Technology

People are dying to get into the gaming industry so bad, the job pool waxes and wains in quality a little but there’s never truly a lack of new talent when you need it.

This tends to be a strategy that works well when you have a lot of people in the talent pool working in smaller shops and affiliated industries, as well as lots of people exiting college with an eye towards the games industry. I think that was much truer in the '00s than it is today, if for no other reason than the market for developers generally is growing tight and people going through recruitment are going to see some enormous pay-gaps between what EA wants to offer you and what - say - Exxon or JP Morgan have on the table.

Lots of people dying to get into the industry have no business being there. Lots of people managing the industry who are good at development are retiring. There's a core of talent that isn't getting propagated precisely because the business is so feast-or-famine. Same thing is happening in Hollywood. And at Boeing, for that matter.

The McDouglas Model of crunch-time hiring is a great way of improving your balance sheet between quarters, but a terrible way to retain institutional knowledge or cultivate industry specific talents and skills.

The saving grace for the industry is live cadence games. The whole subscription side of things that we don’t really want to see as gamers keep this ebb and flow of employment from happening.

I mean, I think there's a business attitude that subscriptions represent a number you can give to an actuary and say "Tell me how much money I'll have in 10 years" with reliability. By contrast, its hard to build a long term model for a business around pre-orders and the random variable of first week sales.

At the same time, its very obvious that businesses can and do run under the "release a game / get a glut of cash / finance the next game with this income" model. It just relies on a business that plans to spend cash forward rather than one in which subscriptions are just revenues used for stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders.

What we've seen over the last two decades is bigger firms with loose credit looking for long-term revenue streams buying up highly recognizable brands as future income streams. Then busting them out until they're shells of their former glory, as all the money gets drained out the back door.

I don't really want to see talented developers working for these firms. I think that's a genuine waste. All the folks who spent years of their lives invested in Diablo 4 are - in my mind at least - talent squandered, as the game is morphed into just another DLC/microtransaction engine.