Name: Game Dev 2024: The Good, The Bad, & The 2025 Predictions
Uploaded: 2025-02-16T13:57:51.000Z
Duration: 14 min 25 s
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So a lot's happened in the games industry in 2024.

Future simple

It's not been great for those people working in the industry and I don't think it's going to be good for people playing games in the future if it continues the way it is.

Modal verbs - A2

So the question is what are these events and what can it tell us about what's coming in 2025 and how should we prepare for it?

So first of all let's take a look at the games industry within 2024.

We've had 13,000 job losses this year alone and that's compounded by the fact that we had 10,000 job losses in 2023.

So this is the likes of Microsoft Gaming.

They had nearly 3,000 layoffs, Unity Technologies over 1,800, Sony, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Epic Games, Take-Two Interactive, Riot Games and Sega.

What's really interesting to me and it seems typical of industry today and how we operate big business, each of these companies made a substantial profit last year.

Take Microsoft Gaming, laid off 3,000 members of staff but made a $5 billion profit.

Unity $1.2 billion, Sony Interactive Entertainment $3.5 billion, Electronic Arts $2 billion and so on.

So let's dig a little bit deeper and take that a bit further.

The average annual salary for a game artist in the United States is $123,136.

That actually sounds a little bit high to me perhaps it's being pulled up by some high earners there somewhere, but we'll take it that it's $123,000.

Now Microsoft Gaming in their wisdom, they laid off 3,000 members of staff.

That is a percentage of their $5 billion profit is 7.4%.

I don't exactly know the employment laws in the US, but let's say there's other costs in there.

Perhaps you have to put something to pension if you're an employer.

So 10% of their profits, this is just their profits, could go on to keeping those staff, but it's not.

And unfortunately, this is a trend we see across many industries.

These companies have to show that they're growing.

It's not just okay to have good profits, they need to show that the profits are going up each year.

Otherwise the shareholders get a bit scared and they might withdraw their money.

And of course, to make sure these profits keep going up, they will cut where they can.

I can't help but feel this is really counterintuitive.

If you've got 10% of your profits that you could be putting on to staff to make these games, the product that you are selling, you'd think you'd want to keep them.

And we also get reports about how difficult it is to work as an artist within the industry.

It seems artists in particular are treated quite badly, difficult conditions, huge pressure, long hours.

So people are not only losing their jobs, but they're not particularly nice jobs to start with.

Well, unfortunately, this is the common progression of putting profits before people.

And it's the natural progression of big corporations.

They purposely bring these type of people in who are making these decisions to sell off staff because they're only concerned with profit.

And they will tell that person, your job is to make this company profitable or more profitable.

And unfortunately, the inevitable treatment of workers follows.

We haven't got to the worst part of 2024 yet.

There is, of course, the elephant in the room, which is AI.

AI has the potential to take away a lot of jobs in the industry.

And of course, CEOs will always look for ways to cut costs.

A big cost for any company is the staffing.

So CEOs are absolutely desperate to get AI working instead of those staff members.

The AI will work 24 hours a day and they won't complain about tough conditions or high pressure.

Now, AI certainly isn't there yet, in my opinion, but it's definitely having an impact already on the workplace.

I've heard of lots of freelance concept artists having less work.

And the type of work that's out there seems to be cleaning up AI and it's bad job that it's done.

So is there anything around the corner that's going to protect us or save us from this AI scourge?

Well, you might be thinking, what about the court cases that are coming up?

They're being sued for copyright infringement because they've scraped artists' work without their permission.

And maybe these big companies won't be able to scrape people's artwork anymore and artists might get paid fairly.

But in my opinion, I'm afraid to say I don't think that's going to happen.

If we take a brief look at history, we've got things like the banking industry in 2008.

They're a huge industry, lots of money, of course, that's where all the money is, and they caused an absolute catastrophe.

The banks gave out very dubious loans and regulation wasn't particularly tight back then, so they did it a lot.

You could even say billions of people because the shockwaves from this were felt all around the world with a global financial crisis.

Many people lost their homes, their savings, and it was an absolute disaster.

What was the result of this once we got past this catastrophe?

Well, there was one person that went to jail.

And to be fair, that's actually unusual that anybody got any sort of justice.

This was a case where many big banks were pretty much committing fraud, and that would have taken quite a huge coordinated effort of people kind of hiding a bit of the facts here, hiding facts there, and we have one person that ended up going to jail as the kind of scapegoat for it all.

This is all allegedly, please don't come after me.

Now, as a response to this, the government being the responsible things that they are, they got involved and they actually bailed out the banks, gave them loads of money, taxpayers' money, mine and yours money, and now we've got regulation so it will never happen again.

And that regulation is slowly being watered down by each successive government that we have since 2008.

We've got big pharmaceutical companies that make addictive painkillers, allegedly.

Then there's things like the tobacco industry.

Cigarettes kill eight to nine million people a year, but you can still, with some restrictions, buy cigarettes.

Then you've also probably heard the stories about nasty chemical industries that have polluted rivers and communities have been killed by these things.

It's horrible stuff, but they're big companies and unfortunately they regularly get away with these things or they get some sort of slap on the wrist, perhaps some sort of fine that affects their profits.

But it's very rare that these companies really get held to account or the people, in fact, that are involved in these tragedies.

Now, I don't mean to dwell on these things or be overly negative.

What history has taught us is that big money and big business has a huge sway in our societies.

They have a heavy influence on our politics and therefore our laws.

So back to the artists that have had their works scraped and copied and are in fact losing their jobs to the machines that did it.

These big companies that broke copyright law are extremely big.

They have a lot of power, especially compared to the rights of a relatively small number of artists.

And yes, much of the artist community are up in arms, but that's a small group.

Perhaps there are a few supporters who are worried about their own jobs maybe.

And even if these court cases are successful, what will the results be?

I don't think AI will stop taking away people's jobs.

The big companies might get a slap on the wrist and perhaps have to pay something out of their masses of profit.

Will it stop them developing this software?

The industry will actually just find a way of taking away your copyright rights.

And we've already started to see that with companies like Adobe saying that they own the rights to use your work that you create in their program for their AI training.

And yes, of course, you can opt out, but for how long?

It seems like most of these companies are developing ways to kind of take away your copyright rights.

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Game Dev 2024: The Good, The Bad, & The 2025 Predictions

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