Bad layoff announcements make me really, really angry.
This one, from Activision, is particularly terrible.
They don’t even bother to express any sympathy for the people being let go, nor do they assume any responsibility as a corporate entity. They don’t even THANK THEM for their work, even though they just completed shipping the game. Just awful.
The first line is “Activision Publishing consistently works to align its costs with its revenues – this is an ongoing process”.
What does that even mean? They haven’t RECEIVED any revenue from this game yet. And who makes the revenue projections that are presumably inaccurate? It sure isn’t the people who were just laid off.
Blah.
Contrast that with this one from Square Enix, where they at least bother to call the situation unfortunate, and thank those let go for their hard work and ‘sincerely wish them well’.
Activision’s release is incredibly un-classy. They should be ashamed of it.
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Art-wise, just a black and white today. Running short on time. Still playing around with those stylistic changes. (Will I ever finish? Who knows).
I have some strange ideas of things I may do with the strip. They make no sense. But I suppose that now is a good time to do them.
I like the black and white honestly. Reminds me of my childhood where all weekday comics were black and white.
As an outside-the-games-industry developer I find the games industry standard practice of laying off massive amounts of staff after a game ships abhorrent. To me it shows lazy and/or greedy management. We outside the games industry ship projects too. Sometimes they are just as big or bigger than games. Sometimes companies outside the games industry do the same thing where numbers are increased for a special project and then reduced after, but usually these employees are hired as contractors and this is only done when there is no reason to believe there will be another big project soon that these people could be used on.
In the games industry OTOH, it seems to be the norm *especially* for massive companies who are constantly churning out massive games where they use large staff numbers every time. It seems like naked corporate greed and laziness to me.
It’s the same thing fast food companies and big box stores do; they want to keep wages down but people want raises at least yearly. So they will regularly lay off staff and hire new staff just to reset the wage button on that position.
I wish I had a solution for people working in the games industry other than for them to start their own companies and avoid this awful practice (which clearly you guys have done at Runic.) Like you those press releases about layoffs make my blood boil.