences want more content, more detail, more dynamic systems. All while gamers are incredibly resistant to paying more, which also fuels the widespread adoption of less ethical and scummy practices (cosmetics, more content being dlc, live service games and subscription models) to trick the public into paying more.

The embracer group accelerated this issue of diminishing returns by swallowing IPs before realising they don’t actually print money and you gotta do something with them, which is expensive. So as that whole fiasco goes bust a lot of jobs are lost in the cross fire.

Being a game maker is just less profitable than controlling access to content, why make art when you can just sell it via your own storefront. Even better if you remove any sense of consumer ownership ship and license your games using a subscription service.

Put simply, late stage capitalism is killing most creative pursuits and gamers are too self destructive to keep the industry afloat during a downturn in the economy.
It’s not that gamers refuse to dump huge amounts of money into the hobby it’s that we’re increasingly terrible at deciding what to dump that money into.

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