I don’t know who Spike Laurie is, but I don’t trust him.
Hiro Capital partner Spike Laurie believes you can trace the current wave(s) of layoffs to one in particular: Elon Musk cutting 50% of Twitter’s workforce in November 2022.
“[Elon Musk] had figured out from people’s electronic passes that there were more people serving food in the cafeteria than actually there to eat it,” he says. “This was the impetus other business leaders needed in order to start looking carefully at the size of their companies and start making judicious cuts.”
This sounded suspect so I looked it up. The claim was posted to Twitter by Musk himself, completely unsubstantiated, and directly contested by Twitter’s former VP of real estate. If I had to choose between this being the actual impetus for other businesses making judicious cuts or the empty claims of a Musk fanboy, I’m betting fanboy.
I wonder if there could be an upside of this. The culling of lots of talented workers from larger companies could lead to a renaissance in smaller independent AA studios. Like we used to have before companies like EA started gobbling up every little company they could get their hands on.
Avera adds another factor: consumers are buying fewer games and spending more time with select franchises, a trend likely to accelerate as the market continues to shift towards live service titles.
Well, given who the layoffs are hitting, perhaps we're done shifting that way and can start to shift back.
The author then goes on to mention game length, and yeah, I agree. Halo and Gears of War used to be 10 hour linear campaigns, and now they're open world. Assassin's Creed games used to be shy of 30 hours, and now they're over 60 hours. Baldur's Gate 3 is as long or longer than Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 put together; quite frankly, if the game was only Act 1, it would have more than enough content to justify its asking price, and it feels a lot like I just played through an entire trilogy rather than a single game.
People spending more time with fewer games is not a reason, in publishers' minds, to reverse course. It's the intended outcome.
Having the same number of people (or near the same number) playing fewer games, and filling those games with monetization features is cheaper and easier to maintain than having a broad and growing library of titles.
Remember, the ideal for publishers is to have one game that everyone plays that has no content outside of a "spend money" button that players hit over and over again. That's the cheapest product they can put out, and it gives them all the money. They're all seeking everything-for-nothing relationships with customers.
But in a world where we assume that they achieved that, ignoring the long games without microtransactions like Baldur's Gate and Zelda, there are industry-wide effects at a macro level.
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