Procrastinato said:
You're kind of thinking of developers as robots who will put up with that kind of treatment, with this statement. There is fierce, fierce demand for experienced devs in the games industry. It has a high burnout rate, and those able to weather the taxing workload long enough to become senior, experienced devs are not folks you can cut the salary on. Likewise, newbie developers, while they have lots of energy, struggle so much with the details of game development (without guidance from experienced devs), that hiring them alone isn't really a valid option, either. |
Yeah, you can probably get away giving a pay cut to a bad employee but doing it to everybody or most everybody won't be taken well at all. That's a quick way to get everyone to leave your studio.
And yeah, uprooting your studio is incredibly expensive and I'm sure you would lose a lot of people, I just find it odd that these big publishers sometimes don't look at California prices and then look at anywhere else and realize the kind of money they can save. They could either completely shut down the studio, or move it just keeping key people and hiring the rest when they need it.
