On trimming fat:
It’s bullshit.
There’s ~300.000 professional game developers in the industry (not including Indy).
They make revenue of approx 350 billion USD. That’s big tech revenue per employee. Profit probably about 450k USD per employee.
The average salary in the industry is somewhere around 50k usd!
The top 10% compensation outside of corporate execs is less than the profit per employee - and barely that of a mid range FAANG engineer.
I switched from senior tech director - top 5 people compensation in a big studio - in games to Mid level manager in big tech at a 5x in TC over 4 years to 8x at Director level over 6.
Yes the industry is extremely lo sided in profitability and risk, but people are not the problem.
In case of unity, insane ad tech plans and complete failure to predict the market are the problem.
Just like with the big tech layoffs, the “cut the fat” and “lazy employees aren’t working hard enough and coasting” narratives exist to absolve senior executives of their failure to adequately plan, manage and control costs and new initiatives or L&D spend. Nothing mid level controls or approves.
In public companies, the senior management and shareholders get to use employees (and game developers) to pay for their i’ll fated bets and mistakes. Rarely, like in this case, there are consequences.
We are on track to lay off 3-5% of games this year, in an industry where on average every employee is vastly profitable. Talent that’s desperately needed and hard to train.
Games is the story of what happens when you don’t have unions and regulation forcing fair distribution of value - massive profits with lobsided distribution that makes many studios only operate with tax credits and at the constant edge of layoffs.