#layoffs

[heartspark]

Have you ever wanted to play a cute monster taming game with lots of love and heart put into every inch and corner of it by a Team of fantastically talented artists?

Me too!! Too bad it got cancelled literally a few weeks before it was going to be anounced!

Artist Nicholas Kole on twitter along with many other talented artists have been sharing their work of nearly 4 years on this game. I cant imagine the heartbreak of working so hard on this project only for it to get canceled right before Release and everyone on the Team to get laid off.

It was meant to be an open world, minecraft inspired builder, with all sorts of unique creatures with various skins, variations depending on biomes, and even petting animations. That you could tame! It also had a large amount of beautiful and unique character customization. Here's some of the art ( NOT MY ART ) for the project!

Apparently alot of this game was near finished, coded, etc! ( ART ABOVE IS BY NICHOLAS KOLE , JOHANNES FIGLHUBER, INES MARSAL, AND MARIA LOBANOVA )

I dont know if the artists can look into crowdfunding ( the Studio still may own the IP ) , but myself and a few others have been trying to get the hashtag #bringbackprojectdragon get some traction on twitter! Maybe if the internet raises enough stink, the Studio might pay attention. Im not sure how likely that is but I desperately want thus game to exsist, it would be a dream game for me and many others im sure. So please consider joining in if you have a twitter.

[saywhat-politics]

BREAKING: I just offered an amendment on the floor to give Veterans fired in the Trump-Musk layoffs their jobs back.

Every single Republican blocked it.

Shame on them for betraying our heroes.

[political-us]

[shipperwolf1]

The Guardian: Southern Poverty Law Center workers vote to remove CEO after ‘inhumane’ layoffs

Empty words won't give us or the communities we served their livelihoods back.

Sign in support of SPLC's laid-off staff

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Demonstrators gathered in Montreal Saturday to protest Amazon's decision to shutter its seven warehouses in Quebec and lay off workers, including at what was Canada's only unionized Amazon facility. Waving flags and holding anti-Amazon placards, protesters marched up the snow-blanketed streets. Felix Trudeau, who represented the now laid-off workers at the unionized warehouse in Laval, Que., urged the public to take a stand against the company.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mckitterick]

Hasbro, owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, lays off 1,100 workers

The corporate owner of Wizards of the Coast (maker of D&D and Magic) announced it will lay off 1100 employees just two weeks before Christmas. Hasbro had already fired 800 workers in January of this year.

At the time, CEO Cocks trumpeted the new corporate plan: focus on fewer and larger brands, increase digital development, and invest in direct-to-consumer and licensed deals like Baldur's Gate 3, demonstrating his disconnect with customers.

Cocks first became Hasbro CEO in February 2022, and now gets an annual salary of $1.5 million. While the company's income dropped and 800 workers went jobless, this one executive received $9.4 million in total compensation last year, an amount that could have saved many creative jobs if even slightly trimmed. Instead, 1100 more actual workers will go.

No reduction in executive salary, bonuses, or additional compensation was announced.

[cardboard-crack]

[isaacsapphire]

One thing that stands out to me about the DODGE layoffs/grant cuts resulting in layoffs is that government employees and grant beneficiaries apparently think they’re more sympathetic than people who work in the private sector; they are telling journalists about the harrowing and traumatic experience of… being in a large workforce reduction.

And yeah, layoffs suck, but they’re a fact of life. A good percentage of the population has been laid off at some point in their careers, and often as part of mass layoffs. There’s a perception that the blue tribe/bluecheck types that are treating the government layoffs as just horrible and unthinkable have treated laid off private sector workers poorly in the past too.

It’s sad for these people that they got laid off, but it’s an ordinary personal tragedy that the employer they thought they’d work at forever cut their dream job, not some special unique trauma.

[madhattersez]

Oof.

Welp, I was a part of the 16% that was laid off from Automattic / Tumblr this week. On a positive note, I am happy to be able to make time again to be posting on here, and I've really missed using Tumblr personally rather than vastly just behind-the-scenes stuff.

I have a feeling of... "It's good to be home again." Is that weird?

Hi again, friends. <3

[askagamedev]

A follow up to your answer about veilguard (was really hoping you would touch on that one). Why do game companies that have a “bad” release always seem to start from the bottom of the pyramid when it comes to restructuring and recouping losses? Why fire low level devs who did their best with what they had, when the companies have people in senior positions making hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) that they could just cut from? Why do the trenches always get the punishment first?

The short answer is because shit rolls downhill. For a longer and more nuanced answer, there's multiple factors to consider.

The main issue is that the company is trying to cut costs immediately. This is usually for two major reasons:

Reassure investors to keep them from dumping the stock and driving down the company's value

Save as much money as they can from their current stockpile for other projects still in development.

If the company goes under because it can't make payroll company-wide, everybody is doomed regardless. A gecko will sacrifice its tail in order to escape with its life. A crab will tear its own claw off to survive. A company will always cut staff to keep itself afloat.

The next factor is that each major experience level up a dev attains tends to be a geometric difference in productivity. [A large task that would take a junior dev two months to complete might take a mid-level dev one month and a senior dev only a week or two]. This is why senior devs are entrusted with the bigger and more critical tasks. Further, the typical quality of work that a senior dev produces is much higher than what you'd get from a mid-level or a junior. I'm a senior dev and I cost the team a large amount of money to keep, but paying for just me is still significantly cheaper than paying a pair of mid-level designers or three/four juniors.

The next factor is that most big layoffs come after a project has shipped. This is because a given project is at its maximum headcount right before it ships - you need all hands on deck during full production, building and validating all of the content in the game. There needs to be other projects in development to pay for those people after the game launches. If the game launches well, a significant portion of the team can stay on to do post-launch content and the others can join in-progress projects at the studio or at other studios owned by the publisher. In the case of a bad launch the post-launch content gets cancelled because there just aren't enough players to make building the post-launch content financially viable and the people who were supposed to build it have no new project to pay for their salaries.

There's also the factor of how projects have different needs at different times. You always need a core team to get a project off the ground - engineering who can put together the foundations of the game, design that can prototype and build core gameplay, art that can establish a new visual standard for a new game. But you likely don't need an army of designers to build content for a game that doesn't have any core gameplay yet, gameplay engineers to flesh out systems that haven't been designed yet, artists to model and skin characters that haven't been concepted yet, or QA to test content that hasn't been built yet. You need those folks when you're in production and all of the groundwork has been laid.

These are the nominal reasons why job cuts always start from the bottom - the juniors and mid-levels have the least to do when a game gets cancelled or a bad launch happens and the cost to keep them all adds up significantly. The fact that it also shields decisionmakers and middle managers is, of course, also in there. This is also why I never offer or expect loyalty to or from an employer, especially a large publicly-traded one. They will never sacrifice their own survival (or even advantage) to keep me, so I should never expect more than a business relationship from them that could end at any time.

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[saywhat-politics]

This is how Trump is putting - or has put - us into a recession. Consumers sentiment falls, they cut back on spending, companies are forced to lay off US workers, and the cycle continues.

[political-us]

[ohnoitstbskyen]

So, considering what's going on with Riot right now, do you think Arcane Season 2 got caught up in all of this restructuring?

Yes and no. Arcane season 2 is part of the reason for the restructuring.

As I understand it, internally at Riot, after Arcane was a huge (and more importantly: prestigious!) success, the decision was made to basically hand the entirety of the game's lore and story over to the Entertainment division within Riot. These are the people in large part responsible for projects like Arcane, K/DA, Heartsteel, that animated series China got, all that sort of thing.

The writers at Riot were basically told to flat out stop producing new content and lore for the game - that's why there's BEEN no new story content for League for over a year - because everything was going to be consolidated under the Entertainment division from now on. This is why Riot started talking about "One Runeterra" and "Arcane is going to be canon" and so on.

The success of Arcane convinced executives that what League of Legends needs is a singular cohesive brand with its most successful public property leading the charge, Arcane is going to be the gateway drug, the hook on the end of the line that brings new players and new paying customers into the exciting world of the League of Legends multimedia IP universe!

Nevermind that Arcane's story and worldbuilding is fundamentally incompatible with >checks notes< the overwhelming majority of Runeterra as it exists and enormous compromises would have to be made to either the world of Runeterra or Arcane itself to make it work. Arcane is the big shiny prestigious mainstream Emmy-award winning project that every executive wants to put their name next to, and like companies Pivoting To Video in 2015 because Facebook showed them inflated viewership stats, Riot Games is Pivoting To Arcane. It's better than them pivoting to crypto and NFTs, at least, although I know for a fact that high ranking people at Riot tried to make that happen too.

Now, the primary cause for all of these games industry layoffs is that interest rates aren't zero anymore. Borrowing money isn't free, the curve of constant growth has ever so slightly slowed, taking on debt is becoming a little tiny bit more risky than it was previously, and corporations are responding to this with massive rounds of layoffs and constriction to show "financial responsibility" and prove to shareholders that they are prioritizing core growth strategies and blah blah blah etc. They're also trying to kneecap the growing labor movement in the games industry and exert downwards pressure on wages, but the interest rates seem to have been the main thing.

In Riot's particular case, a secondary reason is they want to pivot the focus of the company to support their One Runeterra pipe dream, so a lot of the people who got fired at Riot are writers, artists, creative leads and sometimes extremely senior and successful staff who are now surplus to requirements. This is also why Riot shut down Riot Forge in the same round of layoffs - can't have a bunch of talented indie devs going off making video games that don't adhere to the new One Runeterra policy. What if someone played Mageseeker and got confused how there can be mages all over Demacia but somehow there are no mages in Arcane's Piltover and Zaun. That's a plot hole! People write snarky articles about that sort of thing. It turns off new consumers! What if Cinema Sins makes a video making fun of it?!?

So yeah. A bunch of cocaine-addled fame hungry executive vultures at Riot are absolutely gagging on their own d*cks to put their name next to Arcane related projects, and since they were going to be screwing hundreds of people out of their careers, healthcare, and in some cases their fucking visa status anyway, it seems to have presented a nice opportunity to clear the board for their latest Visionary Scheme for the company IP.

That is as I understand the situation, anyway. I'm a bitter old man and most of what I hear is second hand and anonymous gossip through my social networks, take what I say with a grain of salt, but I've followed this company for (oh god) twelve years now and I have developed a tragically keen understanding of how its executive class operates.

[cupsofjade]

bsky

[jadeseadragon]