Nintendo, Valve, Asian Devs and globally indie Devs will reap all the benefits of all these contemporary fails of western big game dev companies and publishers.

You can take the DEI mandates away but when the people who work at these studios are ideologically driven to put the nonsense in anyway (identity politics, ugly females, etc), will there actually be any change? I feel like this runs deeper than just some policy, that it’s the people running the show with this mindset who’ll keep pushing this into games and the only way it’ll get better is if by some miracle they’re ALL pushed out of the industry.

What was Sony thinking when they decided to relocate their gaming division HQ from Japan to California? What was to gain for them? Also, Ubisoft could do the funniest thing ever and replace Yasuke with Johnny Somali, and have all Japanese NPCs hunt him down. Now that's a game I'd buy.

Western AAA games, specifically. China and South Korea are catching up, and Japan has been gaining back the prestige they lost back in the late 2000's-early 2010's for 8 years now. XD

On the Sony comments, did you have an issue with Microsoft requiring you to have an account for something like Minecraft?

I hope you get your job back, let us know what game you'll be working on.

I think shadows will do alright based off its name alone. There’s a lot of AC fans but it definitely won’t save Ubisoft

I just spend 1000s of hours in my old good games like quake, ut & half life...and community ones like Stalker Anomaly etc...The only one i bought 2024 was Stalker 2 and its fire😎

Happy new year man, just subscribed😜 Thx for that informative content...keep it up👍

I look at it like a glass half-full - The gaming industry environment is setting itself to be disrupted. That means new businesses and players can rise to the top while the established, old, decadent companies will slowly lose their influence. For example, look at Chinese games they used to be pretty much 'scuffed' copies of western/japanese games, but now we see games like wukong and marvel rivals - regardless if you like these games or not, you can't deny their increase in quality from 10 years ago and popularity among gamers worldwide.

I wanna see how many layoffs Naughty Dogshit is gonna face after "DEI-licious" releases.

Here's hoping you pick up much more traction in 2025 and you channel sees massive growth! I would definitely try to get in touch with Craig at Sidescrollers, would love to see you guest in an episode or two. You definitely add a lot to the conversation as an industry veteran. Maybe even be in an episode alongside Kirsche.

You know there's a problem when western developers are breaking away to be acquired by eastern companies. Happy New Year and good luck on your search.

State of AAA game industry is in shambles, games are released in buggy incomplete state, that will be "fixed later" that alone makes me buy games that are at least 1 year old, better more complete experience at much cheaper price. Then there is the DEI infestation situation that certently dont help at all.

Gamers to the AAA industry "You are gonna burn all right."

You cannot focus creative endeavors on what a vocal minority believes is righteous, you can only sell consumers what THEY want to buy.

People had fun being a Welsh guy unaliving a bunch of Caribbian people. Rooting for hard working people to lose their livelihood. Classy. Whites, Asian, Jews are protected classes. It's called Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. They are protected under law.

ubisoft doesn't aim at selling games, they're aiming at getting people to sub to their shitty equivalent of game pass, that's why they're overpricing their games which hold no value, that's why they're taking away peoples games if they don't log in for some time, that's why they're saying retarded shit like "player need to get used to not owning their games". underlining: every gamers best interest is the shutting down of ubisoft even after tencent buys the company and they start producing normal games not radical leftist manifestos with a thin veil of a game, people should still not buy their games or sub to their sub service. easier said then done though because normies are normies.

Keep using all Dark mode and stay based my dude , Ubislop lose 85 % of its market value its doom n gloom there, all by their own making love to see that.2025 is gonna be blood bath/cleaning the house.

A kirsche name drop? My dude is cultured

Microsoft laid off all of the DEI team last July

Ubisoft has most of their studios in Europe and I guarantee you the salary is not 100K a year, its gonna be more like 42-55K, likely even lower in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and the Philippines. Make no mistake, they still are in big trouble but not everyone of those 18K employees is costing them 100K, the problem is their recent endeavors werent successful (for multiple reasons) and those BigBrains didnt publish on Steam on launch.

Another great video. I ate Crow already about CD Project Red believing they should be given the benefit of the doubt due to the recent Cyberpunk 2077 DLC, just the past couple weeks they have been the most hostile DEI unhinged company of any of these from the Lore director tweets that surfaced. 2025 will be brutal.

meanwhile i have a list off over 20 indie games i'am looking forward to and that's just for this month, and you should check out Labyrinth Of The Demon King if nothing else the fact just the PS1/PSX visuals alone makes for a more scary game than most recent so called horror games.

7:03 I agree 100%. sony california is really holding them back.

indies arise and take your true place

The Steam charts that only 15% of players play AAA was mind blowing. These studios are the next cable news - nobody believes or consumes them.

there is an odd sequence in hollywood that tons of EFFECTS studios essentially dont exist anymore. they have all been without jobs for years, cause everything is being taken care of by cgi or shitty dei hire replacements. i FEAR that many of these larger companies have essentially culled the work force. even if you change your practices and intent, the employees you have hired and will hire are seemingly all without any inspiration. the south park joke of put a chick in it and make it lame and gay is so unbelievably accurate. these new younger devs are not creating the next new story, the next great mechanic, the next game series. they aren't even trying to sometimes. these bigger companies are going to have to start purging entire studios and funding indie groups to make their smaller projects bigger. its one of the only ways we're going to get through this insanity

Good to see you again Oujirou!

Thanks for pointing out that 1. You can prove that the teams are different just by comparing the credits between new and older games 2. Like movies, credits are inflated as anyone present can be added, breathing or not. They will credit the entire team of 10 even if only 2 worked on the game.

racism is a nice easy way to avoid this and have a coherent society. Idk how many more years it'll take you, but you'll come around

These slimy big tech rats have to jump through a bunch of patronizing rhetoric just to avoid saying they need cheap foreign labor to fill their pockets. It is even crazier that many of them are saying these cheap workers are more "skilled" and "talented" than Americans, that they have a harder work ethic than us, and that we should be happy to see potential job opportunities for us or our children disappear to let's face it, a very concentrated group of people from the 3rd world who carry a lot of resentment towards us. The future of America looks grim, I fear we will all live under a feudal caste system pretty soon.

I'm not American, and while I have been following the developments in the USA since before the elections, it's not always easy to find the truth and nuance in certain pieces of news. This has been very eye opening. Thank you as always for your excellent content.

Love the video, but you should know that race is NOT skin color. This myth needs to die-the myth of equating race with skin color. Skin color is just one small part of race, and skin color varies within races. Race can be determined from your bones. Race is so, so much more than just pigmentation.

I don't care if you call me racist. But if you grew up in a country, paid your tax dollars, got loans to further your education and your politicians are kicking you to the curb while they allow corporations to hire cheap labor is THEFT. How can you play and pay into this system and be undermined? To be second fiddle while you give your tax dollars to the people who are taking your jobs away . What is left for the western man? Uber and warehouse associate?

There is racing scene all the way in up state New York called super modified scene where you have guys that never got engineering degrees building cars that can compete almost at F2 or F1 level. I'm just honestly surprised how much they talk about needing overseas help when you have so much talent in your country. I know someone in Singapore oh told me they've been hiring Americans in tech to work on projects over there because they couldn't find a company in America willing to hire them.

I had a lot of friends from my university in Brazil that got hired in US and Canada but, they were never that really good at all (I'm talking about mechanic/electric/electronic engineers btw), at most they were average in class. The reason most of them took jobs like that, even when they got a bad pay, was just to build their resume (everyone know how good Americans are, so having in your resume a good company from there is like a gold ticket that opens doors around the world). In our minds it was worth to take a few years working in suboptimal conditions/pay if we could get these companies to stamp our resumes and, then leave for the jobs that are actually worth elsewhere.

I'm paraphrasing here, but Elon's tweet likening tech in America to a "sports team" seeking to hire the best talent, being a win for everyone, is completely a false equivalence. In E-Sports, specifically in league of legends, North America's Team Liquid saw a majority Korean roster, with the team even communicating in Korean. To this end, the team performed quite well (domestically) because they were the best. But in the case of H-1B's and tech, how can you prove by a meritocratic metric that those being hired are "the best"? Especially when there is no opportunity for the alternative hires to prove their worth or stack up against foreign hires? Simply put, you can't. The ideal would be to have a rival company which *does* hire American workers against which to compare, but the incentives of H-1B's are just too atractive for those in charge of hiring.

Capitalism, baby! As a non-american I see that this only benefits corporations. If they'd hire H-1B with same pay as for americans then an argument could be used that they just couldn't find someone in States, but offering below market rate is sketchy AF.

Oujirou my friend I work in tech also. In fact Michele Malkin made a documentary about the H-1B visas in the tech field YEARS ago and she featured the abuse my company was engaged in. The H-1B visa program has SIGNIFICANTLY suppressed the wages of my field. What should, and used to be, a 6 figure job has been reduced to 50K if you're lucky. The company is very racially discriminatory. They prefer to hire a certain ethnic group from their home country because that's natural for people to do. The US is an exception in our desire to not discriminate based on race more so than anywhere else in the western society. I'm with you we should ban outright the use of H-1B visas in tech. Normally I don't approve of swearing, but your anger over this is justified. There is no position in tech where an employer can say "if you need this position filed and you HAD to only choose from American citizens and there was no other option that you couldn't find a way to fill the position?" None could say yes. They may not like having to offer more pay, but that's the reality. The argument "Well who will cook and clean and pick your vegetables? Who will work your call centers and helpdesk?" Americans will. Americans are not as lazy as politicians and companies like to make out. It's their excuse to suppress our wages though mass immigration both illegal and legal and in tech we have suffered the burden of H-1B for a very long time now.

Common Oujirou W

There was a video leaked many years ago of a business conference where the speaker was telling these people how to avoid hiring Americans. I haven't seen it in a long time but it's out there on the Internet somewhere.

Thanks for the breakdown. 13:06 👏👏👏 You sounding great again 😊

At the risk of sounding like a Trump apologist, President Trump never said he would do away with immigration. He said he would control the border and deport the criminals.

Happy holidays and a happy upcoming new year, good sir. You are looking and sounding much better. I hope you feel that way as well. Excellent Christmas movie choice, by the way. Regarding the things you were talking about, when you mentioned the Warcraft 3 level editor, another example came to my mind. When Dragon Age Origins released, Bioware also provided players with the toolset used to create the game. The community of talented modders that sprung in the wake of Origins' release created amazing things (15 years later, people are still making mods for it), with many of them taking the knowledge and experience they gained and moving on to create mods for other successful games. I'm hoping some of these people also made it into the games industry. Companies like Blizzard and Bioware intentionally or inadvertently used to cultivate creativity.

Merry Christmas from another laid off dev, I'm glad you're on the mend and this was a great video.

Gamers' issue with gaming: They don't make good games anymore, they make political pamphlets. AAA industry's issue with gamers: They have the wrong color of skin, the wrong sex, and the wrong sexuality. As soon as one group fixes their issues, the problem will fix itself. What are you waiting for?

I think the issue is, somewhere along the way, companies started treating gamers like normies, when the two could not be more different. Normies en masse threw their support behind BLM and companies threw DEI initiatives into their games, but gamers saw it as the divisive race grift that it was. Companies started selling NFT and crypto scams to the more susceptible playerbase, but games knew these were just pump-and-dump schemes. Normies started using AI for writing homework essays; gamers used it to create Rule 34. When are these companies going to learn that mass appeal simply is not working for them?

Totally agree i was looking forward to play this game but not anymore.. Its cooked.

Many of these layoffs are bad and could've been avoided I feel. But one positive thing is that many companies are now "forced" into being more consumer friendly, because they literally have to. Other than that the surgery thing financially sounds horrible. I only pay 70 bucks a month and never saw a medical bill in my entire life, the US is really fcked up in that regard...