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.
No, the proposition makes no sense from a capitalist perspective. We can be united against capitalism without turning it into a caricature, that doesn’t serve to convince anyone of anything.
I know what you said is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that capitalists will prioritise short-term profits over long-term ones. That’s why capitalists will buy a factory, sell of its machinery, fire all the workers, demolish the building and sell the land rather than run the factory so it can continue producing.
Layoffs in the context of gaming/big tech don’t really produce profits though, they reduce expenditure such that existing profits (generated by games already shipped, for which the development cost is already summarily incurred) look more attractive to potential investors. The only participant that would truly stand to profit more from this type of action is the exec attempting to scam investors by exiting during a period of artificially inflated valuation
OK, layoffs might have been a bad example, here’s a better one. A company choosing to do 0-day DLCs, which might increase their profits in the short term, but wuld do damage to their image and game long term. Or a company choosing to include micro-payments and microtranscations in their game (Diablo 3 and 4), which in the short term looked good cause of profits, but in the long term made people less excited for the game or new installments, basically killing the game. So rather than continuing to release a good game they can sell to a lot of people, they chose to make as much money as possible on the current edition without thinking of future profits with subsequent installments of the game.