Baldur's Gate 3, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Resident Evil 4, Diablo IV, Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Alan Wake 2, Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy…to say that 2023 has been an extraordinary year for the video game industry is almost being repetitive. It has been a year with extraordinary works that will greatly influence the future of the industry and it has been an excellent year in economic terms. However, for all the good that the year has been, the truth is that a deplorable and counterintuitive phenomenon has occurred: the industry has suffered more than 6,000 layoffs in some of the most powerful companies (Rockstar, Bungie, Ubisoft, Take- Two, CD Projekt, Epic, Bethesda, Blizzard…).
It is not the first time that one of these companies has laid off many workers in a prosperous year (one of the most famous cases was that of Activision-Blizzard and its 800 layoffs in the 2018-2019 financial year, when it broke a revenue record), but The figures of the labor debacle of this recently completed 2023 exceed all catastrophic perspectives. Paradoxes are always complicated to resolve, but we can point out three factors that can explain this bad news.
The first has to do with the effects of covid. 2020 was a year in which circumstances pushed half the world to take refuge in digital leisure. This led to private investment in video games during 2020, 2021 and 2022 multiplying due to the safe bet image that emanated from the sector, but in 2023 that investment has lost two-thirds. That, without a doubt, is a loss of financial muscle that is impossible not to notice in the labor ecosystem.
The second reason is the exorbitant increase in the price of the largest projects. Insomniac Games (Spyro the Dragon, Ratchet & Clank) recently suffered a data leak that showed the world simply dizzying figures. Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the company's most recent release, has had a budget of 315 million dollars (the forecast is that it will leave a profit of 75 million). The future Marvel's Spider-Man 3, according to the leak, will have a budget of 385 million. And the even further future Marvel's Wolverine It would have a budget of 305 million dollars. That is, figures that are hardly found in Hollywood and that imply the total closure of any project in the event of a disaster.
And lastly, of course, there is AI.
The toy company Hasbro has just announced 1,100 layoffs. And this year he had already laid off 800 people. The thing is that while the company lost almost 10% in annual revenue, the video game division rose 40%. Still, layoffs. Because? Within Hasbro, one of the affected divisions is Wizards of the Coast, the parent company of the card game Magic and role-playing Dungeons & Dragons (the video game of the year, Baldur's Gate IIIis based on D&D). Coincidentally, Wizards of the Coast has recently been accused of using artificial intelligence to create some of the art for their upcoming book. Dungeons & Dragons. The company has defended itself with a resounding statement. Or not so much: “we demand that artists, writers and creatives who contribute to D&D that they refrain from using generative AI tools to create final products of D&D”.
Perhaps in that innocent word, “finals”, lies the key to everything. Everything that is published will ultimately be supervised by people, of course, but anyone who is even a little interested in generative applications based on artificial intelligence knows that it is illusory to think that this new technology will not greatly affect illustrators, editors, creators of video games, application designers and almost everything that involves working with a computer. In silver: it is not unreasonable to bet that the vaunted technological revolution will begin with (or remain in) a labor revolution. A revolution with many layoffs, it is understood.
This column will never tire of saying that video games are the canary in the mine of a world in which the Anglo-Saxon precedes the European and the digital precedes the analogue: political wars and a good part of the discussions were born in video games. that years later they would reach the newspapers; and in that environment a Me Too proto began in 2014 that would later reach the entire world. If AI influences a technology sector that literally vomits gold in this way, it is not very flattering to think what it will do to digital companies that live in a precarious balance. Anyway, why give it any more thought if we have the proverb at hand: when you see the neighbor's beard peeling…
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