The tragic end of Telltale Games
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The games industry preys on young ppl who don't know what a healthy work/life balance looks like. The pay is lower because employees are passionate. Passion doesn't pay rent. It doesn't provide stability for your partner and children who all will suffer because you chose to work in games.
Your passion will be compromised endlessly by marketing and management who can air drop in and change a game's entire direction in one meeting. Because they saw a Minecraft commercial and their kid responded to it. They'll make you work weekend after weekend to fit their pivot into the original schedule and stop in for an hour to drop off donuts. Oh good, eight hours of work for a donut. Donuts also don't pay rent. They don't fix your marital problems.
Games is an industry stuck in a groundhog day loop of misery. This is my warning to anyone who thinks they like games enough to make them. You won't like them after making them. It isn't worth it.
Yeah there are great companies but considering that just this year alone there were over 1,000 layoffs [1] in an industry that there are just a handful of large developers / publishers it's hard to get a position where you aren't just churning out gambling apps or one off VR projects for a Big Media Company trying to make a quick buck.
The issue is that video games are entertainment and the industry is built off the back of exploited workers that are genuinely passionate but have no resources outside of becoming indie (which is basically rolling the dice) or just using their talents elsewhere.
[1]https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-...
While making games is a great way to learn programming, and is a lot of fun, the working conditions make it an untenable career choice for most.
Or, take the risk and go indie - effectively a lottery ticket.
Do it for fun if you want, but doing it for the money will lead to heartbreak.
The hobby project route is pretty much the only way.
Ouch. That really puts things into perspective said like that.
At least it'd be good practice for building casinos for non-children. Slot machine development uses a lot of the same skills (and often the same stack; IGT uses C# and Unity3D for their slot machines if their jobs postings are anything to go by).
But then again, I am aware that most studios are not like that.
Sometimes I really hate living in the US. -_-
For many of us who fell into the other 98% the statistics aren't in your favor and some of the bigger publishers(EA, Microsoft) tend to go in ~6 year cycles.
Had a friend who worked on Dead Space, which should have been a stable thing. Alas, Visceral isn't around either.
I'm sorry but: fuck that shit.
When I was in that industry I worked 8am-6pm because I was able to be more productive when the office was empty than being some night owl who stayed in the office till 2am.
I caught no end of shit because I was "walking out the door at 6pm". People weren't blocked, I wasn't leaving anyone in a state where they couldn't do work.
God forbid I wanted to spend a bit of time with my wife(then GF, I can't believe she put up with it). There's some interesting technical problems in that industry but it's not worth the hell you go through for the rest of it. Saw 3 divorces on my last team before I got out and that was all I needed to know that it wasn't a healthy industry to be in.
Read the glassdoor reviews very carefully.
Look at the new Assassin’s Creed game, which is a reskin of Origins, plus a dozen pages of “buy this shit!” The xp system is rigged to make it a slog and a grind unless you buy “boosts” and it’s a giant map filled with what amount to chores. I feel badly for kids who grow up thinking that skinner boxes connected to a publisher’s bank account are what games have to be, but I’m not touching that stuff.
Meanwhile there are great mid-tier games, indie games, and the very occasional AAA effort that doesn’t punish the player for playing. It only really gets hard when something like CDPR makes great games that don’t monetize outrageously, but also famously treat their employees like dirt.
Not that this is necessarily bad, Ubisoft has gotten really good at building these sorts of open world games, and the market seems to agree that having minor changes to the same formula is a good approach.
Things used to be almost as bad in the software dev industry as a whole several decades back, except software dev moved on and got (a little) better. Additionally, a lot of those folks back then had substantial equity, whereas that's really not the case in GameDev today. There's an endless supply of disposable workers today, and that takes a lot of pressure off the industry to do better. Some places do better, but mostly through their own volition. And, unfortunately, such places are all too rare.
It's so strange how the prestige around the brand was not correlated to the sells numbers. It so strange how their demise was so unexpected by the press and gaming communities when the writing was on the wall long ago.
I understand the limitations to this style and the problems became pronounced as time progressed but to have a "Telltale take" on a property, I roughly knew what kind of experience I was getting and at least for a while made me cautiously optimistic for the release (though I may be a minority.)
Usually the events were cutscenes or QTEs (timed button presses) that you either pass or get a gameover if you fail too many.
Now this wouldn't be an issue if the games were marketed as such but instead they tried to present them with the taglines "Your choices have consequences" while it was clearly not the case. You could run the same game twice making completely opposite choices and the end results were always the same; sometimes a character would die but at most that just resulted in some extra dialogue since those characters were designed to be non essential.
Here is an example of what I mean: Alice is a fugitive on the run and needs a car so she can:
1)Go to her friend Bob and have him drive the car after asking him 2)Threaten Bob to drive her around
In the end Bob is always driving the car and his opinion of you doesn't matter outside a throwaway line where he says "Hey, you owe me!" or "Hey, you're a jerk!"
The illusion of choice is very apparent at times even DURING the game since the events occurring are just too limiting.
It didn't help that Life is Strange and the Witcher 3 came out and had more in depth consequences and exploration of these systems.
That said, your description of the illusion of choice in the story... sounds like every story-based videogame ever. I've been playing games since the 90s, and I can't really think of any such games off the top of my head where your choices will lead you down a completely different path.
Commonly the game will have different ending cutscenes depending on your choices, but the main story quest always takes you to the same locations.
Deus Ex was lauded for giving you choices, but you always took the same general path through the game. Maybe you saved that character and then you meet him again for a short conversation much later - but it didn't really matter.
Planescape Torment is often described as the best story-driven RPG ever written. While it had lots of optional sidequests and offered the option to roleplay your character in loads of different ways, in the end you always took the same path through the main storyline.
These are just two examples of higly rated, character- and story-driven games that happen to be among my favorite games of all time.
It's understandable, after all creating content costs money, and content that won't be seen except by a tiny minority of players seems like a sunk cost to the developers.
Meanwhile, Deus Ex was revolutionary because it gave you a lot of choice in terms of gameplay variety. Your mission could be to enter a building and just some of the ways could be:
A)Sneak Inside through vents B)Bribe a guard C)Impersonate an employee finding a loose ID card D)Use your high jump to go through the roof E)Shoot your way in F)Use a keypad by overhearing the password from a guard E)Use an explosive to break down a wall
Telltale games did neither of these things and got left behind pretty quickly when it failed to innovate off the success of the Walking Dead
While story based games do have to fight combinatorial explosion of possibilities, games like Planescape Tormet deal with that by having actual gameplay: random encounters, item drops, side quests, leveling up. All the traditional RPG mechanics.
Life is Strange was also panned for having the illusion of choice, but I think was able to resist some of that criticism due to the strength of the story, and the different environment: most of the game is peaceful and sullen, not thrilling, so the limited gameplay isn't necessarily a problem.
Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human are excellent examples in that your choices actually matter. For example, it's possible to lose a character much earlier on and drastically change how the whole story plays out, or choose an action which entirely changes a few 'stages' you proceed to. There are also a lot of different versions of the ending, either by showing totally different ending scenes, or tweaking some scenes with different characters, or additional cutscenes that change the whole meaning of the ending.Gameplay was also very satisfying for both games, from the things you can do in each stage or the Quick Time Events (QTE) which also change how the story plays out.
In comparison to Telltale's games which are supposed to be about how your choices matter, the only thing that gets affected are some throwaway dialogue and maybe a few short scenes. QTEs are also laughably simple and nearly impossible to fail, and if you do fail you just restart in the last scene anyway.
The strengths were in the writing and voice acting.
Also your argument is flawed. After all, all football matches are the same.
eg. assassins creed series, farcry series, call of duty series, madden series, etc. etc.
Look at the ridiculously popular battle-royale games like fortnight.. They are pretty much clones of each other, and that gameplay has been done (better) decades ago.
As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.
Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.
There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...
If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.
Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.
It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.
That's exactly why we play BR games.
These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.
PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.
Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.
This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.
Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.
I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.
Unreal and Fortnight are made by the same company by the way. It's really a reskin with adjusted gameplay settings.
Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.
Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.
Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?
Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.
Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.
That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.
That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)
Another factor is that many of these games are 'prestige brands' like Minecraft or The Walking Dead, which means there may be partnership funding involved. This is demonstrated by how Telltale spoke about keeping a skeleton crew around to finish a game in order to fulfill obligations to partners - if that's happening it's because money changed hands.
(I agree in general with the premise that the writing has been on the wall for Telltale, just not that a steamspy chart is proof that the company was already dead in the water)
A big notable example is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13 trilogy (3 games, FF13, FF13-2, and Lightning Returns), where IIRC sales basically halved on each release - so Lightning Returns sold about 0.25x what FF13 did [1]. (FF13 sold well, so this is at least not completely dire).
You can often make this up by spending less money to develop later episodes & sequels, which was true for both Telltale and the FF13 trilogy - but eventually it's not sustainable anymore.
1: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/11/27/lightning-returns-lowes...
Which makes sense, now that I'm hearing how the company was managed - coming up with really original ideas, and making sure they work, takes time and breathing room. You get that out of people that have time to put their feet on the desk and daydream, not people that live on perpetual crunch time.
Gaming journos have very little influence inside the gaming community. Many of them do not quite get that "fun" is the most central reason for playing a game. Their articles often read like someone who is hoping for a regular media house to notice and hire them, rather than a gamer writing for other gamers.
Gaming's biggest personalities are on YouTube and Twitch. ACG, Angry Joe, TB (rip), Dunkey have a significantly better say on whether a game gets played or not. Brothers a tale of sons, is one such game whose success can be in part attributed to TB pushing it very hard, on his YT channel.
Among the younger generation, let's play and streamers are the bigger influencers. At least that is what I feel like looking at my younger cousins.
There are a few good gaming review websites, but the likes of IGN, Polygon and GameSpot feel like surrogate marketting agencies at this point.
And I wish these kids would get off my lawn!
I have learned to never listen to Dunkey when he says a game is "Boring" but his idea of "Fun" matches well with me.
Also I watch some of the Angry Joe reviews because despite his tired theme of being angry all the time, he does a good job extensively covering a game from a semi objective standpoint. And I know when he is hammering home the negative points he is just hamming it up for the views so I don't take them too seriously.
Meanwhile gaming press is just a random assortment of editors with different tastes and values making it harder to discern how well the game will be for me.
That's why I like giantbomb since they are only 5 ish reviewers and you get to learn their tastes pretty easily.
Funny, it seems to me that many gamers don't quite get that not everyone has to have fun exactly the same way they do.
The real question is how influential are they today? I think they might not be that influential when it comes to AAA titles, however, some outlets are extremely influential when it comes to indie gaming, since it's a small scene where "knowing the right person" can make a difference when it comes to coverage.
My problem with the press is that there is essentially 2 categories:
- marketing outlets AKA content farms such a IGN,Gamespot who add very little value to the content they produce as they seek quantity over quality.
- pseudo-intellectual outlets like Eurogamer or Polygon which talk about gaming through the lens of "intersectionality", which is their right, but after 10 hours of work getting yield at by my manager I'm not interested in articles that are more about identity politics than the games I play when I get home.
Personally, I take more pleasure in hearing Joseph Anderson babbling about hitboxes in Dark Souls 2 and how you get critical damages even though the NPC sword stroke was PI/2 radians off your character's position, for 3 hours straight on youtube than any of the former.
Yeah, um, that won't get your average gamer excited either.
HN User 'lmm' was right, everyone from the gaming press, to the youtubers, to the people at the conferences etc, publicizing things that the average gamer could care less about. No one cares about hitboxes off by Pi/2 radians, or your "high art" narrative based games, or your slick C# or Rust based backend server and how cool it is.
The press and the youtubers are, of course, free to focus on whatever they want to focus on. I'm just saying that a lot of people out there are just using games as an escape, we really don't want all those details. And I'd go even further, a lot of games, tech, and issues they concentrate on are out and out boring!
How does that differ from movie and music press? It's pretty much the same situation - you have big blockbusters which are polished and ground down to be as widely appealing and as mildly offensive as possible. These blockbusters then get ridicoulous marketing spending which shoves them down the throat of as many average people as possible.
But studios like Telltale have no hope of even coming close to competing for that attention - they have nowhere near the marketing budget of Ubisoft, EA, Activision. They need to appeal to smaller niche audiences to not get just eaten by large publishers doing the same thing better and with more pomp.
Limited personal experience, but: the music journalists I've known really loved music. Many were in their own bands. There was a certain amount of indie one-upmanship, there was also a deep appreciation and respect for the medium in general, even when faced with genres they didn't get on with. They also spent a hell of a lot of time on music, even when not on the clock. I don't get that sense from video game journalism at all; if anything several of them seem to wish they were movie critics. The depth of detailed technical knowledge just isn't there - music and film journalists throw light both on the techniques used to make music and film, and the process of production itself, in a way that video game reporting doesn't.
How representative it is of the overall picture I can't say. I would imagine that Telltale's style of games sell more on phones/tablets and on consoles, but of course the sales on those platforms may well show the same trends over time.
But of course, names don't tell the full picture, and even major brands can sell poorly if the product isn't interesting/great (like many later Telltale titles).
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm only a gamer and not an industry expert, but it seems to me that too many managerial constraints on creativity and fear of innovation are the #1 game company killers.
That's appalling, and that's the real issue being discussed in the article, not the failure of the company. Horrific mismanagement of the situation, and shows a complete lack of respect for your staff.
It's quite possible they could have entirely avoided this by not scaling the studio so large. 250 people is a LOT for a game studio, even one with multiple projects going. Telltale used to be much smaller and the money might not have run out.
What are you talking about? Not one of their games is even an adaptation of a movie. Some are related to movies but separate stories not adaptations, and the majority have nothing to do with any movies (this includes the Batman game).
They did do a ton of work (exclusively?) with other people's IPs, which may have been what they were trying to say.
At least their "Wolf among us" was an extremely enjoyable adaptation of an existing comic book franchise with a novel story.
Not to mention Tales from the Borderlands being one of the funniest games I've ever played.
On the other hand, the new Walking Dead seasons and Game of Thrones were exceedingly dull.
I feel sorry for people who lost their jobs but at the end of the day the people who have the creative vision for: Walking Dead, Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, Borderlands, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Batman and Guardians of The Galaxy do not sit within the 4 walls of Telltale.
If there is not someone with creative vision and ownership of your product within your company then the people calling the shots are sales and partnerships. Actual product always comes second to closing these deals and riding brands of others.
You can see this in their product lineup, when things went sour they didn't change the product, they just diversified the brands.
based on the article, it seems like most of the telltale developers agreed with you. they cited previous management's unwillingness to deviate from previous successes as the largest source of creative stagnation. the article implies that the newer CEO was making big, positive changes in this area but that it was too little too late for the company.
I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
That would be like a Call of Duty developer or Assassin's Creed developer complaining that the company not diversifying the gameplay leads to stagnation.
I can see from an artists perspective why that's annoying.
But from an investors standpoint, if you have a profitable, winning formula, you use that formula!!
Telltale Games had a unique and successful storytelling formula and some extremely impressive partnerships, and it would be surprising to have seen them abandon their niche just because it got boring.
Of course, they were run into the ground so it's neither here nor there...
Activision and Ubisoft offer different games.
* The branding isn't really the same either, since CoD lacks strong continuity - with Black Ops and Modern Warfare basically being different games with only some shared elements.
With the exception of BO3 perhaps, because it actually added some more fun gameplay elements. (The running along walls / double jumping).
But in general, the games are all quite similar.
Then again, the days the COD games were actually good games are long gone (in my opinion). CoD2 remains my favourite by far, and CoD4 is a close second. Both of which are over a decade old now.
Every time I've lined up pro work in games it's taken at least 3-6 months of up front hunting and negotiations before landing it.
fwiw I know lots of former telltale employees and interviewed there at one point. Investment in projects and in coworkers goes a long way and was definitely present there. Some of the people who did end up leading got a lot out of sticking around because the titles they shipped gave them a strong resume to point to.
> I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...
It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.
Most game studios produce games on behalf of established publishers like EA with licenses from companies like Disney and I would assume they know to take a pretty piece of the cake.
I also have a feeling that the culture in the games industry have been rotting for a while and talent being "abused" has become the norm.
You can be a "rockstar" coder or coding "Wizard" all you want, but you'll probably never reach the paycheck of a good actor.
It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.
I don’t excuse management for a second; they must have known the coffers were bare while they were still hiring.
After that the money goes to other instances (like the loan by the bank etc).
EDIT: They are paid out their outstanding wage for their performed work, not to the end of their contracts
To be honest a company that can “barely keep its head above water” wont be in shape to provide a lot of support. That is kind of the point, if they could do that then maybe they could keep the company afloat which is a bit paradoxical.
It would be nice situations like these to have some form of safety net in form of financial aid or something. I have no idea what they do in the US but in Sweden you can get a lot of help since these things happen with companies from time to time.
No? Manager start doing this when their profits dwindle, not when the company has no cash left. The basic idea is to get one or two more bonus checks while the others lose their homes. You can be sure that some people still made a profit.
> “[Hawley] came into a situation where the staff needed a strong leader with a clear vision,” says a former employee.
Does anybody remember how Dunder Miflin tried to pursuade the stockholders by presenting Michael Scott as the hero who would turn things around?
And one thing I don't really get is why one brings oneself in a situation where one works ones ass off in exchange for living paycheck-to-paycheck. You should have a decent amount of spare time (or time for personal projects at least) and turn a profit, otherwise why work this job at all? I mean gaming industry is not a career you work in because you need to feed 3 children and don't have another choice.
The gaming industry is a tough place to be. I have so much respect for game designers, 3D artists, animators. Because it takes a lot of time, skill, rendering and sleepless nights to get something good out. Unfortunately, most game companies are controlled by mediocre people at the top, who run things like a sweatshop.
More pressure should be put on those mega-corporations to reduce the commissions they charge developers who release games on their platforms - currently 30%.
The consoles are not supercomputers anymore like the PS3, they mostly use off the shelf (AMD) hardware and x86 architecture. Soon they will just stream the game directly to a thin client which will only handle time-sensitive calculations like input and collision. On PC this 30% commission is even less justifiable since the platform is open and there is no hardware for Valve to get involved with.
Cutting this commission would immediately put money into the hands of games studios and improve conditions for workers, whilst still leaving the platform holders ridiculously profitable. Its a shame no one has been first to move on this - Microsoft with Xbox would seem a good candidate given their desperation to attract devs to the platform and away from PS4/Sony.
I think Telltale is just classic bad management. Not much different from other industries. I think the industry can make for a good career - find a small-ish studio with a string of successful releases and low overhead (no crappy legacy engine to maintain, cheap location).
And yes, I was being facetious - I'm aware unemployment benefit is often pretty low and that actual income protection insurance does exist.
True, so why make a broad statement about a continent that includes 30-ish countries, each with their own system, only based on "the UK-way"?
(and if this happens the company's directors are likely in the shit as they've probably been trading while insolvent)
This company used a "cheat" in the legal system in America for labor where they illegally labeled their employees as "independent contractors", which are treated differently under the law. These contractors aren't "employees" and aren't eligible for unemployment (because they were not 'employed', they were contracted).
For example if you were to hire someone to work on your kitchen for 1 week, you wouldn't pay unemployment insurance on their behalf. If they were self-employed doing remodeling/contracting, they would be expected to pay their own unemployment insurance.
It is unfortunate how the illegal abuse of "independent contracting" in America has created these terrible situations though.
- have multiple sources of income/contracts (at least 3, and no single contract may be worth more than 70% of your total income)
- have complete control over how to do your job (i.e. the hiring party can only tell you what to do, not how or when to do it)
- actively promote your own company (acquisition, marketing efforts)
- invest in your own company: your tools (laptop, software licenses) must be your own (they are tax-deductible)
- have your own liability insurance.
If you fail any of these conditions, the tax auditor may classify you as an employee regardless of what the contract says, and both you and your employer may be fined (depending on whether they see you as a victim or an accomplice).
The game industry seems pretty terrible to their workers.
Either way the employees had to know.
These people generally should be eligible (though again I don't know anything about the California program).
Edit: Oh I see a better answer to this. The other post brings up a very important point that people classified as independent contractors are not eligible.
What retribution? They were fired with no severance or time to prepare. Why don't they just speak out against the company that doesn't exist anymore and left them on the street?
Is it just that games companies suffering the same fate get more coverage in the media, or is it something about game studios that seem to make them more likely to crash and burn like this?
I know that games are quite consumer's-whim-driven and you're never really sure if you've got a hit on your hands or not until you release. I guess it is the same for movies, yet I've never heard of any movies spectacuarly just going bust half-way through filming and just abandonning what they are doing and packing it in (although I have heard of some near-misses). Yet it seems to happen a lot for games comapanies?
What gives?
P.S. sucks for the people working on this. Hope you all find something new!
The interesting part is that Hollywood is dealing with a cycle of this sort of suffering currently with Special Effects houses. The CG special effects companies are often contracted for only a single set piece at a time in a movie, as companies they currently last about at most 2 years and involvement in scenes in two and a half films, and there is a lot of employee anguish because a lot of the artists involved have generally not been allowed to unionize (or heavily discouraged from unionizing), especially in the smaller contractors. Most of the Oscars presented for Best Special Effects in the last few years have involved at least one firm that was dead by the time of the Oscars award. It's not making the news as much as game studio suffering, but it's a similar problem in that both industries feel that they can afford to burn through talent cheaper than it takes to protect it, as there are always excitable young kids happy to get their shot in Hollywood or Videogames.
How fungible are game dev skills? At least folks are getting released into a hot tech market.
That depends on the role taken. Artists are fairly fungible (probably unfairly) because they can be shown a bunch of examples and told "make something that fits with this". Coders are fungible only if you're comparing wizard-level coders who can read, understand and fix / improve a game's codebase.