Clownfish TV: Audio Edition
Game Devs ADMIT They Hate Gamers...
AAA Gaming has seen a RECORD number of layoffs this year. And game developers are taking to reddit to say they actually hate gamers. Could these two things be related somehow? HMMM... ➡️ Tip Jar and Fan Support: http://ClownfishSupport.com ➡️ Official Merch Store: http://ShopClownfish.com ➡️ Official Website: http://ClownfishTV.com ➡️ Audio Edition: https://open.spotify.com/show/6qJc5C6OkQkaZnGCeuVOD1 About Us: Clownfish TV is an independent, opinionated news and commentary channel that covers Entertainment and Tech from a consumer’s point of view. We talk about Gaming, Comics, Anime, TV, Movies, Animation and more. Hosted by Kneon and Geeky Sparkles. Disclaimer: This series is produced by Clownfish Studios and WebReef Media, and is part of ClownfishTV.com. Opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of our guests, affiliates, sponsors, or advertisers. ClownfishTV.com is an unofficial news source and has no connection to any company that we may cover. This channel and website and the content made available through this site are for educational, entertainment and informational purposes only. These so-called “fair uses” are permitted even if the use of the work would otherwise be infringing. #Games #VideoGames #News #Commentary #Reaction #Podcast #Comedy #Entertainment #Hollywood #PopCulture #Tech
Hey guys, this is the audio edition of clownfish TV. If you guys are unfamiliar with clownfish TV, please check out the video versions of these episodes on the clownfish TV YouTube channel and also on the clownfish gaming YouTube channel. Please subscribe for more podcast. Check out D-Res, that's our other podcast. The episode will begin in a couple of seconds. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) Hey guys, welcome back to clownfish TV. This is Neon, I'm not here with Kiki Sparkles in this video. We're gonna talk about the video game industry and how the industry is imploding, right? According to variety, gaming layoffs are already topping 2023's total and it's only July. A lot of companies like Blah for a variety of reasons. We're gonna talk about it. I think a big part of it is that gamers are rejecting a lot of the games that are being produced. I think a lot of it is the venture capital is running out. A lot of gambles did not pay off, right? And this whole thing is just kind of imploding. Triple A gaming in particular is imploding. In fact, a lot of indie studios, indie developers have had more success doing games on their own. Just with a small handful of people. And then of course, we have to drag politics into it. Identity politics. And then this little nugget here from Reddit two days ago, we've got a game developer who doesn't like gamers. That's not good for business. We're gonna talk about this 'cause I think that there are many, many factors, but basically the whole thing is burning down. We had a lot of tourists in this industry creating games that gamers rejected and burning through hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And gamers can see through the bullshit. I'm sorry, they can and they're starting to and they're calling it out. And anytime you call it out, you get called a bigot and a misogynist and a Nazi and all this other stuff. And it's insane. And again, I think it's just astrophying. I think it's damage control. I think that these studios have a lot of money on the line just like Hollywood and they can't stand that you don't like their stuff. In fact, I would say the most brutal takedown of modern gaming was on the Babylon B. They put a video up talking about modern gaming and how they arrive at their decisions and they have this Karen come in and change everything about this cute little 16-bit game until it didn't resemble the original game. And it was funny. Check that out, modern gaming. So let's talk about this. Before we get into it any further, please subscribe for more pop culture, news, views and rants. I guess I'll go with it. I'll go with the Reddit story first. Am I allowed to say this as a likely sprite? I kind of hate gamers. Then you're in the wrong business, aren't you? I'm a professional game designer. And I'm worried that I'm starting to hate gamers. Watching the gaming events on YouTube last month with the chat on was extremely disheartening. Every time a character that wasn't a cishet white male is a cishet or cishet. Every time every time a character wasn't a cishet white man appeared on screen, the chats would fill with messages, calling the games woke or complaining about DEI. Golly, gee, willikers. I wonder why. I wonder why everybody is turning on it. I wonder why. Every game that wasn't a shooter or a hyper-casual competitive online game garnered zeez boring comments. And then I checked Twitter. And it's just people complaining that the MGS3 remake is not yellow enough. People telling me that there are right ways and wrong ways to beat Elle's ring. Elle's ring. You mean Elle's ring. And people hating on the new Dragon Age because the trailer doesn't match the tone they had imagined. I've seen people implying that the MC and Fable trailers is ugly because it's all self-insert of some random level designer working at Playground whom they have deemed it not fuckable enough. Is this something more conti? Who is this? Do we know that this person's actually trans rights? Is this person actually a developer? Do we have any proof that this person is actually a developer? I don't know. It's just the internet magnifying negative voices, I guess, doing what it does best. But it's making me real tired of gamers. Just remember there are tens of thousands of gamers who are really interested in games as a true form of art. And they find the lead character Fable highly fuckable. Not that they didn't actually say that. The wild bullshit always floats to the top. No, look, I'm going to tell you what's going on. Likely Sprite. Who, again, I don't know. I cannot verify if this person actually is a game developer or not. I'm a person shaped pizza consuming machine trans rights. What is going on is that gamers are rejecting the content that's being put out. This is indisputable. That's why I put this Reddit thread in this video talking about game industry layoffs. Even the people that aren't loud online are not buying a lot of games that have been, quote unquote, "wocified." It's just to get people are tired of it. And we're talking gay folks and black folks and female folks and even trans folks. They're really getting tired of politics being shoved into every game or established IP being changed to suit current year sensibilities, rather the current year sensibilities of some Karen that doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about. And she comes in and she decides or they decide or whatever. They come in, they decide that, hey, to get with the program, the company DEI program, you need to change this, this, this, and this. And then the game comes out and the game fails. And then the gamers are attacked. They're like, well, piss off. I'm not going to buy your game because you're attacking me. The consumers leave. It's not rocket science. And look, I'm not saying every game is for every person, right? But we've seen a lot of damage done in particular to existing franchises because the big studios, the AAA studios, they're not taking chances just like Hollywood. They're not taking chances. All of the true innovation is coming out of the indie space, but they're not taking chances. So they're taking an existing IP and they're bastardizing it and they're changing it. And then they're saying that the consumers are wrong. You know, hey, we're McDonald's, but we're going to stop serving hamburgers and only serve tacos. And if you don't like it, you must hate Mexican people. You must. It's not us. It's you. Well, no, it's you, video game industry. This is unprecedented. This is like a crash. Gaming layoffs already top 2023 is total. And it's only July coming from variety. 2024 has already exceeded last year's gaming layoffs and at twice the pace. More developers are pessimistic on the market and see a lack of understanding from investors as the biggest culprit. Now, I think the investors understand just fine. I think they're like, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars. Look at Embracer Group. We spent all this money on these game studios and you guys put out these shitty games and we lost a lot of money. That's what they understand. Live services are integral to the bottom line and have informed recent M&A deals, but they come with unrealistic expectations. Yes, gamers hate it for the most part, but it's also a catch 22, right? 'Cause they're like, well, how do we monetize this game most effectively? Well, we do live service and do a subscription. Well, it's fantastic, but those games, like some gamers will play those games for years. So you're competing against World of Warcraft, you're competing against Final Fantasy XIV, you're competing against Fortnite because people never put the game down because it's always being updated. Back in my day, back in my day, we had sequels for that, you know. This is the first quarter of 2024, saw a deluge of layoffs hit the video game industry after more than 10,000 global jobs were cut in 2023. Halfway through the year and the damage done is dumbfounding. It's not hard to understand what's going on. Consumers are rejecting the content. By the end of June, 2024's global gaming layoffs had fully outpaced last year. Q1 did see heavier cuts at prominent companies, including Activision Blizzard and Unity, which cut close to 2,000 roles each. In fact, more people got laid off at Microsoft just a couple of days ago. Gaming Insider found four people announcing their departure from the company right before the 4th of July. A senior product manager at Microsoft wrote. In the recent last Microsoft, my position was eliminated. This is Angela Vanessa. Jessa Birdie on X said, said to announce my role with Microsoft has been eliminated to all those who have been part of Team Xbox. Thank you, Corey Ebert, a technical program manager said after 15 years, Microsoft has made the decision to enter a working relationship effective immediately due to changes in the business direction and landscape. Yeah. They cut people at Twitch, they cut people at Riot Games, cut people at PlayStation, Q2 didn't get rid of the notion that these layoffs were the last pitfall to come after the publicly traded leaders of the industry finished sorting out their budgets. Second quarter was marked by take two interactive slashing more than 600 roles in a third wave of layoffs within the last year. The result of intense costs cutting out as the publisher group prepares Grand Theft Auto 6 for the finish line. With its release still more than a year away, they're actually going to go up against, yeah, Grand Theft Auto 5 Fortnite Roblox called duty of Minecraft and delay of the expected billions GTA 6 will rake in, has made it difficult for take two to find much to brag about. After acquiring Zynga, remember Zynga? For $12 billion take two saw the cost that deal come to pass and its last earnings report went roped down $3 billion in losses ahead of an additional deal to acquire Borderlands Studio gearbox from Embracer Group. Embracer Group went on a massive spending spree and shut a lot of these studios down. Yeah, they said that they're a planned $2 billion deal between Embracer and Saudi sovereign entity savvy games collapsed. It's this push and pull of investors, particularly in the AAA space that many game developers believe is the biggest contributor. Here's a wild notion. Just start small. Just build your business organically. Just create a good product and then create another good product and build a sustainable privately owned company. Everybody wants to take a shortcut. Everybody thinks that by throwing money at something it's going to make it better or you're going to grow faster and what we're seeing is all these companies, whether they're video game companies or publishers or Hollywood studios or whatever, blowing themselves up because they keep taking venture capital and you have to pay that back or they go public and then you have to appease your investors. It's never enough to just stay solvent. I mean, in this day and age, it's something to remain private and stay solvent, but they want to be the next big thing, right? And they're all blowing themselves up. It's kind of like the upper class quit skit from Monty Python. They're all getting to the finish line and then they're just shooting themselves, you know, but that's what's going on. They said of the 600 developer survey by the game developer collective 59% indicated that the current market conditions were either bad or very bad. It's very bad. They said it's understandable, especially in the AAA space, games at this scale be a live service or more traditional single player games now take substantial time to make. That's it. It takes too long to make these games and then people don't play them or the hype has died down or politics have been inserted into said game and the players don't want to play the game. I cannot wait to see what kind of political agenda is going to be shoehorned into Grand Theft Auto 6 that players are going to reject. Who knows? Meanwhile, a single player game Judas from Ken Levine is taken just as long to make. Yeah, I mean, it's just like stuff takes too long. It takes too long. They're talking about Starfield being a massive failure. They said they're taking huge risks in the AAA space and they don't, they don't always pay off. They say if you pin the average development cycle for AAA games at five years, that amounts to 20 earnings calls where investors can grow the top publicly traded game companies on where the new releases are and why more live service games aren't bridging the gap between those differences. This is, this is the problem. Again, I think, I think with everything, I think just in general with entertainment, when entertainment went corporate, and look, it's always been kind of propped up by corporate entities, Warner Brothers owned DC Comics for years, whatever, but when everybody started taking venture capital, private equity, these people want a return on their investment and they want it as soon as possible and they will ask you when you take that money and I know this from firsthand experience, wish to God I didn't, but we do, and we're over that bridge now, but they ask you, what's your five year plan? What's your two year plan, your five year plan, your 10 year plan, and when do we cash out and make a bunch of money? That's what they're gonna ask you upfront. When do we make a bunch of money off of you? We'll give you this money now, but we expect to make many times our initial investment and it's just not possible. You hit a ceiling, it's just not possible. You are better off just producing independent games and comics and stuff like that and making deals as they come, but build toward being sustainable, build toward, you know, hey, I can pay for myself. Oh, hey, we can pay, I can pay for myself to do this full time and now an office. Oh, I can pay for myself, the office and some help. Okay, now I can pay for myself, the office, some help. We'll get a company vehicle. Maybe we'll start working on another game too. That's how everybody did it for years. Most of these big game companies, just a couple of guys working out of an office, some of them working out of a dorm room. And now everything is fueled by venture capital and this is how the DEI stuff creeps into everything. You made a deal with the devil, the DEI devil, but you did and this is what comes to it. These deals always come with strings attached, whether it's answering to investors that don't understand what the hell you actually do or dealing with mandates from the people you took the money from and then having to deal with the PR nightmare of all this 'cause if you're just kind of a private company, just privately doing your thing, you don't have to put out statements all the time. You know, why are all these big game companies and lockstep? Well, they're probably all taking money from the same place or place is. You know, I believe it and this is the expectation. Now you're a big time publisher, you're your corporate venture capital backed, whatever, and everybody else is doing it. So you have to do it too. How many black squares do you have on your Instagram or whatever it is? You know what I'm saying? This is the trap. It's a trap. Don't take the money, just go create independent games. And the biggest games now, the games are blowing up right now. I mean, look at, they're talking about Minecraft. That was like one guy made Minecraft. You know, look how big it got. Now, you know, Microsoft has taken it and completely bastardized it, but even some of the biggest titles back in the day, Ultima was huge. Again, it was like one or two guys, mostly Richard Gariot doing Ultima. And I know it's a different time, but players want good games. They don't necessarily need the best graphics ever. And there's a lot of bloat at these companies and a lot of the people getting laid off are the bloat. Whether it's, you know, unnecessary social media people or DEI people or whatever the deal is. You know, they're getting laid off, right? So we'll talk about this later guys, but there's definitely something amiss here. And I don't think it's gonna get better anytime soon. But blaming gamers, I don't even think this person is really a gamer, but there are a lot of people working in games right now that absolutely hate gamers. But that's not gonna score any points. That's not gonna win gamers back. You need to create games that are good, and then you need to treat your customers well, or at least tolerate them. Don't go out there and rant about how awful your player base is. Because guess what? There are a lot of options out there, a lot of options. And people are taking those options, I think. I'm gonna wrap it up. Please subscribe. We'll talk later. Thanks again for listening. More news and videos are available on our website at www.clownfishtv.com and on our YouTube channel, clownfishtv. You can buy official merchandise, clownfish comic books, and more at shopclownfish.com. If you like this show, please consider subscribing and leaving us a positive review on iTunes and other podcast platforms. 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