this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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What will keep you safe is not selling your business to a mega corp.
Not even that, but usually this comes with the actual big target on your back: Being publicly traded.
Now of course, you can be publicly traded without being a big corp, and you can be a big corp that is held privately. But usually these big corpos are the ones that are on the stock market, and yes, the moment that happens everything becomes secondary to your actual responsibility: To the shareholders. Line must go up! And an easy one is to fire more workers.
Or going public in general.
Unless I'm not seeing something, game production is expensive. Most studios are 1-2 bad games away from closing their doors. Games are expensive as hell to produce and as much as it sucks the "going public" option is sometimes the only way to go.
It's easy to forget but most small (1-3 people) team indie devs probably aren't even working a salary. They split the earnings from the game and either live off of that or reinvest it into their company but the moment salaries need to get paid, or office space needs to be used (not really necessary for small teams) that's when expenses get insanely high. I'm not a business person but I can understand why you'd want to "trim the fat" (I don't support it at all but to play devil's advocate, I can see the logic despite the flaws). Growth means structure, and structure means expense.
If you’re 1-2 bad games away from going bust then perhaps make better games.
Isn’t the premise of capitalism, that if you fail then someone better will take over you. Let them fail.
Someone who can milk their playerbase better. Lootboxes and other "surprise mechanics" (addictive gambling), battle passes, games as a service
No. I mean someone with ethics and morals and just wants to sell something for a single price and be done.
There’s a reason Minecraft and Factorio get a lot of love. It’s because you pay once and you’re done. Yet they still make new things. Although Mojang is going that way.
Except for all the small studios also struggling or going out of business because getting investment right now is really, really hard.
The megacorp closures and redundancies are far from the entire story, they're just the headline grabbers.