I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of devs have gone hard nationalist after Biden's tech layoffs. (Zirp ending + S174 left to wither during Biden)
Everything keeps getting automated or shipped overseas. It's hard to be optimistic for my kids to have good job opportunities when they grow up.
All this AI marketing thing is another thing that is specific about Silicon Valley and investments, and "growth". In EU, you don't have much growth, and that's all.
I guess the US tech market has been drugged on free cash for too long, to even have an idea of what the real world is.
abnercoimbre•3h ago
The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think.
Source: I run a community full of gamedevs.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
almosthere•2h ago
Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hours.
No one was able to get the missile shooting animation done for 8 days because their wife had tons of appointments and the dogs need walking and grocery trips... non-stop excuses. And then eventually no one wanted to work because no one else was. Hence the year of "quiet quitting".
detaro•2h ago
Bigger projects take longer, and many studios chased bigger and better, instead of aiming smaller. Which then meant that these things had to be standout hits to be considered successful, which puts more pressure on perfecting everything, which takes more time, ...
Then many studios have stories of either deep direction changes or large projects being cancelled as the money wasn't as available anymore and trends shifted. E.g. Sony alone has probably spent over a billion and multiple years of work of several studios on live-service games that they then scrapped, Dragon Age Veilguard pivoted a few times (and ended up a mess as a result), ... stories like that across the AAA space.