The problem is that exclusives don’t actually get people to buy other games on your platform. See EGS. They’ve spent millions on exclusives, giveaways, etc, to acquire more users but their third-party revenue has actually dropped over time.

I just talked to an executive at a very smart tech company that decided not to lay off their entire talent staff during the tech recession, but instead to re-train them to do other critical tasks.  This way, they get people who know the company doing important stuff, and the talent staff will be in place to snatch the…

Nothing to do with the business and distribution model. It is solely about reporting growth to shareholders, and layoffs are the fastest way to free up cash.  It is short term strategy and happens in every industry. Good old capitalism. 

In other, completely unrelated news:

100%. I work for a fortune 500, and it is the same cycle every time. Our economy is dependent on the myth of unlimited growth. When you lay off all of these people, it frees up reporting cash for shareholders to see. Which means when they actually do have growth, they will need to re-hire anyways and have massive…

Over 6000 layoffs in the video game industry, but how many people have been laid off in the Tech Industry altogether from 2023-present? The fact that companies can just throw their workers away while claiming record profits is ugly capitalism at its finest, but the sheer unchecked accountability for companies to…

It’s the everything has to be a live service mentality, that ruins games and developers.

My guess is that Gounded and Sea of Thieves are the community driven games and Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush are the smaller games that aren’t system sellers.

To be honest the PS5 first party catalog, for a 5 year old system, when you take away the remakes and remasters, is... pretty anemic already without taking an entire year off. What actual 1st party / major exclusives are actually on the system right now? Returnal, FF7 Remake (which I consider an original title just…

I’m really not very sure why we’d consider Aveum a referendum on single player game modes, particularly in light of how well several games with single player modes available are doing right now. A bit of a reach!

Yeah the takeaway from this is NOT that single player games are in trouble. There were lots of other potential reasons (aside from quality) why this failed:

I had never heard of this game until the last couple days. It’s mentioned in another article where the cause of layoffs are being discussed and now here. I also work in advertising so -

I mean, I think the game didn’t do to well because it looked boring as hell and EA didn’t go that hard with promoting it. 

Aren’t single player games thriving right now? The issue may be more major publishers caring more about shareholders than gamers

How does FFVII: Rebirth LEAD the releases when its literally out on the last day of the month?

Fried chicken and watermelon are very well-known racist stereotypes. Like...some of the most well-known negative stereotypes about African Americans dating back to the Civil War. You not being aware of it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be moderated. Some imagery could be questionable, but the specific examples you’ve cited…

They are not doing us a favor by offering a Battle Pass that doesn’t expire, even though it “only has Cosmetics.” They... know we can remember the previous Batman games that just had costumes in them, right? Or the three Spider-Man games? Not gonna cheer you on for selling “just cosmetics” instead of including them as…

They did the never-expire Battlepasses for Halo Infinite and depending on how it’s done, it’s not necessarily a good thing. The amount of time to clear a battlepass for that game was pretty high for my kid (they stopped bothering after realizing they were playing not for fun but to get their quota each day - a…

JFC

“This might be a hot take, but I don’t want Persona to devolve into a dating simulator.”