10 Days Into 2024 And 2300+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced
This year is already looking to be another horrible one for people making games
Mostly from Unity: 1800 through the end of March.
Wow, 35% of Twitch! What a shitty start to the year
Twitch having 1400ish employees before the layoffs doesn't seem too crazy, right? Cutting 35% is insane, though.
Unity is firing people as a result of a failed monetization attempt by the chief executive. I would argue the employees should have a case against the company and the chief executive. As this was so poorly implemented, fault could be argued.
We all could see that Unity's layoff was coming, that pricing backlash not only drove away many developers, also probably was driven by troubling financial within the organization.
Twitch is sort of unexpected, but when I see the number of impromptu rules they rolled out and rolled back last year, whether from restricting multi-streaming, to limiting showing brands logo on stream, to restricting / unrestricting female streamers from showing too much skin, etc. I assume that means that even with all those intrusive ads, Twitch is still losing money.
I guess from now on, when a tech company starts to arbitrarily change their T&C / rules to either protect their revenue / market share, and maybe rolling back from backlashes, then it's a sign that there's trouble brewing (if you work at those companies, beware)
It's looking like many companies are doing it at once so not any one of them gets focused on for backlash.
Unity and twitch are really an advertising industry problem, not gaming. Unity tried to expand into selling ads in games and it hasn't gone very well at all.
I think we should see this as separate to the actual industry issues from Devs and publishers.
