You're arguing with people who blame capitalism and corporate greed for every single shitty scenario that happens like a layoff. God forbid someone here put down one of their Marx books and spent a day in a business exec's shoes.
Honestly - what are people in this forum proposing as an alternative to this situation? "Let's just keep all these employees around even though the current model isn't working"? If this is the common line of thought, it's no wonder why the majority of businesses shut down. As if somehow the risks of running a company don't multiply as they get bigger and more complex.
You're right, layoffs aren't inherently wrong.
But layoffs in the gaming industry definitely are. Companies use and abuse employees, lay them off ritualistically, then look for fresh blood to do the same thing to them.
Most game companies don't need layoffs, not at the scale and rate they've been doing them. These companies don't need to lay people off to survive, they do so purely so the people at the top can make more and please investors.
Now, maybe this time wasn't entirely unnecessary. Maybe EA really was just trying to cut off positions that had proven unnecessary or were bleeding money.
But people are tired from shit like Activision cutting 800 people despite making massive profits. The heads of the companies getting bonuses in the millions while people doing their job perfectly well are told to go fuck themselves. Not to mention the terrible work life balance, heads pulling stupidly greedy ideas and punishing the workers when it doesn't pan out, general inability to properly manage things, etc.
all the more reason for programmers to unionize, something like SAG could work for the games industry.
LMAO, nice straw man, literally one or two people in this thread hold this view. Yup must mean everyone on facepunch is a dirty socialist commie marxist right?
And, why? Because people on the forum are capable of more nuanced discussions of the merits and flaws of capitalism?
We've both been on this forum for years. Marxist-like views here have been the norm for quite some time.
The reason I say "Marxist" and not "left-leaning" is because of the same old rhetoric in these responses. I think a lot of people here are very quick to blame the wealthy and unduly attribute malice to some sort of rigged system. There is very much a "fuck capitalism, corporations are greed" attitude here, and that has been the case for years. This doesn't fit my bill of a "nuanced discussion of the merits and flaws of capitalism" - I genuinely believe posters here are far more politically biased in their responses rather than coming from a place of being informed in business/economics, or at the very least being open-minded outside of this "fuck capitalism" narrative. There is a bias on this forum, and sometimes it's quite infuriating to have an honest discussion when your viewpoint is against the grain here.
We just had a big layoff of about 70 to 100 people at EA's australian studio too, so it's a pretty broad range of layoffs
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