I’ll explain this as quick as I can. Basically the bourgeoisie that own the major studios are so obsessed with profit that they make blatantly unsustainable decisions like overmonetization and shipping unfinished games every few years. Now look what’s happening, the studios have no choice but to lay off employees to recoup the costs they inflicted upon themselves and the worst affected are the fired employees naturally.
This is honestly infuriating and insulting as someone who’s been a massive video game fan since 2019 because the franchises I took a liking to (especially Halo) had countless labor and talent (stretching decades in some cases) have been completely gone to waste publishing cookie cutter generic dogshit games for the c suite’s next payday.
Indies are no better. They also suffer from the problem of shipping unfinished games but unlike their AAA counterparts, they suffer from genuine lack of time and resources to deliver games in a timely manner. So the whole “go indie” is basically lesser evil.
Come to think of it Capitalism actually enables and rewards such incompetence as long as profits are high.
The biggest problem is that it’s basically impossible to sell quality products without sacrificing profit. There’s a reason why the pestilences of microtransactions, live service, battlepasses and CoDNite gameplay are popular in the AAA market.
If you compare a game like Fallout New Vegas to Starfield - including in representation - the quality is night and day, and the latter has a sophisticated pronoun system mind you. Just look at Halo Infinite, you have to get ripped off just to change the color of your Spartan’s armor, and you know why? It’s simply more profitable conditioning entire generations of people to mindlessly consoom overly monetized CoDNite slop than publish quality games. I cooked up the idea of “groomed to consoom” for this reason.
If you want to save gaming you need to get rid of capitalism. We do not out of touch corporate fuckheads like Frank O’Connor who hire people who hate the franchise they’re hired to work for to decide how a game is developed.