When a company like this catastrophically fails and Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld do gangbusters, that signals to others who also want to make money what they should be making in order to make money. Where the money does go, like a Larian or a Pocket Pair, now has profit to spend on growing their studios and making more of what actually works. They end up hiring the talent that was let go. Not all of them; this is less efficient than if the first studio that imploded had instead made something that the market actually wanted, but this is not a situation so dire that the industry will feel it for decades like you say. New studios form all the time from mismanaged large companies that lay people off after making bad bets.
The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though the reason EA sucks is because of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the choices the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.
The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.
So yes in a very real way I think EA functions as much to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games.
That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all.
ampersandrew@kbin.social 4 months ago
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.
The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don’t just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, cause entire industries to fold up and collapse with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn’t work at the company.
ampersandrew@kbin.social 4 months ago
No, this is the reality. The likes of Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Take Two rule the industry by market cap, but that's because their games notable sell to the type of person who only buys a few video games per year at most. If they utterly dominated the material reality of the industry, how on earth could Baldur's Gate 3 or Palworld even happen? How could Hades or No Man's Sky, made by former EA devs, happen? Your view of reality is quite overly pessimistic. How can you even measure some of the claims you're making?
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?
I don’t know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn’t like there is a massive amount of scholarly work and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.
And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself but I guess in this case my pessimism is well founded.
space@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
That’s why AAA+ is failing and indie games are getting better than ever. It’s insane how good the tools and engines have gotten. Making games had become much more accessible than ever.
dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.
Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category, seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.