First it's being laid off, not fired.
Second, unemployment checks are awesome.
Third, being a large bloated company is what helped MS to wreak so much havoc against Sony in the console marketplace.
| potato_hamster said: It is very common practice to lay people off in the games industry after a game has shipped or a game has been cancelled. Pretty much every industry veteran has likely been laid off multiple times. All studios do this. It sucks but it's a fact of working in the industry. I myself have been laid off twice. It's actually one of the bigger factors that has me strongly considering switching careers. This isn't about Sony or MS, or Nintendo, or any other major publisher. They all do it, contrary to what others might say: http://kotaku.com/nintendo-of-europe-will-lay-off-320-people-this-month-1627924242 http://kotaku.com/report-nintendo-of-korea-is-laying-off-most-of-its-sta-1767681089 http://arcadesushi.com/microsoft-closing-xbox-entertainment-studios-cuts-18000-employees/ |
No its not normally common to lay people off in the games industry after a game has shipped (certainly not in the UK). I think people are getting confused with Temp staff (which to be fair shouldnt be reported as job losses) and redundancies. These are two different things. Mostly in the UK, the most temp staff are QA people, this is not what happened at Evo or at this other company.
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Yes, but are Sony a basket of deplorable?
| Goodnightmoon said: Nintendo has talked in the past about this issue, they don't hire more studios or people than they need because they rarely fired them, so they can feel safe and important in their works and do things better. |
"Oh hey, a negative Sony topic. Let's compare them to Nintendo again, since it's still slightly in topic."
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Madword said:
No its not normally common to lay people off in the games industry after a game has shipped (certainly not in the UK). I think people are getting confused with Temp staff (which to be fair shouldnt be reported as job losses) and redundancies. These are two different things. Mostly in the UK, the most temp staff are QA people, this is not what happened at Evo or at this other company. |
No, it is. Super common. Most game studios do it every 3-4 years at most. Big publishers like EA and Activision are laying off multiple times a year. It is extremely common. I'm not talking specifically about the UK but the industry as a whole.
And no I'm not talking about temps. I'm talking about programmers, graphic artists, producers, project managers, sound engineers. Full time jobs. People that have been there for years. I have seen it happen to myself and my colleagues. Our game was suddenly cancelled by the publisher, and 48 hours later 20% of the staff was laid off, including a receptionist that had been there over 6 years.
Azuren said:
"Oh hey, a negative Sony topic. Let's compare them to Nintendo again, since it's still slightly in topic." |
Wow, how sensitive.
OP: Just bad timing for this news.
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Have you worked in a big corporation before? This happens alot. Either that or you are too young to know.
| Acevil said: Um that is just PR, of course you are not going to say "You're fried because you undelivered on the games you made, that are loved but in a business sense are duds." Also unlike the PS3 era, sony does not need a large quantity of first party as they did, as they have the full support of third party publishers again and are doing really well for themselves. |
Evolution did a good job with Driveclub, its an awesome racing game and sold well. There was no reason to fire them especially as Sony's only other racing game developer makes games so slowly, they actually need more racing game developers.
| GoOnKid said: Employment protection is quite low in the UK and practically non-existent in California, so from a legal point of view, Sony can do whatever the fuck they want. If we look at the moral aspects, though... Personally, I think this hire and fire mentality is pretty bad and hurts companies moreoften than it benefits them. It must be somehow strange as an employee to never know when your time has expired. I would feel very uncomfortable if I had no employment protection. |
Though I don't necessarily disagree with you, there are two things I'd like to stress.
1. My future is constantly uncertain. I get hired by a university to teach a course for three months and at the end of the contract, I have to apply again and risk not gettting hired the next semester. This uncertainty may be bad for me, but it's actually great in terms of my performance. I do a lot of things that are not asked of me to increame my chances at getting hired again.
2. Had it not been for this, I wouldn't have an academic job. So it's much better than being unemployed or working somewhere else. Every semester I work with much more enthusiasm than all of my colleagues who have a permanent job. I believe that when you get comfortable, you simply don't appreciate your job that much.
It's even more regular in the video game industry. Not only do teams depend on their success, but even when you develop successful games, your team doesn't need the same number of people at the beginning and at the end of the development. So usually, people get fired or if lucky work on something else when their project is done.
When entire teams or studios are fired, it's because their games didn't work, that's all. Companies do not fire profitable people.
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