Two multiplayer devs cut a big chunk of staff WEEKS after launch and what the fuck are we even doing?
The games industry continues to crumble under its own massive weight as two big teams get cut days after their games launched
Wildlight Entertainment's much maligned Highguard has had a rough few weeks since it launched in late January, losing players pretty precipitously since the initial release. And despite trying some interesting things — like a rushed and improved 5v5 mode — the game hasn't held onto many of the players it started with. So Wildlight announced that it was laying off some staff while preserving a "core group." Staffers, on the other hand, said most of the staff that helped build the game are gone. The game came out Jan. 26, 17 days before the announcement.
Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends, launched their fighting game 2XKO — perhaps one of the worst names for a branded fighting game of all time, but that's beside the point — onto both PC and console on Jan. 20. And it laid off 80 developers, which is nearly half the team, on Feb. 9, 21 days after its mass launch.
Need I remind you that Sony closed Firewalk Studios, the people who made Concord in 2024, about two months after the publisher took the game offline in early September of that year?
So, folks: what the fuck are we doing here?
The video game industry is in trouble and it's getting substantially worse all the time. Big games with mysteriously big budgets are coming in, not immediately earning their budget back, and getting shot dead in the streets days later at this point.
And that sucks for gamers, man. It sucks to see these projects that some people genuinely love become unplayable relics. I don't think Concord was a good game, but it's really sad that there is a group of players — however small — that loved it and will never play it again for as long as they live. And I feel their pain, because Anthem is a game that will always make me wonder "what if?"
What if Anthem had a publisher that gave a shit enough to let BioWare retool it? Diablo 4 is on what feels like its 10th major rework since launch — which is great, I like that game a lot and it's getting better all the time — but Anthem couldn't get the time to do one major overhaul? Destiny 2 has been bouncing back and forth between "dying" and "thriving" for a decade at this point and these other games can't live a month? That sucks.
But you know who it sucks for way worse than gamers? The people who make the games and depend on the industry's support to feed their families.
The layoffs around the country have been disgusting over the past year — trust me, my wife and I got laid off within a two week span of each other a month before our daughter started preschool — but it's been hitting the games industry hard ever since the Covid boom. Just look at Jeff's post about how many layoffs we've had — which I've now linked twice in this story, and am now linking it a third time, god dammit — and you'll see that the industry is burning through talent at an alarming rate.
Listen, I'm a journalist in this space and have been a journalist for a decade. It's the only job I've known since graduating college. But I'm getting my Masters in Social Work in 2028 because I can't provide for a family of four in this volatile of an industry (I'm not abandoning Rogue! I'm not going anywhere). If you think game developers — many of whom are way better at their job than I am at mine — a aren't looking for roads out of this shitbox of an industry in order to achieve some semblance of stability, you're out of your mind.
This is something everyone should care about. As a human, you should care about the suffering of others. But even if you're just a selfish gamer who doesn't care about the people that made your favorite art, you should care about this. Because some of the people responsible for making the shit you love most are leaving for more consistent pastures. And they're not coming back.
Really, like all things, it's a problem of the rich weeding their way into art.
Art has been profit driven forever. Even the beloved Nintendo has been making a premium on its games since longer than I've been alive. But when we have reached a point where the purse-clutching douche bags — rich, shortsighted fools that they are — are willing to cut and run less than a month after something doesn't meet expectations, it's impossible not to look at this and say "something is fundamentally broken here."
Mercifully, some indie games are still doing great, and games like Mewgenics are making their development budget back in a matter of hours. But even then, how many great games that people poured years of themselves into go completely unnoticed because of the sheer number of games coming out every week? [Ed. note: Jeff popping in to shamelessly plug my review of TR-49 and my interview with its director Jon Ingold — it's apropos here.]
I'm so tired. I'm so tired of the people who will never see the consequences for failure setting unrealistic expectations for success.
Highguard was fine at best. I know lots of Riot fans from my League of Legends days and I haven't heard jack shit about 2XKO. We're not talking about the cream of the crop here. But we should not have an industry where developers have to make the next great thing every single time they launch a product in order to keep their health insurance.
It's all broken. And I'll be honest, gang: I don't know how it gets fixed.
Unionize. Eat the rich. Help others however you can.
