Layoffs in Gaming (Current State of the Gaming Industry)

[KrspaceT]

SvennoJ said:

haxxiy said:

Japan has strong labor laws that protect from arbitrary employee dismissals. There's no magic sauce involved here or anything.

The magic sauce is a government caring about their worker base...

Which has led to a much better strategy that Nintendo is following. Instead of hire for crunch (which isn't effective anyway), release broken, fire after its patched, Nintendo tends to keep their people around working on different projects. Long term planning vs short term money grab.

Heck given the recent EA talks about title consolidation, you could also point out that Nintendo seems to know how to make both small and large titles work for them. Heck they're happy when you manage to turn a sub million series like Xenoblade and Fire Emblem into a couple million sellers. 

Yes, Nintendo doesn't manage to keep every franchise well fed, but honestly compared to seemingly everyone else...

...Of course as I (believe) I've mentioned before, half the trouble is also cultural on a fanbase level. Nintendo fans might rag on the odd tree in a Pokemon game, but they lack the graphic obsession that seems to be have kickstarted the graphics race that is hitting problematic levels at the moment. Heck I remember some people, I think an ex-God of War guy, making a 'better' cover for Zelda with AI that basically just makes it graphically more 'realistic' instead of the art style Tears and Breath use. And you've got to wonder how many more fans would that bring in for how much more cost. 

...Billion dollar GTA6, is all I'm saying. Doing a rough estimate based on some old numbers, if GTA6 was a first party exclusive game and selling at 70, it would take somewhere around 25 million copies sold to break even. As a third party it will take more (you have to pay a cut Steam, Sony, Microsoft....I'd say Nintendo but they never even put GTA5 on the Switch, so even if the Switch 2 could run every PS5 game I doubt it would get it), and also have more platforms to sell on, but that's an insane number as your lowest end. And GTA is one of the few franchises that might be able to handle that...