Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like

Comments

• prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is why they need to unionize.

  source

  • 9point6@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I cannot wrap my head around why the game industry hasn’t already unionised massively—I hear horror story after horror story and everyone working in the industry seems to have convinced themselves they’re special and it won’t happen to them

    source

    • Lemjukes@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It’s called “a decades long campaign to erode trust and even awareness of unions by corporate business interests”.

      source
    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s not that hard to understand. The whole gaming industry is filled with people who are super passionate about games, like passionate to a fault. This makes it very, very difficult to unionize as there’s almost always some other game dev out there who would take the job for less pay and more hours.

      I actually know a friend like that. He was job jumping a lot, looking for game dev roles almost exclusively. He finally landed such a role. Far as I heard, he’s working overtime a lot (voluntarily) and he earns less than half of what I earn as a “regular” software developer.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • digitalnuisance@infosec.pub ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      AAA dev here; it’s not that. It’s that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector kills your competitiveness ad a studio. That being said, unionization is desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker’s rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company’s unique internal culture. How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why. That’s the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers’ rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • j0ester@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m sure it will get a lot worst with AI bs.

      source
    • KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      We (large European gaming companies employees) have been trying to get a CBA for a year and a half now, sometimes it takes time.

      source
• EnderLaw@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  TL,DR: Company fires hundreds of workers. CEO makes $25.6 million.

  source
• Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  My question is when workers in game studios start to make unions. It’s a massive industry and the people actually making the games are constantly fucked over.

  source

  • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They are!

    Recent and huge progress on that front. It’s an industry wide union, and apparently even recently laid-off workers can join.

    source
  • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Many years ago. But as you said, it’s a big industry, and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.

    source

    • buddascrayon@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.

      Moreso now than ever before.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yes, but there are also European developers. Such as Ubisoft, which previously had major issues with harassment, and probably still does. If they have a union, it certainly isn’t a powerful one.

      source
  • 3dmvr@lemm.ee ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    in my head its because its an industry where going solo is viable and if they arent working at a company thats their goal so they have full contol over the vision and make all the money and one day they want to exert the same creative control over others and get overtime/overwork out of them

    source

    • ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.

      That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don’t have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.

      source
• peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  TIL Apex had writing behind it

  source

  • Soggy@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s set in the Titanfall universe, there’s lots of lore scattered around. People work hard to integrate a narrative into the level and character designs, to imply plot in incidental dialogue or cinematics, or just literally write text entries that the majority of gamers will never read because only shooting and rare skins trigger their dopamine.

    source
• Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.

  source

  • chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I mean, if you want to emulate a corporate ethos, I don’t think Japan should be the benchmark, either…

    source

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
  • pulido@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I think a lot of what comes out of Japan is better than the West because they haven’t given up their idea of the company man.

    Like it or not, having to switch jobs every few years is going to impact your performance.

    source

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      at least the west is starting to acknowledge the torturous monotony of doing the same job for decades.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
• RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  We should pay way more attention to other industries.

  source
• Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I hope these CEO’s get their reckoning some way some day.

  They seem to think it’s all just business and cruelly wielding power is no issue, but I think they overestimate how isolated they are.

  source

  • rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They won’t get any kind of reckoning that we’ll understand. They’re rich, powerful, and insulated from pain. They’ve all got golden parachutes via their weaselly networks. There will be no karma.

    source
  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If we want them to receive a reckoning, it’s on us, the working class, to force it to happen.

    source
  • pulido@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I don’t think they will receive a reckoning, but their children might.

    It’s especially disgusting when we realize rich people are setting their children up to inherit a world where everyone hates them for being rich from exploitation.

    source
• simop_jo@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  That’s sad and disgusting.

  source
• MyDarkestTimeline01@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  On the one hand it sucks that a writer lost their job. And it’ll never not suck. On the other hand I love when Apex Legends looks bad. I lost Titanfall 3 for that?

  source

  • Baguette@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    In a better universe apex and tf3 could have existed at the same time

    Unfortunately we live in the universe where games as a live service is the only model that big companies run on, which means all resources must go to just that one game

    source
• Tuxman@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  And then they feed the documents to a LLM and iterate over it

  source
• CaptainBasculin@lemmy.bascul.in ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Had over a thousand hours in Apex, while I quit way back because of different reasons, their actions definitely are not going to bring me back

  source
• eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I was gonna get snooty about being an indie game buyer, then I remembered that I bought a Larian game developed in partnership with Hasbro, so my snootiness will have to wait for another day.

  source

  • Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hasbro is a requirement for the D&D license, no?

    Larian at least went against the grain of the AAAAA Industry and delivered something truly wonderful.

    source

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sure, but they’re still a AAA studio since BG3 is a AAA game. AAA studios can absolutely create wonderful games.

      source
• tagoth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  This is why we need to have 90 dollar games! /s Apex is literally free to play

  source

  • MyDarkestTimeline01@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Don’t be pedantic you know what they meant.

    source

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The exact opposite of what they said?

      source
• Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Apex has a story?

  source

  • arudesalad@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s a spinoff from titanfall, a series with a lot of cool world building, it would be a bit weird to have no story at all.

    It’s also a live service so they need to copy fortnite have an in game explanation for the updates

    source
  • IronKrill@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    No, they have “lore”: a bunch of 2 minute animations, vague plot points, and character bios that give just enough of a reason for their seasonal events to occur and for fans to drool over. Just like every other live service.

    source

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      While I feel sorry for her as a worker, I do not feel sorry for her as a writer.

      Live Service writing for AAA studios has got to be the most disposable form of fiction. I can find old short stories from magazines that closed close to a century ago, but I can’t play the Destiny series from start to finish today?

      source