I don't understand. We have a good thing going, you make us great games, we pay, you get to make what you want with a big budget. Why do you feel the need to start a smaller studio where we likely won't buy your game in masses. You'll most likely fail. You'll not be accepted back in with the big dogs. Why do it? You're making pieces of art that is bigger than yourself or your needs, you need to think alturistically about this decision. You leaving is going to hurt gaming as a whole. Why do it...?

I've lost so much faith in R* with GTA6 and CDPR with The Witcher 4. It's saddening. The bioware guys are at their own studio just to make a discount version of mass effect, I kinda understand why they left cause that culture must have been shit to work in with political correctness but the CDPR devs and R* writers... why...

Outside of toxic work environment that would burn out anyone, one of the biggest reasons is going to be creative freedom. Under major established studios, a creative lead may have great ideas and wants to take risks on an upcoming project, but upper management that would prefer to show big numbers to shareholders will shoot down a lot of those great ideas and risks for something safer and so far away from the devs vision.

Gaming is nowhere near the same as it was 20 years ago where it was still considered a "nerdy" hobby to have, so major game companies focus now on reaching out to as many people as possible, and those big budgets are a big reason for it. 20 years ago, a AAA game could sell 1 million copies, and it would be more than enough to fund the next project. Now, those kinds of sales figures can shut a studio down. This is lowkey one of the reasons why I'm happy Astro Bot won GOTY.

When the behemoth that was Halo 3 released, Bungie barely had 100 developers that worked on the game. Compare that to something like Assassin's Creed Valhalla that routinely has thousands of developers. That requires a LOT of ROI to keep the studio rolling and so creative freedom is often very limited. Otherwise, companies will pull the plug.

One of my top 5 most anticipated games is Exodus from Archetype Entertainment. The Lead Designer and Lead Writer from BioWare's glory days starting with the first Baldur's Gate founded the studio and in the many Q&A videos they've posted about the game, they very often mention "creative freedom" being one of the driving factors behind the studios founding.

Terrible working conditions id assume.

I see. Perhaps it's time for these studios to fix this and reorganise so they can keep their talent. The most important asset they have for making money and not only that but throw buckets of money at these people instead of shitty marketing with failing games media. And to what you said, I heard that there is a process in big studios today where if they pitch and idea or want to make a small change in code or something and it could take 45 minutes of work to do but ends up taking weeks cause it has to go through people and they need to check with other people and so on and so forth. Perhaps it's time to organise, Naughty Dog and Sony First party seem to have it down to a science and no one leave those studios. Whatever they are doing they need to let the rest of the industry know. 

It's not like they are coal miners or oil rig workers....

I'm so saddened by seeing the CDPR talent go loose. It physically hurts.

Maybe they want to branch out and create different types of game and experiences.

They don't leave because of "political correctness". Have you not followed anything about crunch and the work culture at these big studios. Impossible deadlines, forced to release broken games, monetization forced on your artwork, no room to follow your vision, games made by (marketing) committee.

Don't blame the talent for leaving, blame the companies for creating a culture that treats developers as throwaway commodities. "You should be happy to have a job in the games industry" is still the prevailing sentiment. How dare you ask for fair compensation, you're just working for fun and to stuff the coffers of the CEO and shareholders.

And blame the gamers for putting up with all that shit. Pre-order broken games, defend CDPR even when blatantly scamming their customers with broken promises and games full of bugs, games that don't even run at release on the hardware they're sold for. The industry won't change for the better as long as gamers keep behaving like junkies that will do anything for their next fix, calling everyone with problems as 'the problem' rather than the way games are released nowadays.

Of course review sites are in on it as well, rating games on potential, glossing over big problems. Writing any criticism off on the woke/dei agenda. That's just a smoke screen for the real systemic problems in the entire games industry.

And now, you're part of the problem... Political correctness is the least of all the problems in the industry, if it's even a real problem at all.

Whoah. We're you drinking last night? I've never seen you you actually fired up :) ... but good points. Indeed, there are systemic problems. Perhaps throwing more money at these people to stay in the short term instead of giving CEOs millions, give it to the top talent.

I thought the founder of the studio left CDPR due to bullying allegations? Not sure if they were true.