There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.

Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring.

Goes to show, Unions are important and work. The best time to unionize was several years ago. The next best time is now.

Unions also many times (especially with "guild" type unions) can serve other valuable functions like guaranteeing a higher minimum quality of work (generally).

Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.

- Someone in the early 19th century

You _can_ do computer-based work anywhere, anytime. People working in software have no leverage at all, between India and AI. Software unions will kick the race to the bottom into overdrive.

The scabs who don't strike?

I'm pro-union and unlike the person you are responding to I'm not sure things are "dead in the water", but I do think software developers had a much better leg to stand on to push for unionization a few years ago than they have now (and, probably, going forward).

Working in games I thought working for a bit 'straight' corporation would be literal hell, I was very very wrong.

Just to say, if they haven't organized by now I'm not sure what it would actually take.

That's what happened here: they just released the big DOOM DLC today. Chop!

So, you know, do that. <insert "c'mon, do something" meme>

I have seen a number of projects go from

'We're building our own engine'

To

'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day'

To

'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine'

If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine.

Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.

I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.

There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.

Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.

And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.

It's a fallacy to extrapolate that into calling a team structure completely fungible. Throwing away an effective team that was able to ship a game is an incredible waste.

This has been the objective of the tech industry for years

We've optimized our own destruction.

Can we extend this elsewhere? Are tech companies' decision to use popular programming languages (eg. python) or software (eg. postgres) part of some dastardly ploy to make programmers "a replaceable commodity ... rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans"? Should all programmers push for having bespoke tech stacks at their companies so they can be "skilled artisans"?

Having had to work with these guys, and then maintain their software when they inevitably get bored and/or leave for more money elsewhere, no. Usually when these guys leave, their stacks/projects are the first to get rolled into the monolith and/or rewritten in the company's lingua franca (python)

UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps.

I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.

You're in an extreme minority. Also, unfortunately, Unreal is popular with indies who probably have (in general, relatively) more ethical staffing practices.

For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournament) and Tribes competed using their engines' strengths; those engines didn't look as good but were capable of rendering much larger spaces than idTech, and those games emphasized that, e.g. Tribes' massive multiplayer maps with vehicles, or classic UT maps like Facing Worlds and Lava Giant.

Then in the late 00s to 10s, things started to hit a wall. Probably peaking with Crysis in 2007, which is likely more remembered for its engine, graphics, and system requirements (all of which were truly mind-blowing at the time) than its actual gameplay. After that, games' graphics improved at a much slower rate; it started to be less about the engine's capabilities, which were increasingly homogenized, and more about art direction.

Now in the 2020s, we have UE5 for AAA games with high-fidelity graphics and Unity for everything else... what is the competitive advantage in maintaining your own engine? As you mention, you have to have internal expertise, which is less well-documented than UE5/Unity because you don't have dedicated documentation staff; you have to maintain your own tooling, which is likely worse because you haven't invested as much in it. From a ROI perspective, unless you're planning on investing so you can license out the engine and become a UE5/Unity competitor, it doesn't make sense to maintain your own engine.

And looking ahead, frankly, consumer GPUs are now so expensive that game graphics have likely peaked for at least a decade. There will simply not be better hardware available to gamers for the foreseeable future. Games "looking good" will be more about art style and direction, and you sadly do not need a team of game engine programmers for that.

Also there is obviously a massive gap between how games look and what the hardware is capable of. Cyberpunk runs better than total war attila on my computer as an example.

Don’t write a database, don’t write a compiler, don’t write an os, don’t write a game engine… are we all supposed to write web apps at this point?

This mindset didn’t create what we have today and won’t create what we will have tomorrow. I recommend people that like building these things to ignore this pov as much as possible

Both can be true.

Just because it's becoming more common doesn't mean it's not bad.

I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.

I hope the industry will be in a better place in a few years. There is this recurring theme of big companies rolling up little developers and destroying their development culture.

I have near zero hope we'll see any meaningful antitrust action in the future either without a complete overhaul of the incentives in politics.

Xbox div's annual revenue is $23 billion. Its big enough to be its own company and sit upper-mid pack of the F500 on its own. It'd be the number 3 or 4th top gaming company globally, beating out Nintendo even. No reason for Microsoft to not have been broken up by now, let alone have been allowed to buy all the studios they did. Don't forget they also mislead the FTC to convince them to allow the Activision/Blizzard acquisition to go forward, and then once allowed laid off 1900 employees, mostly admin/HR & support, forcing it to integrate into Microsoft gaming and operate less independently.

Why are the little devs selling to the big companies in the first place then? If you’re crushing it as an Indie studio why wouldn’t you stay that way knowing how big tech acts?

Looking at LinkedIn, I see mostly people from tech (design tooling, game AI, QA), art (modeling, mats, UI, character), design (levels, gameplay), and production roles in DFW being cut, but haven't seen engine roles or Frankfurt-based employees.

ZeniMax's QA team was notably unionized in 2023: https://cwa-union.org/news/releases/quality-assurance-worker...

Scott Miller said it himself:

> Big day today at Id Software [...] today, Microsoft/XBOX decided half the team was deemed USELESS and needed to be let go [...] With literally the best of the best coders in the industry.

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mpy...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1up5pta/95_reportedly...

And I'm not sure I share your optimism that the industry will be better. It might not be worse, because it's possible that Microsoft is just so dysfunctional that id would never be allowed to produce another good game anyway. But the people losing their jobs here might be financially better off just leaving the game industry entirely. In particular, if the engine devs were totally cut, it's not clear to me that there's room for a studio to differentiate itself with a custom engine in the modern day.

And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.

The only thing that truly counts, for her.

We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.

In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.

Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".

Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met.

I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.

I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.

Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.

> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.

This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.

Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.

Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...

Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.

I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.

If you input $1000 into process A which returns $20, and inputing $1000 into process B returns $30, you'd be insane to invest in process A and not process B, right?

Sure the Xbox division wasn't doing amazing but still had $24B of revenue in 2025. For reference PlayStation made $30B that same year.

If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.

The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.

So, I'm guessing internally there were some leadership hopes that IdTech would help support IVAS and related professional AR systems and when those failed to be adopted at scale, IdTech lost a key sponsor. I'm guessing it's been a rough year of internal advocacy since.

Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?

Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_...

The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.

I wonder what's happening to MachineGames...

"In France, Arkane's management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options."

Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.

This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" isn't applicable at all in this context though?

So utterly predictable it’s infuriating

Fuck Microsoft.

Corporate culture spent the last fifty years convincing the working public that it was important to identify with your job, career, and most importantly, your employer. That's how you get the most out of a worker. If they identify themselves as - just as examples - "parent" or "spouse" first, those priorities can get in the way of their value creation for you.

The employer can, of course, drop you as an employee pretty much at-will. You'll be left with shame, disillusionment, and potential financial setbacks, but they'll have accumulated the value from your best efforts.

But that is basically the minimum set of consequences for any homemaker or non-breadwinner when a marriage fails.

Think about women through the centuries, who’ve been faced with basically homelessness and poverty, and the full responsibility to all their children, if they divorced or separated.

And then it becomes crystal clear why many people cling to suboptimal and abusive relationships, because really, we need one another.

There's also an increase in the number of women who are able to independently support themselves.

People are also less likely to get married now for that exact reason.

If there were some sort of alimony for employment, even if just for a year, and a public health insurance option to fall back on, you probably don't see that much outrage from the people who have lost their jobs. But then, you'd also, at least in the minds of certain employers, see less willingness on the behalf of employees to throw their whole lives into the production of value for the business, and I think that's part of why you don't see guaranteed severance and public health insurance in the US.

Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)

The only major studios doing their own thing is Rockstar and Bethesda.

I would not include Cloud Imperium here because they are forever in a beta state with no clear ship date in the future for their two games.

Bizarre incentives we have created

There's a reason game companies want to move towards the digital-only subscription model, and Xbox has been going that way for some time. As "bad" as Blizzard is, it's got the right model. That's what they care about, not about workplace culture or innovation.

In any case, WoW has been stagnating for quite some time even before the merger. The devs act as though everything is slow because it needs to be. Classic+ could've been much better.

I'm deeply opposed to game distribution companies (console makers) being allowed to acquire game studios.

In the same way that theaters and streaming services shouldn't be allowed to do acquisitions.

Disney owning whatever ridiculous proportion of media by buying everything serves nobody's best interest.

Because someone who cares might buy the brand and do something good with it and be a competitor. ID Software is still a strong brand, and it the hands of another gaming studio it might pose a threat.

Serious question, is there any kind of entities that can be owned, but not "dismantled", if you don't want it you need to try to sell or make it independant.

Would there be any chance to make it a thing when a company is bought?

There's also the case where new teams can self organize to form new studios in the aftermath. That's also a factor on whether it makes sense to pay for the previous name or game license, or simply start over.

You can also make all sort of post acquisition agreements.

These usually take the form of making stock available at steep discounts in response to actions e.g. in the event of a 20% layoff any employee from the time of acquisition can purchase stock at $0.10 a share, any one laid off will get a million dollars severance, if acquirer shuts down the studio the original founders have the right to re-acquire all IP and trademarks for $1 -- those sorts of things.

This isn't a specific kind of entity, any business entity can have Shareholder Rights Agreements. It's a bit of a game to get the terms right so everything is in good faith and agreeable.

1. Tax write off.

2. Acquiring a competitor, and then closing them down is a way to decrease competiton.

Resetting Xbox

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993

Anyone know?

Did it appear First in quake or quake III?

1: https://www.quora.com/Quake-series-Who-was-the-level-designe...

2: https://www.shacknews.com/article/101156/rocket-jump-quake-a...

3: https://www.shacknews.com/article/181/more-on-bjames-id-depa...

Companies don't owe you anything. (And you don't owe them anything, either.)

Work is a temporary agreement to provide services in exchange for money. That's it. Understand how the world works.

That's why we have workers' rights.

1: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/bethesda-parent...

2: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/09/21/welcoming-bethesda-to...

3: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/zenimax-board-of-directors...