Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, Diablo IV, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Alan Wake 2, Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy… to say that 2023 will be an exceptional year for video was The gaming industry is almost monotonous. It was a year of exceptional work that will have a major impact on the future of the industry, and it was a banner year economically. But as good as the year was, the truth is that an unfortunate and counterintuitive phenomenon occurred: the industry suffered more than 6,000 layoffs in some of the most powerful companies (Rockstar, Bungie, Ubisoft, Take-Two, CD Projekt, Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard…).
It is not the first time that one of these companies has laid off large numbers of workers in a successful year (one of the most famous cases was that of Activision-Blizzard and its 800 layoffs in the 2018-2019 fiscal year, when the company experienced a decline in sales). record), but the numbers of the labor debacle of this recently concluded 2023 surpass any catastrophic outlook. Paradoxes are always complicated to solve, but we can point to three factors that can explain this bad news.
The first has to do with the impact of Covid. 2020 was a year in which circumstances forced half the world to take refuge in digital leisure activities. This caused private investment in video games to multiply in 2020, 2021 and 2022 due to the industry's image as a safe bet, but in 2023 this investment fell by two-thirds. This is undoubtedly a loss of financial strength that cannot be ignored in the work ecosystem.
The second reason is the exorbitant price increase for the largest projects. Insomniac Games (Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank) recently suffered a data leak that showed the world simply staggering numbers. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the company's most recent release, had a budget of $315 million (the forecast is for a profit of $75 million). According to the leak, the future Marvel's Spider-Man 3 will have a budget of 385 million. And the even more future Marvel's Wolverine would have a budget of $305 million. These are numbers that are hard to find in Hollywood and that, in the event of a disaster, imply the complete closure of any project.
And finally, of course, there is AI.
Image from Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which according to leaks had a budget of $315 million.
The toy company Hasbro just announced 1,100 layoffs. And this year he had already laid off 800 people. The thing is, while the company lost nearly 10% of annual revenue, its video game division grew 40%. Still, layoffs. Because? One of the affected divisions within Hasbro is Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of the card game Magic and the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (the video game of the year, Baldur's Gate III, is based on D&D). Coincidentally, Wizards of the Coast was recently accused of using artificial intelligence to create some of the graphics for their upcoming Dungeons & Dragons book. The company defended itself with a clear statement. Or not so much: “We demand that artists, authors, and creatives contributing to D&D refrain from using generative AI tools to create final D&D products.”
Maybe that innocent word “finale” holds the key to everything. Everything that is published is ultimately monitored by humans, of course, but anyone who is even slightly interested in generative applications based on artificial intelligence knows that it is delusional to believe that this new technology will not have a major impact on illustrators, Editors and creators will have video games, application designers and almost everything related to working on computers. In Silver: It's not unreasonable to bet that the vaunted technological revolution will start (or stay) with a labor revolution. A revolution with many layoffs, of course.
This column never tires of saying that video games are the canary in the mine of a world where the Anglo-Saxon precedes the European and the digital precedes the analogue: political wars and much of the debate were born in video games. that they would make it into the newspapers years later; and it was in this environment that a Me Too proto began in 2014, which would later reach the whole world. When AI impacts a technology sector that literally spits out gold in this way, it's not very flattering to think about what it will mean for digital companies that live in a precarious equilibrium. Anyway, why should we think about it any further when we have the saying at hand: When you see your neighbor's beard peeling…
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