Dw, there’s still enough people there to make CoD DLC maps. 

Yeah, but he still only probably getting paided 15 bucks an hour.

Are you sure about that, for every one successful Indie, about 10 go away without anyone knowing.  Making games is a brutal environment and only the studios who are able to keep cost down and still output a successful product gets to see another day.  Most go from game to game and live in debt barely making payroll. If the top of the food chain is hurting, the industry as a whole is hurting. 

New All-time peak for Palworld today

Its just seems interesting that a lot of you were cheering this merger but forgot the end results.  This is usually the outcome of just about ever merger.  There will be a lot of jobs getting cut.

As for MS being right or wrong, I have to say your information on the subject is very limited.  There definitely isn't a shortage of talent if a lot of dev studios and publishers are laying off people.  I think a lot of you forget that there have been a lot of dev closures as well as layoffs. If anything, its a sign that the industry over hired for the output they can produce.  Not long ago you were comparing how much it cost to make Spiderman 2 and other Sony games.  Game development is very expensive and a lot of companies are cutting back because they cannot sustain that type of cost in an industry that is hit or miss.

As to what will happen in the industry, what happens to any industry when there are a lot of layoffs.  As stated this is an industry wide event not something just isolated to the games industry.  People will either create their own studios, leave the game or tech sector or find another job.  The company I use to work for is in a totally different industry then the one I work today but as with anything you will adapt.  I could easily go back to that industry but I actually find myself free from that thinking and see so many different options.

As to the employees being available for publishers and dev studios, actually yes they will.  I could not tell you how many times I have seen people get cut and end up right back at the same company when things settle down.  Not only do they come back but they usually come back at a much higher pay.  Not only will they be there but they will probably have a much fatter pockets when they left.  There were a few times, I was hoping for the layoff because of the amount of money I was going to get in my severance package.  I already had another job lined up because most companies inform their employees that layoffs are coming.

My point is that its really not the end of the world but instead just the beginning.  The company I use to work for layoff another additional 150 people.  Most of them I knew because I worked there for 15 years.  All have found new jobs and the majority found better jobs with better pay.  

Yes we're pretty much saying the same thing.

If I may explain things better for what I meant by using palworld as an example is simply that wowing consumer with graphics does not mean anything anymore. back in the 2000s a game could be marketed and talked about for it's graphics that pushed boundaries. in the 2010s that was also the case but to a lesser extent and that mentality lead to an explosion in development cost. Meanwhile nowadays (and this have been true for quite some time) a game that doesn't try to push graphics in any way doesn't feel like it lacks anything compare to one with heavy focus for it. Graphics have just grown to be absolute garbage of a focus for the success of a title, gameplay and/or stories as again become what matter most. This coupled with the fact pushing for graphics is primarily what lead development time and budget going out of control and you can see the why the bubble finally popped.

to better illustrate what I'm saying is, add 2-3 years of development and 50-100m budget to palword to produce the same game but with way better graphics/animation and... it would not have done anything more or less for the title success in any way. A push for better graphics have simply become synonymous with lesser ROI. 

The way I see the gaming industry going forward and even on the AAA side of things is to start heavily reusing assets from previous entry while focusing on innovative gameplay and stories (TotK say hi). I also believe we will observe a trend towards consolidating engines, particularly towards a select few like Unreal Engine, while in-house engines become increasingly rare.

To your point, PUBG when it hit that 3.2 million concurrent player mark, it both looked and played like ASS for the most part still does! Yet, to this day still holds the record on Steam for highest player count. You look at other massively popular games like Counter-Strike continues to immensely popular while not having changed much over the course of 24 years now.

Even other big Survival games like Rust and Ark started as indie titles as well that have continued to thrive.

But the other side of the coin is these are multiplayer games. The games that are meant to push the boundaries of graphics are always going to be the single player games to really wow at what technology can do. 

If budgets continue to remain unchecked, developers will get themselves to the point where a single flop could be the end of the studio. Which in some cases, we've already seen that happen. It'll be a painful pill to swallow for some, but a necessary one.

I don't need it, I don't need it...

Oh well....Controller 7 this generation:

Really need to get an gears controller announcement ^^...

Guess I'm glad I wasn't in a hurry to play it.  Gonna finish my Assassin's Creed Odyssey play-through first.

I have the gears 5 controller. My favorite controller!