this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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Most software is project based, only the games industry regularly lays off their best people after projects are deemed "complete."
This is exceptionally strange in the context of a successful live service game like Marvel Rivals where they're going to need a good team working on the game if they want to keep the game bringing in money.
They also did not fire the Chinese portion of the team, only the Americans.
One of the reasons Halo Infinite was a giant clusterfuck was because MSFT hired a team of temp contractors to overhaul the engine all the Halo games had been built on...
... then handed actual development in this engine over to another team of 343 employees, and other teams of temp contractors...
... who could not figure out how to use this new/overhauled engine or get their assets to import/function in it properly... because the changes to the engine were not well documented, and they couldn't ask anyone for help with it ... because everyone with that knowledge was now gone, onto some other contract.
The modern paradigm for AAA game dev is basically:
Management is completely abusive and also incompetent and will give contradictory, countermanding directives constantly, can't agree on or coordinate shit...
...but all the actual coders and artists and gameplay designers, who generally do exactly what they are told to do, are expendable, and will be blamed for doing something management told them to do, or not doing something management did not tell them to do.
Indeed, and given that NetEase is a Chinese corporation, this is hardly surprising. Not all layoffs come from a general industry trend, as the headline would suggest.
Not really - building the game takes way more resources than maintaining it later. And I imagine that NA team was far more expensive than Chinese one.