How Private Equity Is Ruining Gaming

Corporate greed is killing the video game industry. Investors flocked to buy up video game studios during the pandemic. Now they’re laying off thousands of workers. And we get glitchier games, delayed releases, and fewer workers forced to put in inhumane hours.
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[TinaMcCall.]

Dear Indie Game Co.,
If you love game, stay indie.
Going public leads to shareholder butchery.

[Ahzpayne]

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”― Edward Abbey

[ChiekoGamers]

CEOs and shareholders don't code. They dont create games. They dont even play games. Workers do the work.

[Tienkou]

Greetings from Finnish game industry. Unionize and thrive. Idiots with money and a dream shouldn’t lay off 20000 highly passionate skilled professionals.

[hrep]

This has been the pattern that has been plaguing US industries for decades. Focusing on shareholder short term profits only, has been dragging down the viability of most sectors in the long term.

[shles]

I genuinely don’t understand how “buy a company to then fire the workers and close the project” is even legal and normal. Corporations should be liable for that stuff. It’s totally leads to monopolies, worse conditions for workers and worse products for consumers.

[jessejamez]

Corporate greed is ruining video games, food, electricity, clothing, the ground, the air...
Our Lives....

[evanhunt]

Our solely profit driven way of life is unsustainable and toxic. We need to start focusing on other things like quality and personal satisfaction.

[NothingIsKnown]

Same thing with movies. “I’m an investor. I want to invest $10M in a product and I want $25M back. Therefore the product needs to have all the features consumers like according to market research. And avoid anything controversial that may lose consumers. So we will create shiny, meaningless fluff and market it heavily.”

[Debbie]

I’m a veterinarian who owned her own practice for over thirty years. During that time, I’ve watched private equity buy out single-owner practices more and more, to the point that only three practices in my county are not corporate-owned. They buy animal hospitals, fire most of the staff, raise prices, and don’t care how many animals now cannot get good care because they can’t afford it.

It took years of planning and my willingness to take a few hundred thousand dollars less than Corporate offered me in order to be able to sell my animal hospital to an associate vet who started at our place as a teenage volunteer and joined our practice years later as a doctor. But, there are too many owners who cannot turn down what private equity people offer.

[Apheleion]

Maybe Microsoft shouldn't have spent 75 billion on buying Activision/blizzard.

They said the same bs oh this is good for us and will allow us to be more competitive while paying our workers

Then they proceed to axe 3 studios that had highly successful games.


These monopolies are complete trash.

[olliepoplol]

You know what’s so weird? If you make a game that is fun, that people want to play (AND you take care of your employees) it’s almost like your company will stay afloat. How crazy.

[EB--]

In other words, art turned into business, and that business has failed to produce art.

[CynthiaMcG]

As a certain video game critic says, "They don't want your money. They want all the money."

[ShuckleII]

I watched another video exposing this problem. Their main point was that the corporate side expected extreme monetary success on every project, like gaining 20x or 100x the money spent on development, not just above 1x, which is all that's necessary to keep a studio going. If they didn't meet those absolute supremacist predation numbers, and just gained even something like x5, the studios were closed. The corporate side is expecting Genshin Impact levels of constant extreme success (which is only "successful" because it syphons as much money as possible from it's players in return for the most worthless reward possible, like 0 desirable characters for 100 dollars). It is truly an abomination, it is destroying the *ENTIRE* industry in search of the single most profitable, most abusive, most worthless studio, leaving nothing but dust all around.
That's not what art is, not what preferences are, not what games are, and that's beyond boring. There's supposed to be diversity in art, genres, art styles, narrative, not the same garbage over and over again with literally no alternative, that's a monopoly's nightmare, sheep that eat the same grass and never complain. It really is societally cannibalistic lunacy, the consumption of the world, simply for the purpose of increasing a number. These corporations shouldn't have billions of dollars and shouldn't fuel economies in the most destructive way possible, they should be playing cookie clicker in jail for trying to destroy the world for their benefit.

[HoxxesFanFilm]

It says a lot when the old adage 'A happy workforce is a productive workforce' is seen as somehow revolutionary.

[kalibbailey]

Its wild to buy a ton of talent then immediately lay them off

[SaiyaSounds]

"Companies don't want to make money. They want to make ALL of the money.

This is why you'll see layoffs and cutbacks no matter how successful a company is.

The more they make, the more they expect, and they'll gut anyone to get it."

- James Stephanie Sterling

[Akimbo]

Games, housing, Healthcare, you name it, private equity has ruined it

[darkstar]

We all remember the studio shutdowns Microsoft did, despite the fact Hi-Fi Rush was a success and one a game award, they still shut down the studio.

I don't if anyone who watches and read comments will agree, but there is a reason many gaming channels are saying Nintendo has won the console war. And let us not forget what Satoru Iwata did during the Wii U era, where he took a pay cut to help pay for employee salaries. Do you think Phil Spencer will do that?