Fallout dev Tim Cain says the games industry's volatility is 'always gonna be around': 'What's happening now isn't novel, it isn't new'
Overview & Key Takeaways
"Art and technology constantly changing makes the whole industry unstable."
I don't know if you've noticed, but the games industry kind of sucks. Despite (and because of) the absurd amount of money games rake in, there's an ungodly degree of consolidation, the RAMpocalypse, and constant, huge waves of layoffs. Tim Cain, who co-created the original Fallout, uploaded a video to YouTube last Wednesday explaining why he thinks the current state of affairs is so terrible, if not terribly surprising.
"Why are things looking particularly bad right now? Well, the simple answer is 'cause they are bad right now," he said in the video. "Correction for [reckless investment during] COVID, hardware costs have shot up—a lot due to AI data centers—but investors are redirecting their money outside of the games industry, in some cases outside of the US … things had to contract. And that means people are gonna get laid off.
"These things will pass. They really will. I know if you're caught up in it, you're thinking, 'this is terrible.' They'll pass. That's the good news. The bad news is, new ones are gonna happen."
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Cain was careful in his video to clarify that he understands things are uniquely bad now, but also said that things have been bad and will be bad again. "If you're somebody who got into the games industry in that time period, in the last five or 10 years, and you thought it was going to be a stable job that would see through 30 or 40 years, you assumed incorrectly. You're wrong."
He warned taking a decadeslong career like his own as evidence that gamdev work is reliable for up-and-comers was "survivorship bias." He recalled the stateside video game crash of 1983 as an example of what he introduced as his main point: "What's happening now isn't novel, it isn't new to the industry, and it's always gonna be around." As for why that is, he posited that games sit at the intersection between art and cutting-edge tech, both of which change rapidly as a rule.
For workers trying to weather industry conditions anyway, he suggested either honing an eclectic and broad set of skills or hyper-specializing and becoming a go-to guy in a particular niche. Notably, there is also a larger fight for labor rights in the industry trying to change some of these conditions for good: Blizzard Entertainment workers, for instance, just won what the Communications Workers of America called "a breakthrough first contract" for all the studio's game development teams and shared services. The Independent Workers of Great Britain, meanwhile, is currently rallying in support of Rockstar Games workers as the company grapples with union-busting allegations.
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