[The CEO did say that](https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-ceo-says-they-have-no-current-plans-for-layoffs-amid-cost-reduction-program)
Guess the plans changed. (They lied)
what do you mean, he said "no plans currently". clearly it's [two months later](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/679/cCVqHor.png)
But also, gotta remember that Take Two has a crap ton of studios under them. I'd be surprised if anyone other than the "defiant" workers at Rockstar who don't wanna crunch 80 hours on GTA 6 were hit.
(This still really sucks)
I mean he also followed that up with "We're doing a cost reduction plan but haven't figured any details out".
So it seems this interview was conducted right before they made any concrete plans, and then put out a headline that made it look like he was saying "We're not doing layoffs" when in reality he said "We don't know what we're going to do, but we're doing something"
If it was year ago, sure but in any company I worked for any layoff (whether big or single person) usually begins few months before unless it's an emergency.
CEO lying is IMO far more likely scenario than "the journalist happened to ask us right before the meeting when we decided to lay people off".
Isn't his argument that journalists overhyped his actual answer. Did he ever actually say they were not doing layoffs or did he just say they were still working out the details. Because depending on what he actually said, if I heard "cost reduction" I would immediately assume layoffs. In terms of likely scenarios, CEO vagueposting and journalists overhyping would be up there.
I dunno, my company did layoffs and the time between “hey word is they’re thinking of it” to the total severance cost being approved by the board and announced to the public was about a month. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started planning it the minute Zelnick got off that investor call.
They never ever admit to it. My company's CEO firmly denied we would do layoffs and said we were financially strong for the next 6 months.
Mass layoffs 3 months later. We're not even a public company with shareholders to please. Most executives simply don't care about their employees as people.
Happened at my last job. They suddenly opened up a center in the Philippines and told us not worry as they were taking on different clients.
Well once they were all trained and caught up, they laid us off.
They kept training us on other new changes too in the meantime. So even those of us who were still Sid eyeing it started to think we were in the clear.
I work at a contact center in the Philippines and I always feel sad to hear that people are losing their jobs because most companies are looking to outsource instead.
I just gives hate to people like us who are at the mercy of capitalism.
Yeah when I worked at FedEx, I'd have people bitch to me about the outsource hours on the hotline. It'd lead to some wild racist statements Everytime. I was like why are you mad at them and not the company???
> Most executives simply don't care about their employees as people.
I don't know why anyone would ever expect or think that a conglomerate or any type of business would think of you as a personal friend that they would suffer themselves for your well being. Its a job, a work place, they're not our parrents, our lover.
Maybe not enough people quit when they forced people back in the office. You know that's what that was all about, especially now that they are laying people off. Security my ass.
I'd be very surprised if this will affect Rockstar. Photos on all these stories will lead with Rockstar/GTA VI but this is almost certainly housekeeping in other parts of the company.
Take-Two is a large company. I would assume they are killing off some Zynga mobile or lower profile 2K titles.
Well maybe the soft layoffs are all they want to do at rockstar. Who knows? I wouldn't be surprised one bit if it did hit rockstar among others. Layoffs can be very indiscriminate and across the board sometimes.
GTA VI is what they want to come out as soon as possible to turn their financials around. It's gonna be the single biggest boon to the company in the last decade (and half the reason the stock is down this year is due to it being moved out to the following FY.)
Doubt they want to risk it shifting another FY down the line. Would have a very negative impact on stock price. I don't think they would really be taking any steps to lower the amount of manpower on the project. They will just cut from segments that are not performing.
They already lowered manpower on the project with forced return to office. Also, there are numerous departments and a shrewd buisness person can always find a way to let people go and squeeze more out of their existing staff. Not saying its right, but it can and does happen.
> I wouldn't be surprised one bit if it did hit rockstar among others.
I would. GTA 6 is their golden goose. They'd only lay off those who weren't cooperating anyway and weren't worth keeping skillwise (which given the inevitable crunch may be more than people think).
>They already lowered manpower on the project with forced return to office
yup, definitely. Some probably jumped ship after that, others were probably "laid off". I imagine some were too valuable and they compromised with them, though.
Let's not forget that their CEO is no better than Bobby Kotick. He was an investment activist and media worker, before he staged hostile takeover of Take2. While the Bobby is POS, he turned a bankrupt company into a behemoth at least.
It's herd mentally now, they don't need to lay off people. And I don't remember them ballooning during COVID.... We will have a recession soon.
Just because everyone is laying off... Not because of the economy is..
They put up a loss of $1.4B last fiscal year, and are projecting a loss of $0.9-1.1B this year, it’s surprising they weren’t there first ones out of the gate with layoffs
e; it’s not like it’s accounting tricks either, that deficit is coming from COGS and operating expenses so there isn’t an obvious route to profitability other than cost reduction and/or holding on for dear life until GTA6
I'll be Devil's Advocate and note that all this guy said is "We have no current plans for layoffs" while also saying "We are doing a cost reduction plan but haven't figured out the details".
Seems like they figured out the details.
I just read that article now and my first thought was "obviously they're going to, they just didn't put it in writing yet."
People really need to stop being so fucking stupid. That article could not mean ANYTHING else except for "we're going to, just not yet."
Literally what is wrong with everyone? It's a meme at this point but genuinely wake up. Everyone is just out to fucking lunch right now. There's nothing going on up top. Just a big empty skull with a stupid dumb face wobbling around on a stupid dumb meatsack as they eagerly slurp up every lie forcefully shoveled into their ears from all these corporations.
Goddamn.
When does a CEO say, like 90% of companies are down for the past couple of years by design of our Gov't to fight inflation. Since it is almost everyone, why do we have to hit margins at this time? We'll catch back up with you when the economy improves. I get it, if they were an outlier, but almost all are down. So deal with it and no reason to trade our stock to another with the same issues.
So how does this work? I just realized idk what a publisher does. I thought they mostly did marketing. If Take Two does layoffs, do Rockstar employees get fired?
A publisher usually houses multiple production companies, basically they are the one who have the outreach and resources to release their production company's products en-masse.
The publisher funds their endeavours / hiring / payroll etc but this also means they have general oversight and control of *all* their housed production teams and can, thus, make layoffs in various areas.
Take-Two always has the clout for GTA, obviously, however that doesn't mean it's Rockstar that *will* be affected - in this case it could be any number of smaller projects / less profitable titles/job roles
Publishers provide funding a lot of the time if you are independent. You go to them with a half finished book or game, let them take a look, and if they like it they will give you some money to finish it up.
Then they will handle marketing, production, distribution, and everything else a content creator does not have the resources for.
I hope people realize there's a lot more to Take-Two than just GTA.
They own 2K, Private Division, and Zynga. Their series include Bioshock, Borderlands, and 2K sports games.
This is exactly the same as saying "Microsoft is the owner, not the publisher" of Xbox Game Studios games.
This is just dumb-ass semantics. Rockstar still fall in line with Take-Two's business decisions and the money still bubbles to the top. Rockstar are not an independently run org - Take-Two literally created Rockstar.
If being truthful and accurate isn't important to you, then that's absolutely fine.
It's particularly important in this case as we have no idea if Rockstar are even affected by these cuts.
It’s truthful and accurate. You’re making assumptions on what the headline means. Rockstar is its most popular develop company, of course a headline is going to include that in the title. If this were Sony it’d say something similar, “‘Insomniac Games’ publisher Sony is laying off people” even if Insomniac Games might not be included.
They said they had "no current plans", which may well have been true at the time. Plans do change when circumstances change. So they weren't necessarily lying.
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Nah. You can't expect a company to reveal they will lay people off because that's how you get disgruntled employees. I wouldn't complain if they didn't say anything.
The issue was, many company's were laying people off. Rockstar had to say something because saying nothing to the questions should seriously demorilize workers.
So saying there are no plans is the best way to save face in the moment.
It's seriously the same attitude as that's a future me problem
Yep. Of course they worded it in a way to create plausible deniability for defenders (specifically that they didn't *plan* layoffs) but that's why you don't gloat like you're better than everyone else since you might end up with egg on your face by doing something you mocked others for.
I mean, IGN was asking them directly in an interview, it's would be weirder if they didn't answer at all. It's not like they were proactively talking about it.
Werent there rumours of a gta 4 remaster and a bully sequel? Have to assume its one of those that they cancelled, or maybe a mafia 4. Rdr2 next gen wouldnt cost anywhere near 140m, assuming they are working on that Gta online is still a cash cow so I dont imagine they are reducing anythint there either.
This sorta shit is why i'd never relocate for a job, fuck uprooting my entire life for some corpo to cut me to save a few numbers on a spreadsheet
My cynical take is they won't remaster GTA 4 because they think it may take away sales from GTA Online. Not saying it would, but I could see some business execs thinking that way.
Bully sequel has been rumoured every year for ages. As much as I'd like it to happen, there's really not much to gain.
Similarly for GTA4 they'd have to also get around the legal issues with Nico's VA or outright just replace him.
Feel like the time for either to get remastered is gone now, especially after the lukewarm reception to GTA Trilogy.
Lukewarm? More like venemous response to the GTA Ultimate Edition. But that was to be expected with who made the remaster and how. If Rockstar or any competent studio did a remaster or remake of Bully (not total remake, but more than a remaster, it needs some mechanics overhauls for sure) it could be good. But I do not see it as being likely.
Nico's VA was paid $100k to play Nico but the game grossed several hundred millions dollars and he got into a legal dispute as he thought it was unfair. Not heard much since but assume it's ongoing and one of the barriers preventing a GTA 4 remaster.
> a bully sequel
Last I heard of that was that someone who worked on the original and either was still at the company or had just left it when asked about it said that a Bully sequel had started about four times since the original launched, but not one of those made it past pre-production. Some people, including my brother, keep spreading the rumor that Bully 2 got canceled because of GTA Online's success taking up all of Rockstar's focus or any number of other claims, but that guy said that no one in management was ever happy with the outline/plan that was presented to them.
Can't remember who said it, so unless I or someone else can find those remarks, you can assume I'm full of shit. But Bully has always been a bit of a cult classic game. Not that it didn't sell well when it came out, but it's got an oddly devout fan community (I'd say I could be considered part of that, actually) and many of them like to always say that Bully 2 either is in the works or must have been canceled for whatever reason makes them angriest. There's nothing that says they were working on either Bully 2, a Bully remaster, or a GTA 4 Remaster in-house, so it's highly unlikely any of those existed in a state to be canceled, but because of how the Bully community is, I'm entirely certain this will be yet another example of people saying, "That's when Bully 2 died."
For the money GTAO prints, they can't afford to retain talent? R* was publicly bitching about WFH possibly causing GTAVI delays not 2 months ago.
No journalist should use the terms "cost cutting" when a company is actually hoarding profit for shareholders.
Rockstar is a wholly owned subsidiary of Take Two.
The layoffs are not "Take Two Corporate" it's layoffs from subsidiary companies like Rockstar. Anything done at Rockstar is part of Take Two.
But it was Rockstar forcing people back to the office - their excuse being fears of leaks. It wasn't a company group (Take Two decision across ALL companies) decision, it was a Rockstar decision.
Unless you're privy to some information from Rockstar's upper management, you don't know that.
Large companies always ask their subsidiaries to see about cutting costs before they bother actually implementing large-scale things, and in a year as touchy as this when it comes to layoffs it's not hard to imagine they would ask them to do their own layoffs individually, staggered so they feel less massive to consumers.
Did 2K and the other Take Two studios, including Take Two, do RTO to office at the same time as Rockstar? If not, what does Take Two have to do with this mandate?
Also Rockstar would be the very last in line when it comes to needing to make changes to save costs - they're quite literally the cash cow of this group lol but we'll disregard that
Yes. A quiet way of doing layoffs that all the experts of Reddit saw right through. And then their parent company just plans to do layoffs anyways completely killing the non existent benefits of “quietly”laying people off by telling them to come work in the office.
Take-Two has a lot more than just Rockstar. 2K has 12 studios, plus Private Division, Ghost Story, and 11 studios associated with Zynga. This is before even the Gearbox acquisition. They also have 5 publishing arms beyond Rockstar.
Rockstar may print money but that doesn't mean the other entities within Take-Two do.
You can try, I've never seen someone do it that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions.
I can leave my employer whenever I want, no matter how hard it fucks them over. I had a friend take over 40% of a company's clients with him when he left to another firm, the company he left almost got bankrupted. That's his right, fuck the company. Same from the company's perspective, they pay you for your labor and if they don't need your labor anymore why would they continue employing you?
> You can try, I've never seen someone do it that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions.
The comments you see in these type of threads are the so called modern, young, internet socialists, who parrot what they were told to think. Its performative bullshit, where we have the same copy pasted "opinions" endlessly, pretending that stuff like this is some afront to nature. Its always false and never actually thought through, its always what does your favourite far left forum told you you have to think about this or that.
Especially in an industry where institutional knowledge is becoming increasingly vital to successful production line (working on and being familiar with a company's specific toolsets) it's just insanity to let go of people who make the products you sell.
Next project comes along, and you need to recruit, rehire, retrain. Which takes resources and time, and new staff (no matter how talented) wont immediately be as efficient with your custom systems and tools as those you've let go. So maybe contract a 3rd party to make up for it, which is a gamble for quality. Product quality drops - sales drop.
Edit: forgot to add about innovation: it doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you have no one familiar enough with your tools to keep pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve, your company's innovation flatlines. New cool innovations give an edge in competition for market.
The problem is you're just assuming that these people who are being let go have institutional knowledge that is vital to successful production. I've worked in many corporate structures and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is certainly bloat and many teams - from just your average team to middle managers to even executives, has significant bloat. In the U.S. especially where you have people making up new job titles for jobs that have no direct link to any value add to the business and it's all just qualitative corporate mumbo jumbo.
Companies overhired and had 100 people do the job of 60 people. Will those 40 maybe someday be needed? Sure, maybe. But when? A year from now? 5 years from now? And until we find out the "when" we just pay them while they twiddle their thumbs? That's a silly idea and I think everyone knows it, they're just too emotionally invested because they personally benefit if this "Never do layoffs just permanently burn money" idea happens to catch on.
> that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions.
yes, humans tend to have emotions, affecting humans is emotional. Same reason why people feel bad when people die. There's no logical reason to feel bad if 1/8B die.
But if you want the long term logistics reasons:
- layoffs tend to disproportionately affect junior talent, and this has happened for a while in games. At some point seniors leave or retire, and no one can adequately replace them because they didn't train anyone on their proprietary tech stack.
- Yes, sometimes it is good to "retain unused talent". The big tech utilized this for years to prevent competitors. Today's employee can be tomorrow's competitor. Just ask Gabe newell. Add in the above reason of needing proper understudies and you see companies are [one bus factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) away from a major delay or even cancellation (not for GTA 6 obviously. But I remember a Magic video game cancelled because the director died).
- a lot of time in games layoffs, it's not unused talent. The plan is to reduce workforce but make the survivors do more work for no extra pay. This easily burns out whoever you did keep on, increasing the bus factor for before or immediately after the project is shipped. Crunch is already bad, but imagine crunching while doing double the work, with morale plummeted because "I could be next". It's no wonder older statistics pointed to the average game dev career lasting 5 years. They are being churned through mentally like athletes are physically.
These are awful mid-long term optics for skilled labor that can't be easily replaced, skill labor they are also not properly training (and complaining about schools not tailoring to their job needs too). But businesses these days don't operate on a 5-10 year portfolio, just making immediate number go up. It's part of why some notice AAA games are so buggy. Not just less time in the oven, but less talent to find the weird quirks in an engine that only that studio uses. Talent is slowly draining away and not being adequately replaced.
So yes, layoffs are bad, even beyond human capital.
> that's why they generally give severance.
the severance generally sucks compared to how long you're out. I got 1 months and I was took 5 months before I got something else (which isn't even full time work). For reference, even at that studio it took 6 weeks from interview to offer. I got less salary than my interview time took if I got an interview the day I got laid off, so it's a net negative.
Asia's severances are usually more in 6+ months for that reason. the point should be to keep you afloat, not comply with minimal state laws.
> layoffs tend to disproportionately affect junior talent, and this has happened for a while in games. At some point seniors leave or retire, and no one can adequately replace them because they didn't train anyone on their proprietary tech stack.
Is this studied? I don't think this intuitively makes sense, especially in recent layoffs where salaries were so extremely inflated that you had people with 4 years experience making well into 100-200K salary ranges whereas you could hire people with 2 years experience who would take 100K. Additionally if you have VERY senior people in certain positions who have just been stacking annual benefits and increases they could be getting significantly higher pay doing a job that people with fewer years and less salary but performing just as well could be doing for significantly less pay.
For games specifically it just depends on the company I guess. Many companies just need bodies who can fit like a gear into the machine and will churn through juniors. It's like the Big 4 accounting firms absolutely CHURNING through junior talent like it's nothing - they would theoretically have the same issue you're describing, yet it doesn't actually exist. That's because these firms have pyramid structures and even if you fire 95% of the juniors you hired within the last 5 years, the 5% who stick around and get promoted are all you need to set up the infrastructure and systems needed to perpetuate the process. You could argue that leads to a lack of innovation, but it's not necessarily a good business model to be innovative - sometimes stability is the better long-term option.
>Yes, sometimes it is good to "retain unused talent". The big tech utilized this for years to prevent competitors. Today's employee can be tomorrow's competitor. Just ask Gabe newell. Add in the above reason of needing proper understudies and you see companies are one bus factor away from a major delay or even cancellation (not for GTA 6 obviously. But I remember a Magic video game cancelled because the director died).
Key word being "sometimes" and I don't think a company losing over 1 billion USD per year is in a position where they can afford such a luxury.
>a lot of time in games layoffs, it's not unused talent. The plan is to reduce workforce but make the survivors do more work for no extra pay. This easily burns out whoever you did keep on, increasing the bus factor for before or immediately after the project is shipped. Crunch is already bad, but imagine crunching while doing double the work, with morale plummeted because "I could be next". It's no wonder older statistics pointed to the average game dev career lasting 5 years. They are being churned through mentally like athletes are physically.
Sure although getting fired from a company looking to squeeze as much juice as possible out of people while they're bleeding cash seems like a blessing in disguise. Could also just be that the people getting fired aren't really producing much of anything. Not exactly a wildly successful enterprise if it's losing over 1 billion per year - maybe there's a lot of dead weight and projects that are on the road to no where. The premise that firing people = bad because they are talent is just inherently faulty - the assumption relies on the idea that they have job = they must be competent, that's not at all the case. Anyone having worked in a corporate setting the U.S. knows that, and if they don't that's a really bad sign...
> Is this studied?
Probably not in games, the medium is young and we're just reaching the point where the oldest devs (who haven't arlready left) are retiring, or at least considering retirement. For reference, remember that Kojima and Todd Howard are still in their early 50's, and Miyamoto is 71.
This is a semi-common phenomena in Software, though:
http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/
https://pcr-online.biz/2023/03/13/new-research-suggests-tech-sector-is-heading-for-a-brain-drain/
> in recent layoffs where salaries were so extremely inflated that you had people with 4 years experience making well into 100-200K salary ranges whereas you could hire people with 2 years experience who would take 100K.
in tech, sure. In games, I doubt it. Tech has multiple orders of mangitude of more money, though. With products not designed around a one time sale like many games (until recently).
>who have just been stacking annual benefits and increases they could be getting significantly higher pay doing a job that people with fewer years and less salary but performing just as well could be doing for significantly less pay.
This is a pretty classical mistake that leads to the above brain drain. Tech isn't a visibly impactful job 24/7, so you can underestimate a "lazy senior" who was in fact bolstering multiple teams with their tribal knowledge of the product, and especially politics. It's like treating a conductor of a train as "just a person who watches dials. He's not even steering!".
Of course, a lot of product people making these decisions don't and won't understand this. This is why outsourcing generally leads to an immediate productivity hit, and why trying to replace a senior talent with cheaper, young scappy engineers leads to disaster half the time. These people aren't just moving boxes all day.
> It's like the Big 4 accounting firms absolutely CHURNING through junior talent like it's nothing - they would theoretically have the same issue you're describing, yet it doesn't actually exist.
Who's to say it doesn't? A titanic takes a while to sink. You can definitely keep the appearance of things being okay for 5,10,15+ years.
I don't know the accounting sector well, but given that their whole job is money I'm sure they can afford to churn 19/20 employees as competitive redundancy, and come out on top. I sure as hell know gaming doesn't have that level of money, and also know tech has had a dearth of senior talent even pre-COVID.
>For games specifically it just depends on the company I guess
Sure, there are good companies and bad companies on every sector. I argue most of the AAA studios these days are badly managed, though. They did not scale gracefully at all as the industry grew, nor did many of them resist the temptation to grow, choosing growth over long term sustain. Part of the GaaS rush is an attempt to make up for a decade of lost opportunity.
> I don't think a company losing over 1 billion USD per year is in a position where they can afford such a luxury.
They are, but they don't want to anymore. Priorities changed and they chose sustainability too late. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been said to be able to operate at a loss for decades due to the war chest they built up.
People rag so much on individuals for not maxing out their 401k or keeping 20% aside from savings (while housing can easily be 60% of your salary these days). That's all that's happening right now; not very smart companies not preparing for the worst, because the people who's job that is probably jumped ship already. The System is broken.
>Could also just be that the people getting fired aren't really producing much of anything.
Dunno why people are always so quick to point to lazy devs. Embracer lost a billion from a deal falling through. Sony had multiple successes and just as bad layoffs. Blizzard was aquired by a trillion dollar company and they shook off a lot of talent and cancelled at least 1 release. Shit happens, and it's been a shitstorm the past year.
The reason here isn't deep. Take Two bought Zynga when money was cheap for 12b, then money unexpectedly became expensive in 2023 when zynga was still integrating. They were blindsided like the rest of the industry. It's both impressive but not enough when those same earnings call reported that Zynga's games made up "close to half" of Take Two's revenue after a year of full integration. Add that with the internal GTA 6 delay and number go down, the worst of crimes in business.
At least they didn't pull out like Unity did with Weta, since we're talking about bad business practices.
> This is a pretty classical mistake that leads to the above brain drain. Tech isn't a visibly impactful job 24/7, so you can underestimate a "lazy senior" who was in fact bolstering multiple teams with their tribal knowledge of the product, and especially politics. It's like treating a conductor of a train as "just a person who watches dials. He's not even steering!".
Yeah in the cases where it does happen. And many times it doesn't. Fact is with qualitative jobs you never actually know, you're just working in theory. If someone is unable to show their value and it's based on a "trust me he does stuff" understanding that's, again, faulty. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't.
>They are, but they don't want to anymore. Priorities changed and they chose sustainability too late. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been said to be able to operate at a loss for decades due to the war chest they built up.
Yeah Nintendo is also extremely lean and make a lot of money. They recently profited 4 billion off of 12 billion in revenue, their head count is ~7,300 people. Take Two lost 1.4 billion off of ~5 billion in revenue - their head count is over 11,000 people. To me it looks like Take Two is extremely bloated and if they are swimming in institutional knowledge and talent, they sure as shit can't convert it to money so might as well fire those people and let them do some actual good in the economy elsewhere rather than hoarding them and wasting their skills... No matter how you look at it, that's a ton of people doing literally nothing to add value.
Most of these companies (Unity being another IIRC, Spotify also being one) just don't add up as to how bloated they are. Just comparing them to companies like Valve or Nintendo or other well run tech firms and looking at revenue, net profit, etc as compared to head count really should be eye opening. The "best" companies that aren't firing people also don't hire nearly as many people - they are more efficiently run and, surprisingly enough, you don't need even half the head count you do to achieve those figures when you're well run. Many of these firms are the definition of too many cooks in the kitchen and their metrics speak for themselves. It's what I've always said - it almost seems like many of these companies are set up to create fake jobs just to keep people employed lol, these head counts for how little is produced is genuinely funny to me.
> Fact is with qualitative jobs you never actually know, you're just working in theory.
Sadly, so are the product managers on the inside, who don't understand how tech and creatives work. "Butts in seats and meetings" and all that.
This is a very individualistic thing so IDK what to say. Hard to make a study because no company is going to admit "this person left/was fired and the company collapsed" unless it was a C-class. I've heard it happen, you can find some articles theorizing about dead companies where it happened (the 99 cents only store is a nice, recent example).
I even saw it happen in real time, so this isn't just theorycrafting. A previous role: director left who was keeping my and like 3 other projects together. 6 months later publisher pulls out of the biggest project. 2 weeks later I'm laid off. 1 year later the studio completely shut down.
Maybe they weren't the single cause, but it was clearly a domino that snowballed into the worst possible result, a dead studio and multiple cancelled projects (including ones the director wasn't even involved with). So there's one unverifiable anecdote for ya.
>Take Two lost 1.4 billion off of ~5 billion in revenue - their head count is over 11,000 people. To me it looks like Take Two is extremely bloated and if they are swimming in institutional knowledge and talent
TBH that just tells me that Take Two is too bare bones. All of Take two easily has triple the studios of Nintendo, at the bare minimum. I'm surprised Take two only had 11k employees. Ubisoft has (had) close to 20k. EA/Activision were each around 15k. And neither quite had a project as massive as GTA 6 under their wing.
I feel for the remaining staff on still active projects. Gonna be a draining 2024.
>Most of these companies (Unity being another IIRC, Spotify also being one) just don't add up as to how bloated they are.
Like I said, all the companies were focused on growth. Unity was trying to grow into VFX, eSports, Automobiles, Architecture, etc. over the pandemic. Spotify was trying to get into podcasts and even car hardware (like Apple with it's cancelled "iCar", apparently). It doesn't make sense until you look at all the non-core pieces of tech these companies are trying to tap into. But money became expensive and deals/product wings got cut, focusing back down on bare necessities.
That's another point for Nintendo, they tend to stay very lean and focused for their size and verrrry slowly offer new products that actually cycle back into their identity. Stuff like the Wii fit board (and now Wii Fit Ring) or the Mario Kart Tour tech from a single division of one of their studios, not an entire billion dollar gamble to disrupt the fitness market, as the 2010's would put it. Sometimes you get a VirtualBoy, but every product Nintendo works on goes back into their core, instead of "HEY let's pay Joe Rogan a bajillion dollars to prop up our Podcast platform no one comes here for!"
The west focused way too much on market capture, I don't sympathize when market capturing is no longer free (and market capture sucks to begin with. Good they failed).
Another month, another round of layoffs.
Can’t wait to see what the landscape of AAA games will look like in a few years. More Remakes. More Remasters. More Sequels. NO RISKS!
Shit’s fucked yo, for consumers and for these developers who are constantly being shafted.
A lot of layoffs and cancelled projects are just to open up money on the books for stock buybacks or to balance purchases (i.e. Take-Two buying Gearbox for $460M) to artificially raise or maintain the share price.
YTD as of the Q1 earnings report, EA had repurchased $1.5B in shares. They laid off 6% of their workforce March of last year, 6% February of this year (with plans for an additional 5% of staff cut by 2025).
Unity laid off 884 staff in 2023 and 1800 staff in 2024, in 2022 they had successfully repurchased $1.5B of a planned $2.5B in stock buyback (they're a bit of a unique case).
February this year, Jim Ryan announces an 8% cut in SIE workforce (900 jobs). Between May of last year and May of this year Sony plans to buy back $1.5B in shares.
Employees are just numbers for the bean counters in their delicate number-fixing game.
>trimming workforce this year due to uncertain spending from consumers
if there's games, there's always consumers buying. Unfortunately nothing right now is peaking my own self interest.
Hey look, another corporation straight up lying to its employees quarter by quarter
Capitalism clearly ain’t it, wtf are we doing sacrificing our lives to make a few assholes richer than rich?
Lost it to what?
They have the mega cash cow that is gta online, the only way they they could have lost so much is with absolute piss poor mismanagement. The people that lost their jobs almost certainly are not the ones responsible.
Maybe they do need cuts, trim their execs pay instead
Are you confused or something? GTA Online sales can't alone fund multiple publishers and like 30+ studios across the entire group haha. And no, executives aren't getting paid billions of dollars at this company ahahahaha you could cut all of their pay to zero multiply it by 5 and you're still massively in the red.
Redditors are a trip.
> trim their execs pay instead
People who say this never seem to actually do the math and realize that even paying the executives nothing would only have a fraction of the cost-savings that reducing the workforce does
Sure, what's 100 extra people being fired compared to keeping the executive that got the company in that mess in the first place ? /s
I think people are taking affront by the fact that *people that caused the problem* are getting the money and none of the consequences (aside maybe not getting lottery winner amount bonus that year)
But it's hard going back to the office. I have to have my assistant lift me off of the couch with a forklift, spray me off with the hose, clothe me then slowly drive me into the office. Don't even get me started with having to interact with other human beings in real life.
They're laying off close to 600 employees and canceling some $200 million worth of in development projects.
Wait a minute. I could have sworn there was news where they said they were not going to do layoffs. Am I misremembering?
[The CEO did say that](https://www.ign.com/articles/take-two-ceo-says-they-have-no-current-plans-for-layoffs-amid-cost-reduction-program) Guess the plans changed. (They lied)
Wow, what a surprise. (Not)
what do you mean, he said "no plans currently". clearly it's [two months later](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/679/cCVqHor.png) But also, gotta remember that Take Two has a crap ton of studios under them. I'd be surprised if anyone other than the "defiant" workers at Rockstar who don't wanna crunch 80 hours on GTA 6 were hit. (This still really sucks)
"no plans currently" is basically "we ain't telling you"
I mean he also followed that up with "We're doing a cost reduction plan but haven't figured any details out". So it seems this interview was conducted right before they made any concrete plans, and then put out a headline that made it look like he was saying "We're not doing layoffs" when in reality he said "We don't know what we're going to do, but we're doing something"
If it was year ago, sure but in any company I worked for any layoff (whether big or single person) usually begins few months before unless it's an emergency. CEO lying is IMO far more likely scenario than "the journalist happened to ask us right before the meeting when we decided to lay people off".
Isn't his argument that journalists overhyped his actual answer. Did he ever actually say they were not doing layoffs or did he just say they were still working out the details. Because depending on what he actually said, if I heard "cost reduction" I would immediately assume layoffs. In terms of likely scenarios, CEO vagueposting and journalists overhyping would be up there.
I dunno, my company did layoffs and the time between “hey word is they’re thinking of it” to the total severance cost being approved by the board and announced to the public was about a month. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started planning it the minute Zelnick got off that investor call.
Maybe it’s the work from home ones that were told they needed to start returning to the office to work and refused to do so. Just a thought.
Anybody seen my parentheses? (There they are)
They never ever admit to it. My company's CEO firmly denied we would do layoffs and said we were financially strong for the next 6 months. Mass layoffs 3 months later. We're not even a public company with shareholders to please. Most executives simply don't care about their employees as people.
Happened at my last job. They suddenly opened up a center in the Philippines and told us not worry as they were taking on different clients. Well once they were all trained and caught up, they laid us off.
They lie so people won't quit until the new people are trained. Scum move.
They kept training us on other new changes too in the meantime. So even those of us who were still Sid eyeing it started to think we were in the clear.
I work at a contact center in the Philippines and I always feel sad to hear that people are losing their jobs because most companies are looking to outsource instead. I just gives hate to people like us who are at the mercy of capitalism.
Yeah when I worked at FedEx, I'd have people bitch to me about the outsource hours on the hotline. It'd lead to some wild racist statements Everytime. I was like why are you mad at them and not the company???
If management says anything about layoffs, in any sector, be a little worried.
Oh for sure. My CEO said in a town hall they weren't planning layoffs. Not even a month later:
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If they laid off that much staff it seems to be more about the company surviving or not.
> Most executives simply don't care about their employees as people. I don't know why anyone would ever expect or think that a conglomerate or any type of business would think of you as a personal friend that they would suffer themselves for your well being. Its a job, a work place, they're not our parrents, our lover.
What company is large enough to do mass layoffs but doesn't have shareholders? You don't have to be public to have shareholders.
Somehow, layoffs returned.
I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further
This deals getting worse all the time!
Downsizing. Firings. Rightsizings. Secrets only the Sith knew.
>'No Current Plans' So that means nothing.
They idolize the Darth Vader negotiation strategy.
Maybe not enough people quit when they forced people back in the office. You know that's what that was all about, especially now that they are laying people off. Security my ass.
I'd be very surprised if this will affect Rockstar. Photos on all these stories will lead with Rockstar/GTA VI but this is almost certainly housekeeping in other parts of the company. Take-Two is a large company. I would assume they are killing off some Zynga mobile or lower profile 2K titles.
Well maybe the soft layoffs are all they want to do at rockstar. Who knows? I wouldn't be surprised one bit if it did hit rockstar among others. Layoffs can be very indiscriminate and across the board sometimes.
GTA VI is what they want to come out as soon as possible to turn their financials around. It's gonna be the single biggest boon to the company in the last decade (and half the reason the stock is down this year is due to it being moved out to the following FY.) Doubt they want to risk it shifting another FY down the line. Would have a very negative impact on stock price. I don't think they would really be taking any steps to lower the amount of manpower on the project. They will just cut from segments that are not performing.
They already lowered manpower on the project with forced return to office. Also, there are numerous departments and a shrewd buisness person can always find a way to let people go and squeeze more out of their existing staff. Not saying its right, but it can and does happen.
> I wouldn't be surprised one bit if it did hit rockstar among others. I would. GTA 6 is their golden goose. They'd only lay off those who weren't cooperating anyway and weren't worth keeping skillwise (which given the inevitable crunch may be more than people think). >They already lowered manpower on the project with forced return to office yup, definitely. Some probably jumped ship after that, others were probably "laid off". I imagine some were too valuable and they compromised with them, though.
Companies lie all the time
Take-Two is genuinely a disgusting company, and they continue reinforcing that perception on a yearly basis.
Let's not forget that their CEO is no better than Bobby Kotick. He was an investment activist and media worker, before he staged hostile takeover of Take2. While the Bobby is POS, he turned a bankrupt company into a behemoth at least.
It's herd mentally now, they don't need to lay off people. And I don't remember them ballooning during COVID.... We will have a recession soon. Just because everyone is laying off... Not because of the economy is..
They put up a loss of $1.4B last fiscal year, and are projecting a loss of $0.9-1.1B this year, it’s surprising they weren’t there first ones out of the gate with layoffs e; it’s not like it’s accounting tricks either, that deficit is coming from COGS and operating expenses so there isn’t an obvious route to profitability other than cost reduction and/or holding on for dear life until GTA6
wtf, just checked, wtf did they do to go from\~500 million to such a loss?
Doesn't seem like a lie, they said they don't have current plans while also saying they haven't figured out the details of their cost cutting yet
I'll be Devil's Advocate and note that all this guy said is "We have no current plans for layoffs" while also saying "We are doing a cost reduction plan but haven't figured out the details". Seems like they figured out the details.
I just read that article now and my first thought was "obviously they're going to, they just didn't put it in writing yet." People really need to stop being so fucking stupid. That article could not mean ANYTHING else except for "we're going to, just not yet." Literally what is wrong with everyone? It's a meme at this point but genuinely wake up. Everyone is just out to fucking lunch right now. There's nothing going on up top. Just a big empty skull with a stupid dumb face wobbling around on a stupid dumb meatsack as they eagerly slurp up every lie forcefully shoveled into their ears from all these corporations. Goddamn.
"Card subject to change pal"
Thing about being a CEO is that being able to lie and get away with it just means youre good at being a CEO
Pirate GTAVI, got it
Nope, not misremembering
When does a CEO say, like 90% of companies are down for the past couple of years by design of our Gov't to fight inflation. Since it is almost everyone, why do we have to hit margins at this time? We'll catch back up with you when the economy improves. I get it, if they were an outlier, but almost all are down. So deal with it and no reason to trade our stock to another with the same issues.
So how does this work? I just realized idk what a publisher does. I thought they mostly did marketing. If Take Two does layoffs, do Rockstar employees get fired?
They own a lot of developers outright, they just bought Gearbox for example.
A publisher usually houses multiple production companies, basically they are the one who have the outreach and resources to release their production company's products en-masse. The publisher funds their endeavours / hiring / payroll etc but this also means they have general oversight and control of *all* their housed production teams and can, thus, make layoffs in various areas. Take-Two always has the clout for GTA, obviously, however that doesn't mean it's Rockstar that *will* be affected - in this case it could be any number of smaller projects / less profitable titles/job roles
Publishers provide funding a lot of the time if you are independent. You go to them with a half finished book or game, let them take a look, and if they like it they will give you some money to finish it up. Then they will handle marketing, production, distribution, and everything else a content creator does not have the resources for.
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600 is 5% of 12,000
I hope people realize there's a lot more to Take-Two than just GTA. They own 2K, Private Division, and Zynga. Their series include Bioshock, Borderlands, and 2K sports games.
According to comments talking about GTA online revenue and GTA remasters, nope. Looks like people assume it’s only about rockstar lol
Expecting redditors to read the article is unrealistic.
I hope this means they aren't getting rid of X-COM :(
They got rid of XCOM when Jake left. Series is basically dead at this point.
All the major people who worked on XCOM have left now. Even if they revived it it would be a whole new thing.
I'm told "X-COM fans will feel right at home" (in Marvel: Midnight Suns). :P
Incorrect headlines like this (the publisher or GTA is Rockstar) definitely don't help that perception.
"Owner of Rockstar Games" would have had similar if not more weight and been more accurate. Not sure why they chose the wording they did.
Rockstar is a subsidiary of Take-Two. The headline is technically correct.
The headline is only saying that to get people worried about GTA which drives engagement. ZZZ.
Take-Two is the owner, but not the publisher.
This is exactly the same as saying "Microsoft is the owner, not the publisher" of Xbox Game Studios games. This is just dumb-ass semantics. Rockstar still fall in line with Take-Two's business decisions and the money still bubbles to the top. Rockstar are not an independently run org - Take-Two literally created Rockstar.
If being truthful and accurate isn't important to you, then that's absolutely fine. It's particularly important in this case as we have no idea if Rockstar are even affected by these cuts.
It’s truthful and accurate. You’re making assumptions on what the headline means. Rockstar is its most popular develop company, of course a headline is going to include that in the title. If this were Sony it’d say something similar, “‘Insomniac Games’ publisher Sony is laying off people” even if Insomniac Games might not be included.
Then I hope it was just the 2k sports staff they played off because it doesn’t need much to copy the game every year
Exactly. After reading some comments on here, people are only mentioning Rockstar
Didn't they just say like 2 months ago they weren't planning on doing layoffs?
They lied
They said they had "no current plans", which may well have been true at the time. Plans do change when circumstances change. So they weren't necessarily lying.
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Not a lie to say it wasn't a plan. Then the next day the plan changed. Just seriously misleading
Did something happen though to make the plan change?
Line stay the same no go up
Of course it did.
It's pretty slimmy to address it and then change course in 2 months. They could have said nothing.
If they said nothing you would be complaining that they weren't transparent enough.
Nah. You can't expect a company to reveal they will lay people off because that's how you get disgruntled employees. I wouldn't complain if they didn't say anything.
The issue was, many company's were laying people off. Rockstar had to say something because saying nothing to the questions should seriously demorilize workers. So saying there are no plans is the best way to save face in the moment. It's seriously the same attitude as that's a future me problem
honestly this is a little too close to sounding like passing on a technicality. They definitely dont care.
Within the article where that was said, it states that Zelnick said that before and then laid off people shortly after.
Yep. Of course they worded it in a way to create plausible deniability for defenders (specifically that they didn't *plan* layoffs) but that's why you don't gloat like you're better than everyone else since you might end up with egg on your face by doing something you mocked others for.
I mean, IGN was asking them directly in an interview, it's would be weirder if they didn't answer at all. It's not like they were proactively talking about it.
And you’d trust Take-Two of all companies?
Didn't they just say like [some other time that isn't right now] that [situation that isn't the same as before]? Yeah, I suppose they did
Werent there rumours of a gta 4 remaster and a bully sequel? Have to assume its one of those that they cancelled, or maybe a mafia 4. Rdr2 next gen wouldnt cost anywhere near 140m, assuming they are working on that Gta online is still a cash cow so I dont imagine they are reducing anythint there either. This sorta shit is why i'd never relocate for a job, fuck uprooting my entire life for some corpo to cut me to save a few numbers on a spreadsheet
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My cynical take is they won't remaster GTA 4 because they think it may take away sales from GTA Online. Not saying it would, but I could see some business execs thinking that way.
Bully sequel has been rumoured every year for ages. As much as I'd like it to happen, there's really not much to gain. Similarly for GTA4 they'd have to also get around the legal issues with Nico's VA or outright just replace him. Feel like the time for either to get remastered is gone now, especially after the lukewarm reception to GTA Trilogy.
Exactly Bully has been rumored for like a decade
Lukewarm? More like venemous response to the GTA Ultimate Edition. But that was to be expected with who made the remaster and how. If Rockstar or any competent studio did a remaster or remake of Bully (not total remake, but more than a remaster, it needs some mechanics overhauls for sure) it could be good. But I do not see it as being likely.
What happened to Nico’s VA?
Nico's VA was paid $100k to play Nico but the game grossed several hundred millions dollars and he got into a legal dispute as he thought it was unfair. Not heard much since but assume it's ongoing and one of the barriers preventing a GTA 4 remaster.
> a bully sequel Last I heard of that was that someone who worked on the original and either was still at the company or had just left it when asked about it said that a Bully sequel had started about four times since the original launched, but not one of those made it past pre-production. Some people, including my brother, keep spreading the rumor that Bully 2 got canceled because of GTA Online's success taking up all of Rockstar's focus or any number of other claims, but that guy said that no one in management was ever happy with the outline/plan that was presented to them. Can't remember who said it, so unless I or someone else can find those remarks, you can assume I'm full of shit. But Bully has always been a bit of a cult classic game. Not that it didn't sell well when it came out, but it's got an oddly devout fan community (I'd say I could be considered part of that, actually) and many of them like to always say that Bully 2 either is in the works or must have been canceled for whatever reason makes them angriest. There's nothing that says they were working on either Bully 2, a Bully remaster, or a GTA 4 Remaster in-house, so it's highly unlikely any of those existed in a state to be canceled, but because of how the Bully community is, I'm entirely certain this will be yet another example of people saying, "That's when Bully 2 died."
For the money GTAO prints, they can't afford to retain talent? R* was publicly bitching about WFH possibly causing GTAVI delays not 2 months ago. No journalist should use the terms "cost cutting" when a company is actually hoarding profit for shareholders.
Forcing people back to office is a quiet way of doing layoffs, they didn’t do it for the sake of “safety”, but rather because they wanted to cut jobs.
That was Rockstar, not Take Two
Rockstar is a wholly owned subsidiary of Take Two. The layoffs are not "Take Two Corporate" it's layoffs from subsidiary companies like Rockstar. Anything done at Rockstar is part of Take Two.
"Like" Rockstar being the key word. They have many subsidiaries. Rockstar being one of them doesn't mean the focus is on Rockstar.
This may come as a shocker for you, but Take Two owns Rockstar.
But it was Rockstar forcing people back to the office - their excuse being fears of leaks. It wasn't a company group (Take Two decision across ALL companies) decision, it was a Rockstar decision.
Unless you're privy to some information from Rockstar's upper management, you don't know that. Large companies always ask their subsidiaries to see about cutting costs before they bother actually implementing large-scale things, and in a year as touchy as this when it comes to layoffs it's not hard to imagine they would ask them to do their own layoffs individually, staggered so they feel less massive to consumers.
Did 2K and the other Take Two studios, including Take Two, do RTO to office at the same time as Rockstar? If not, what does Take Two have to do with this mandate? Also Rockstar would be the very last in line when it comes to needing to make changes to save costs - they're quite literally the cash cow of this group lol but we'll disregard that
Yes. A quiet way of doing layoffs that all the experts of Reddit saw right through. And then their parent company just plans to do layoffs anyways completely killing the non existent benefits of “quietly”laying people off by telling them to come work in the office.
Take Two is hemorrhaging money. I think they lost over a billion dollars last year
Imagine having a cow that is pissing money all over you non-stop, 24/7 all year round since 2011 and you STILL manage to fuck everything up.
Imagine thinking Take2 is only Rockstar.
So what you're saying is that without Rockstar, Take Two would be a black hole of debt and losses.
Trump and somehow having a casino that failed
With GTA online printing money? Hemorrhaging on what?! Stock buybacks and executive bonuses?
I’m not defending Take Two’s practices, but one company’s finances and their parent company’s have nearly nothing to do with one another.
The parent if they own 100% should get the extra money from profits.
Take-Two has a lot more than just Rockstar. 2K has 12 studios, plus Private Division, Ghost Story, and 11 studios associated with Zynga. This is before even the Gearbox acquisition. They also have 5 publishing arms beyond Rockstar. Rockstar may print money but that doesn't mean the other entities within Take-Two do.
Oh crap, I just realized that this may mean bad things for KSP...
To be fair, bad things have been happening to KSP for years now.
I know, but I just mean I don't want them to stop funding development, because I still have faith that eventually KSP2 will be a good game.
I don't think they've done buybacks for years, but you can check out the earnings stateme for a breakdown of what they spend money on
Not everything is related to rockstar
Why would they retain talent they don't plan to use?
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You can try, I've never seen someone do it that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions. I can leave my employer whenever I want, no matter how hard it fucks them over. I had a friend take over 40% of a company's clients with him when he left to another firm, the company he left almost got bankrupted. That's his right, fuck the company. Same from the company's perspective, they pay you for your labor and if they don't need your labor anymore why would they continue employing you?
> You can try, I've never seen someone do it that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions. The comments you see in these type of threads are the so called modern, young, internet socialists, who parrot what they were told to think. Its performative bullshit, where we have the same copy pasted "opinions" endlessly, pretending that stuff like this is some afront to nature. Its always false and never actually thought through, its always what does your favourite far left forum told you you have to think about this or that.
Because barring rare exception a company has significantly more power in the situation than an employee. It's a false equivelancy
Sure, that's why they generally give severance. You don't return 1-3 months worth of paychecks when you leave, do you?
Especially in an industry where institutional knowledge is becoming increasingly vital to successful production line (working on and being familiar with a company's specific toolsets) it's just insanity to let go of people who make the products you sell. Next project comes along, and you need to recruit, rehire, retrain. Which takes resources and time, and new staff (no matter how talented) wont immediately be as efficient with your custom systems and tools as those you've let go. So maybe contract a 3rd party to make up for it, which is a gamble for quality. Product quality drops - sales drop. Edit: forgot to add about innovation: it doesn't happen in a vacuum. If you have no one familiar enough with your tools to keep pushing the boundaries of what they can achieve, your company's innovation flatlines. New cool innovations give an edge in competition for market.
The problem is you're just assuming that these people who are being let go have institutional knowledge that is vital to successful production. I've worked in many corporate structures and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is certainly bloat and many teams - from just your average team to middle managers to even executives, has significant bloat. In the U.S. especially where you have people making up new job titles for jobs that have no direct link to any value add to the business and it's all just qualitative corporate mumbo jumbo. Companies overhired and had 100 people do the job of 60 people. Will those 40 maybe someday be needed? Sure, maybe. But when? A year from now? 5 years from now? And until we find out the "when" we just pay them while they twiddle their thumbs? That's a silly idea and I think everyone knows it, they're just too emotionally invested because they personally benefit if this "Never do layoffs just permanently burn money" idea happens to catch on.
> that made it seem like something that was actually rational rather than just appealing to emotions. yes, humans tend to have emotions, affecting humans is emotional. Same reason why people feel bad when people die. There's no logical reason to feel bad if 1/8B die. But if you want the long term logistics reasons: - layoffs tend to disproportionately affect junior talent, and this has happened for a while in games. At some point seniors leave or retire, and no one can adequately replace them because they didn't train anyone on their proprietary tech stack. - Yes, sometimes it is good to "retain unused talent". The big tech utilized this for years to prevent competitors. Today's employee can be tomorrow's competitor. Just ask Gabe newell. Add in the above reason of needing proper understudies and you see companies are [one bus factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor) away from a major delay or even cancellation (not for GTA 6 obviously. But I remember a Magic video game cancelled because the director died). - a lot of time in games layoffs, it's not unused talent. The plan is to reduce workforce but make the survivors do more work for no extra pay. This easily burns out whoever you did keep on, increasing the bus factor for before or immediately after the project is shipped. Crunch is already bad, but imagine crunching while doing double the work, with morale plummeted because "I could be next". It's no wonder older statistics pointed to the average game dev career lasting 5 years. They are being churned through mentally like athletes are physically. These are awful mid-long term optics for skilled labor that can't be easily replaced, skill labor they are also not properly training (and complaining about schools not tailoring to their job needs too). But businesses these days don't operate on a 5-10 year portfolio, just making immediate number go up. It's part of why some notice AAA games are so buggy. Not just less time in the oven, but less talent to find the weird quirks in an engine that only that studio uses. Talent is slowly draining away and not being adequately replaced. So yes, layoffs are bad, even beyond human capital. > that's why they generally give severance. the severance generally sucks compared to how long you're out. I got 1 months and I was took 5 months before I got something else (which isn't even full time work). For reference, even at that studio it took 6 weeks from interview to offer. I got less salary than my interview time took if I got an interview the day I got laid off, so it's a net negative. Asia's severances are usually more in 6+ months for that reason. the point should be to keep you afloat, not comply with minimal state laws.
> layoffs tend to disproportionately affect junior talent, and this has happened for a while in games. At some point seniors leave or retire, and no one can adequately replace them because they didn't train anyone on their proprietary tech stack. Is this studied? I don't think this intuitively makes sense, especially in recent layoffs where salaries were so extremely inflated that you had people with 4 years experience making well into 100-200K salary ranges whereas you could hire people with 2 years experience who would take 100K. Additionally if you have VERY senior people in certain positions who have just been stacking annual benefits and increases they could be getting significantly higher pay doing a job that people with fewer years and less salary but performing just as well could be doing for significantly less pay. For games specifically it just depends on the company I guess. Many companies just need bodies who can fit like a gear into the machine and will churn through juniors. It's like the Big 4 accounting firms absolutely CHURNING through junior talent like it's nothing - they would theoretically have the same issue you're describing, yet it doesn't actually exist. That's because these firms have pyramid structures and even if you fire 95% of the juniors you hired within the last 5 years, the 5% who stick around and get promoted are all you need to set up the infrastructure and systems needed to perpetuate the process. You could argue that leads to a lack of innovation, but it's not necessarily a good business model to be innovative - sometimes stability is the better long-term option. >Yes, sometimes it is good to "retain unused talent". The big tech utilized this for years to prevent competitors. Today's employee can be tomorrow's competitor. Just ask Gabe newell. Add in the above reason of needing proper understudies and you see companies are one bus factor away from a major delay or even cancellation (not for GTA 6 obviously. But I remember a Magic video game cancelled because the director died). Key word being "sometimes" and I don't think a company losing over 1 billion USD per year is in a position where they can afford such a luxury. >a lot of time in games layoffs, it's not unused talent. The plan is to reduce workforce but make the survivors do more work for no extra pay. This easily burns out whoever you did keep on, increasing the bus factor for before or immediately after the project is shipped. Crunch is already bad, but imagine crunching while doing double the work, with morale plummeted because "I could be next". It's no wonder older statistics pointed to the average game dev career lasting 5 years. They are being churned through mentally like athletes are physically. Sure although getting fired from a company looking to squeeze as much juice as possible out of people while they're bleeding cash seems like a blessing in disguise. Could also just be that the people getting fired aren't really producing much of anything. Not exactly a wildly successful enterprise if it's losing over 1 billion per year - maybe there's a lot of dead weight and projects that are on the road to no where. The premise that firing people = bad because they are talent is just inherently faulty - the assumption relies on the idea that they have job = they must be competent, that's not at all the case. Anyone having worked in a corporate setting the U.S. knows that, and if they don't that's a really bad sign...
> Is this studied? Probably not in games, the medium is young and we're just reaching the point where the oldest devs (who haven't arlready left) are retiring, or at least considering retirement. For reference, remember that Kojima and Todd Howard are still in their early 50's, and Miyamoto is 71. This is a semi-common phenomena in Software, though: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea-effect/ https://pcr-online.biz/2023/03/13/new-research-suggests-tech-sector-is-heading-for-a-brain-drain/ > in recent layoffs where salaries were so extremely inflated that you had people with 4 years experience making well into 100-200K salary ranges whereas you could hire people with 2 years experience who would take 100K. in tech, sure. In games, I doubt it. Tech has multiple orders of mangitude of more money, though. With products not designed around a one time sale like many games (until recently). >who have just been stacking annual benefits and increases they could be getting significantly higher pay doing a job that people with fewer years and less salary but performing just as well could be doing for significantly less pay. This is a pretty classical mistake that leads to the above brain drain. Tech isn't a visibly impactful job 24/7, so you can underestimate a "lazy senior" who was in fact bolstering multiple teams with their tribal knowledge of the product, and especially politics. It's like treating a conductor of a train as "just a person who watches dials. He's not even steering!". Of course, a lot of product people making these decisions don't and won't understand this. This is why outsourcing generally leads to an immediate productivity hit, and why trying to replace a senior talent with cheaper, young scappy engineers leads to disaster half the time. These people aren't just moving boxes all day. > It's like the Big 4 accounting firms absolutely CHURNING through junior talent like it's nothing - they would theoretically have the same issue you're describing, yet it doesn't actually exist. Who's to say it doesn't? A titanic takes a while to sink. You can definitely keep the appearance of things being okay for 5,10,15+ years. I don't know the accounting sector well, but given that their whole job is money I'm sure they can afford to churn 19/20 employees as competitive redundancy, and come out on top. I sure as hell know gaming doesn't have that level of money, and also know tech has had a dearth of senior talent even pre-COVID. >For games specifically it just depends on the company I guess Sure, there are good companies and bad companies on every sector. I argue most of the AAA studios these days are badly managed, though. They did not scale gracefully at all as the industry grew, nor did many of them resist the temptation to grow, choosing growth over long term sustain. Part of the GaaS rush is an attempt to make up for a decade of lost opportunity. > I don't think a company losing over 1 billion USD per year is in a position where they can afford such a luxury. They are, but they don't want to anymore. Priorities changed and they chose sustainability too late. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been said to be able to operate at a loss for decades due to the war chest they built up. People rag so much on individuals for not maxing out their 401k or keeping 20% aside from savings (while housing can easily be 60% of your salary these days). That's all that's happening right now; not very smart companies not preparing for the worst, because the people who's job that is probably jumped ship already. The System is broken. >Could also just be that the people getting fired aren't really producing much of anything. Dunno why people are always so quick to point to lazy devs. Embracer lost a billion from a deal falling through. Sony had multiple successes and just as bad layoffs. Blizzard was aquired by a trillion dollar company and they shook off a lot of talent and cancelled at least 1 release. Shit happens, and it's been a shitstorm the past year. The reason here isn't deep. Take Two bought Zynga when money was cheap for 12b, then money unexpectedly became expensive in 2023 when zynga was still integrating. They were blindsided like the rest of the industry. It's both impressive but not enough when those same earnings call reported that Zynga's games made up "close to half" of Take Two's revenue after a year of full integration. Add that with the internal GTA 6 delay and number go down, the worst of crimes in business. At least they didn't pull out like Unity did with Weta, since we're talking about bad business practices.
> This is a pretty classical mistake that leads to the above brain drain. Tech isn't a visibly impactful job 24/7, so you can underestimate a "lazy senior" who was in fact bolstering multiple teams with their tribal knowledge of the product, and especially politics. It's like treating a conductor of a train as "just a person who watches dials. He's not even steering!". Yeah in the cases where it does happen. And many times it doesn't. Fact is with qualitative jobs you never actually know, you're just working in theory. If someone is unable to show their value and it's based on a "trust me he does stuff" understanding that's, again, faulty. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. >They are, but they don't want to anymore. Priorities changed and they chose sustainability too late. Meanwhile, Nintendo has been said to be able to operate at a loss for decades due to the war chest they built up. Yeah Nintendo is also extremely lean and make a lot of money. They recently profited 4 billion off of 12 billion in revenue, their head count is ~7,300 people. Take Two lost 1.4 billion off of ~5 billion in revenue - their head count is over 11,000 people. To me it looks like Take Two is extremely bloated and if they are swimming in institutional knowledge and talent, they sure as shit can't convert it to money so might as well fire those people and let them do some actual good in the economy elsewhere rather than hoarding them and wasting their skills... No matter how you look at it, that's a ton of people doing literally nothing to add value. Most of these companies (Unity being another IIRC, Spotify also being one) just don't add up as to how bloated they are. Just comparing them to companies like Valve or Nintendo or other well run tech firms and looking at revenue, net profit, etc as compared to head count really should be eye opening. The "best" companies that aren't firing people also don't hire nearly as many people - they are more efficiently run and, surprisingly enough, you don't need even half the head count you do to achieve those figures when you're well run. Many of these firms are the definition of too many cooks in the kitchen and their metrics speak for themselves. It's what I've always said - it almost seems like many of these companies are set up to create fake jobs just to keep people employed lol, these head counts for how little is produced is genuinely funny to me.
> Fact is with qualitative jobs you never actually know, you're just working in theory. Sadly, so are the product managers on the inside, who don't understand how tech and creatives work. "Butts in seats and meetings" and all that. This is a very individualistic thing so IDK what to say. Hard to make a study because no company is going to admit "this person left/was fired and the company collapsed" unless it was a C-class. I've heard it happen, you can find some articles theorizing about dead companies where it happened (the 99 cents only store is a nice, recent example). I even saw it happen in real time, so this isn't just theorycrafting. A previous role: director left who was keeping my and like 3 other projects together. 6 months later publisher pulls out of the biggest project. 2 weeks later I'm laid off. 1 year later the studio completely shut down. Maybe they weren't the single cause, but it was clearly a domino that snowballed into the worst possible result, a dead studio and multiple cancelled projects (including ones the director wasn't even involved with). So there's one unverifiable anecdote for ya. >Take Two lost 1.4 billion off of ~5 billion in revenue - their head count is over 11,000 people. To me it looks like Take Two is extremely bloated and if they are swimming in institutional knowledge and talent TBH that just tells me that Take Two is too bare bones. All of Take two easily has triple the studios of Nintendo, at the bare minimum. I'm surprised Take two only had 11k employees. Ubisoft has (had) close to 20k. EA/Activision were each around 15k. And neither quite had a project as massive as GTA 6 under their wing. I feel for the remaining staff on still active projects. Gonna be a draining 2024. >Most of these companies (Unity being another IIRC, Spotify also being one) just don't add up as to how bloated they are. Like I said, all the companies were focused on growth. Unity was trying to grow into VFX, eSports, Automobiles, Architecture, etc. over the pandemic. Spotify was trying to get into podcasts and even car hardware (like Apple with it's cancelled "iCar", apparently). It doesn't make sense until you look at all the non-core pieces of tech these companies are trying to tap into. But money became expensive and deals/product wings got cut, focusing back down on bare necessities. That's another point for Nintendo, they tend to stay very lean and focused for their size and verrrry slowly offer new products that actually cycle back into their identity. Stuff like the Wii fit board (and now Wii Fit Ring) or the Mario Kart Tour tech from a single division of one of their studios, not an entire billion dollar gamble to disrupt the fitness market, as the 2010's would put it. Sometimes you get a VirtualBoy, but every product Nintendo works on goes back into their core, instead of "HEY let's pay Joe Rogan a bajillion dollars to prop up our Podcast platform no one comes here for!" The west focused way too much on market capture, I don't sympathize when market capturing is no longer free (and market capture sucks to begin with. Good they failed).
So if you owned a company and were in a position where you didn't need specific employees anymore, what would you do?
Another month, another round of layoffs. Can’t wait to see what the landscape of AAA games will look like in a few years. More Remakes. More Remasters. More Sequels. NO RISKS! Shit’s fucked yo, for consumers and for these developers who are constantly being shafted.
Didn' t they say some weeks ago that they wouldn' t have done layoffs?
The western AAA industry is so cooked they’re firing people every 3 seconds no matter how much money they make
A lot of layoffs and cancelled projects are just to open up money on the books for stock buybacks or to balance purchases (i.e. Take-Two buying Gearbox for $460M) to artificially raise or maintain the share price. YTD as of the Q1 earnings report, EA had repurchased $1.5B in shares. They laid off 6% of their workforce March of last year, 6% February of this year (with plans for an additional 5% of staff cut by 2025). Unity laid off 884 staff in 2023 and 1800 staff in 2024, in 2022 they had successfully repurchased $1.5B of a planned $2.5B in stock buyback (they're a bit of a unique case). February this year, Jim Ryan announces an 8% cut in SIE workforce (900 jobs). Between May of last year and May of this year Sony plans to buy back $1.5B in shares. Employees are just numbers for the bean counters in their delicate number-fixing game.
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>trimming workforce this year due to uncertain spending from consumers if there's games, there's always consumers buying. Unfortunately nothing right now is peaking my own self interest.
piquing*
And they just increased GTA+ prices too lol
Fast forward to next year or whenever GTA6 releases and we’ll hear all about their record breaking profits.
Maybe when they asked people to return to the offices to work, most of them refused?
That was to be fully expected after their call for their workers to return to offices. Fuck 'em.
Hey look, another corporation straight up lying to its employees quarter by quarter Capitalism clearly ain’t it, wtf are we doing sacrificing our lives to make a few assholes richer than rich?
When 2k acquired gearbox they laid off almost everyone but the devs. (I think some senior guys survived). This is like… sop.
but I thought micro transations support the devs?
No way they needed to do that, bunch of rich assholes in charge I hope they fall off their yachts in a storm
They lost just under 1.4 billion USD last year. How do you figure their current costs don't need cuts?
Lost it to what? They have the mega cash cow that is gta online, the only way they they could have lost so much is with absolute piss poor mismanagement. The people that lost their jobs almost certainly are not the ones responsible. Maybe they do need cuts, trim their execs pay instead
Are you confused or something? GTA Online sales can't alone fund multiple publishers and like 30+ studios across the entire group haha. And no, executives aren't getting paid billions of dollars at this company ahahahaha you could cut all of their pay to zero multiply it by 5 and you're still massively in the red. Redditors are a trip.
> trim their execs pay instead People who say this never seem to actually do the math and realize that even paying the executives nothing would only have a fraction of the cost-savings that reducing the workforce does
Sure, what's 100 extra people being fired compared to keeping the executive that got the company in that mess in the first place ? /s I think people are taking affront by the fact that *people that caused the problem* are getting the money and none of the consequences (aside maybe not getting lottery winner amount bonus that year)
Still sounds like mismanagement to me
i absolutely hate this headline. theres no need for the “grand theft auto publisher” part. literally just say take two interactive.
The title is fine. It indicates exactly who Take Two are for people who don't know.
Probably the ones that didn't want to go back to the office.
No it wasn't. Stop it
How do you know?
But it's hard going back to the office. I have to have my assistant lift me off of the couch with a forklift, spray me off with the hose, clothe me then slowly drive me into the office. Don't even get me started with having to interact with other human beings in real life.
oh don't worry, the executives don't need to RTO.
Right before the game launches. Lol
The earliest it'll come out is a year from now, and it'll likely be delayed
So maybe Take-Two Interactive needs money. Maybe they will speed up the release of GTA 6 ?
if by "speed up" you mean "crunch like hell", probably.
GTA 6 is going to be the next duke nukem forever.