The director of Baldur’s Gate 3, Swen Vincke, was one of many to speak out on the recent mass layoffs within the video games industry at an industry awards show last night, blaming the job losses on corporate “greed” that had been “fucking this whole thing up for so long”.
It’s not only the game industry unfortunately, it’s every industry everywhere.
It’s public trading - and all the financial speculations around it - that ruins companies, forcing them to earn more and spend less year after year, and when they have nothing else left to cut, they start cutting the workforce, with all the bad repercussions Swen described, like loss of institutional knowledge for example.
It’s a financial model that’s totally unsustainable, noone can grow indefinitely, they should change the way companies are valued, not looking at quarterly profits but a number of other parameters like respect for the environment for example, security, financial stability, things like that.
It won’t happen tho so the only option today to be a good company is avoiding public trading, not many entrepreneurs are smart enough, or unselfish enough, to do it.