Asmongold TV - Indie games are a threat | Asmongold Reacts | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Indie games are a threat | Asmongold Reacts Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --------------------------------- ------ Keywords: streamer content, streamer podcast, gaming podcast, gaming takes, gaming opinions, gaming reactions, game reviews, gaming culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How is this a threat? Well, it threatens their money because nobody wants to buy garbage whenever they don't have to. You need to stop what you're doing right now. I see what you're doing. I saw what you said. You are not, you should not. What do I do? Stop celebrating the success of these 30-person studios that are doing more with 30 people than most video game studios can do with 600. I love how like some of the developers try to like use the idea of like, oh, we're going to try to make you feel sorry for us because our games aren't doing well. Like, how can you cheer for a game failing? That's easy. It's super easy. Instead, you need to panic.

We all need to panic because the deprofessionalization of the games industry is on the horizon. At least that's what they're calling it. And that means that there are fewer roles in marketing. Cultural consulting. What? Brace yourselves for this one. HR. Less roles in middle management.

No! God the horror. Oh, geez. Today we're going to be talking about... People with useless bullshit jobs that add no value to the product or the company whatsoever are losing them. Oh, guys.

Oh. Oh. Now, apparently it's a bad thing that more people are making games on their own because that means less opportunities for the real professionals. Oh yeah, this is going to be good. There it is. Once success starts happening outside of the system,

all of a sudden it's not about whether or not games are good. No, it's about who's not getting paid to make them. Accountability is a rare thing in the games industry. I've noticed that more times than not. And so many people want to shift the blame on the system. The reason why they want accountability displaced is because they are products of an apparatus that displaces accountability. What people that are lazy love doing is,

they love displacing fault between so many people that nobody can actually be assigned blame when something goes wrong because it's just a failure of an apparatus that is too large to deconstruct and it is designed that way on purpose somebody else they want to create an enemy out of thin air or they want to appeal to empathy for job security and now we need to be careful it's like here's a really good personal example have you guys ever had a problem with somebody and whether it's a girlfriend, maybe a toxic relationship, something like that, and they say, oh, well, we both made mistakes. It's like, bitch, you made 98% of the mistakes and I got mad at you for it.

That's basically what they try to do. But in a corporate level with 150 people. How much we enjoy these indie games because it could hurt AAA. You need to put down that Expedition 33. Yeah. Poke somebody's eye out with that thing. But before that, a word from today's sponsor. If game publishers are willing to charge $80 for digital games that you don't actually own,

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well, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. Thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring today's video. indie games haven't just found success in recent years. They have dominated, not just as underdogs, but as some of the most beloved and talked about titles in the industry. And indie has become a bit of a spectrum. On one end, you have studios like Larian with Baldr's Gate 3 or Sandfall Interactive with Expedition 33, well-funded, still operating.

Indy games are just simply games that don't have a publisher. That's it. Outside of the grip of traditional publishers. And on the other end, you have solo developers like Tyler with Schedule 1 or local thunk, the creator of Bolitro. Completely different scales, but the same result. Self-run, self-funded, and most importantly, unrestricted by AAA.

As tools become- It's so funny for me to watch people play this game the way it's supposed to be played. God. How embarrassing. More accessible, and these games keep hitting both critically and commercially, more creators are jumping in.

Some are seasoned veterans that are finally breaking free to go make something they actually want to. Others are just complete newcomers. But the point is, they're doing it and they're doing it on their own. And that's where the friction starts. Because every new success story from the indie world exposes just how bloated and inefficient

the traditional studio system has become. And for some people, that's a threat, especially if you're holding... This is inside of all corporations. I think that this is a problem of corporate bloat that's happened inside of all tech companies. And this is why, like, I think that there's a form of organizational and managerial entropy that happens inside of these companies where more management begets more management and before you know it all you get is management and that's the problem middle management yeah exactly job exists within a 500 person pipeline yeah like look at twitter before you on look at meta look at all

these companies and think about how many people that like they let go and think about the fact that the product did not change that should say a lot all purpose developers are doing to AAA what YouTubers did to network television, what streamers did to cable news. They are proving that you don't need 10 departments at 1,000 employees to make something that people actually care about. And just like how content creators are often branded

as unprofessional by legacy media, indie developers are now getting the same treatment from the AAA establishment. Unprofessional means unwilling to work within the imagined confines that have been invented for you. Oh, you're being unprofessional. How is that?

Well, you're not playing by our rules. Yeah, that's because your rules are bullshit. It's pretty simple. Bryant Francis of Game Developer.com titled The De-professionalization of video games was on full display at Pax East. Look at a bro. Oh, God, yep. I totally, yeah, that's exactly the kind of guy.

Yeah, it's either that or a boomer. East felt like a warning, explosively successful. games by solo devs and small teams are great, but it could lead to the death of vital specialists. He writes at Dyson GDC this year, I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine. De-professionalization as A16Z marketing partner, Ryan K. Rigney defines it. De-professionalize it. Be aware of this. Is A16Z is a, it's like a subfund for Andreson. Mark Andresen runs the most successful

venture capitalist firm in the entire world but this random idiot video game journalist is being scared by this and also by the way I've interacted with people that work at this company they're smart they know what they're doing

civilization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles they're getting paid a lot more than he is too I guarantee fucking Tia particularly free to play live service games, large studios struggling to drive sales, and the outsized success of some solo developers and small teams. These three forces, he argues, will combine to drive career professionals from the traditional professionalized side of the games industry. Drive career professionals from

traditional professionalized size of games. Yeah, that's the goal because they're worthless and they add no value. Yeah, that's the point. Duh. Yeah, now you get it. These people will decide to go indie. He can news, others will leave gaming altogether. And in between, there is a vast spectrum of irregular working arrangements available. Yeah, I'm going to have to stop you right there. The idea that indie success is driving career professionals out of the industry is such a war. It is. It is because why is it that you need all these people?

It's like Iron Man One. Tony Stark built this in the fucking basement and you can't build this with a lab. What the fuck do I need you for? And I'm going to be honest, he wasn't really wrong. That's a great point. Floating door. Holy shit, thank you for the subs. And Luke the pizza guy, Jesus, you guys are gifted in subs like crazy.

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it, guys. Take that it's almost impressive. I'm serious. Ignore the last five years of layoffs, project cancellations, and ruthless studio consolidation, and instead blame the one guy who made a viral hit in his bedroom.

That's the villain now. Major studios have been pushing these people out long before Indy would even come into this conversation. specialized talent wasn't being nurtured, it was being discarded. Projects were getting rebooted mid-development. QA is being outsourced and artists are being chewed up and spat out like there were nothing more than replaceable assets. Indies success didn't create this brand drink.

It gave people a reason to leave willingly or a place to go if they didn't. So if those same professionals now look at indie devs and think, yeah, I'd rather take the risk and make something real, that's not deprofessionalization. That is liberation. That's re-professionalization because their job is to make video. games not exist inside of a bureaucratic karenocracy that's been created in order to make sure that people get payroll for doing something that creates no value. That's a good thing.

That's the reason. This industry needs more of it. Because the reality is the parts of this industry that this article feels are being threatened, the corporate modelists like Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Epic are the same companies that are responsible for most of what's broken right now, bloated budgets, monetization first design, copycat games that are designed to mimic Fortnite or Call of Duty, if those studios are shedding talent, maybe that's

because they've become the worst place to put it. And if those same professionals that are being kicked out of the industry go on to build the next Larry and the next Super Giant or the next San Fall Entertainment, that's not a loss. That's the start of something better. The writer goes on to say, wandering through these booths, I found a mix of truly excellent

and inspiring games, but also found myself bubbling with frustration. Few developers on display were working with teams larger than three people. They talked about publishers and this was frustrating to you. Why was this frustrating? We have ourselves a bureaucracy enjoyer. What the fuck is this problem? A lot of people fall victim to the idea that the way things are. Let me see if I can find it. You know, throughout the years in business, I found something, which was I always ask why you do things. And the answers you invariably,

get our, oh, that's just the way it's done. Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business. That's what I found. I'll give you an example. When we were building our Apple ones in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple two days, the accounting had this notion of a standard cost. Right. What's that? You'd kind of set a standard cost, and at the end of a quarter, you'd adjust it with a variance. Sounds like a job for somebody else. And I kept asking, well, why do we do this? And the answer was, well, that's just the way it's done.

And after about six months of digging into this, what I realized was the reason you do it is because you don't really have good enough controls to know how much it costs. So you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don't know how much it cost is because your information systems aren't good enough. but nobody said it that way. And so later on when we designed this automated factory for Macintosh, we were able to get rid of a lot of these antiquated concepts and know exactly what something cost to the seconds.

So in business, a lot of things are, I call it folklore. Because they were done yesterday and the day before. And so what that means is if you're willing to, sort of ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard. You can learn business pretty fast. It's not the hardest thing in the world. I guess you just can't say the same thing for journalism, though, right? I just want you guys to hear it from the guy himself.

Okay? Apple's literally overpriced. Well, Steve Jobs has been out of the picture for a while. The last transcendent product that Apple made was oversaw by Steve Jobs with the iPhone. Wanting ever more expensive offerings is a part of their pitch. deck short-term contractors seem to be the best way to plug the app you think about it every single one of us has equivalent to what an iPhone one was in our pocket probably right now except for three or four of you guys they're probably drug dealers that are using a flip phone that is crazy apps why did it feel like so few proper businesses were fighting to get their games in front of players at packs speaking

with rigney and other developers i sense that deprofessionalization isn't just a catchy phrase to describe the demand side of economics. Steve Jobs would have 100% fired this guy. Yep, this guy would have been fired by both. Steve would have had this dude out on his ass. He would have had his shit in a box. Ooh. Industry hiring.

It's a frustrating reality that may undervalue games from big and small teams alike. Rigney offered some extra nuance on his deprofessionalization theory in an email exchange we had before Pax. Right. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be the first on the the chopping block. Good. The people that run marketing campaigns at most publishing studios and development studios are

retarded. They are. They're stupid. And I'll tell you like, so whenever I do sponsorships, they'll tell me what to do. And I'll be like, okay. And then I just don't do it. I just do it my way. And my way is always better.

That's it. Called by roles that seem to be replaceable to management, even if they're not. I genuinely cannot believe that this article exists. The writer walks through packs. He's a wave of exciting and inspiring indie games made by teams of three or fewer and comes away frustrated. Why? Because there weren't enough proper businesses represented? What does that even mean?

You just admitted that these indie teams are doing great work, but then you're upset because they're not expensive enough because the teams are so small? And then you go on to quote developers saying that publishers are to demand. Yeah, you're mad, bro. like and the thing is that the reason why he's upset is he knows what this means to everything else in the industry spending bigger budgets to take their pitches seriously and somehow that isn't the problem you don't see the connection the developers at packs didn't create the system the publishers did this entire bloated mess is a natural result of an industry obsessed with scale overspending risk aversion these indi devs are simply surviving despite it but of course now we arrive at the heart of the article that's scary word

de-professionalization and suddenly the tone shifts. The accomplishments of these studios gets brushed aside, their success becomes a problem, not a triumph. Because, oh, no, they shipped a game that people actually liked without a marketing team or a ludo-narrative synergy specialist or a lead experience. Do you guys know what that is? No, and they don't either. It's a retard worthless position that adds no value.

Yep. Just a worthless position. Put it in the garbage. Riential curator. No, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Like a live streamer? The thing is that live streamers, I think, are actually one of the main things that are the most capitalist and the most free market fair. Because every single person chooses to watch somebody or not watch somebody.

So if you fail as a live streamer or you fail as a content creator, you have failed because you went into the free market and you lost. That's it. That's on you. Guys, I've said this before and I'm going to keep saying it. One of the biggest issues in AAA development is bloated teams, bloated budgets, bloated management structures where nobody knows what the person next to them actually even does. You end up with departments that are built to manage other departments, pipelines that are so tangled that you can't even see the final product and a burn rate that is so high, it is a miracle that anything gets shipped at all. And then they warn us, brace yourselves.

Marketing might be the first role on the chopping block. Brace yourself, guys. Video games are to become more expensive. Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure. Good. Most marketing departments in this industry are completely useless.

It has never been easier to get your game in front of players if your game is actually good. You can't fake that kind of traction anymore. You can spend millions of dollars plastering avowed on trains and buses, put an ad in Times Square, but it won't matter if the game doesn't deliver. Meanwhile, Expedition 33 has people screaming about the soundtrack, the story, the characters, the combat, because the game itself is worth talking about. You don't need a 30-person marketing team if your game hits.

You need a game that deserves to. You need a good game. That's all you need. You need a good game. And if you want a good marketing push, you can get that. And I think marketing pushes do help certain games. But you can't polish a turd.

You can't put lipstick. stick on a pig. It doesn't matter how many people you pay to play your game. And also, like, I have a huge problem with the way that companies and marketing agencies handle promotions for streamers. I think that they are creating so many problems by how badly they handle them. I unironically think that I could do a way better job. They're wasting, I'm not even kidding you guys, two to ten million dollars on a regular. Imagine example.

I don't want to make an example because I don't, if I mention that company, I would want them to work with me in the future. And so, but like there's a lot of examples. I'll give you one. Immortals of a Venom. There. How about that?

Now, that's what's going on. And it's not deprofessionalization. It's rebalancing. This industry has been top heavy for too long. Whoever was in charge of that marketing campaign should never be in charge of anything ever again. To shift towards the people who actually build the damn thing. The article then pivots to acknowledge a different kind of success story.

The creative renegades, the ones that are making weird, original, impossible to greenlight games that traditional publishers would have laughed out of the room. Rigney praises them, calling them out as this is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million making something by themselves, which... What about crypto? True, but the tone here still drips with discomfort. like it's a cool fluke and not something to build around. Now, to the author's credit, they go on to clarify that small teams aren't obligated to hire anyone.

They are doing what they can with what they have, and better tools have made that possible. But here's where the framing starts to slide sideways. They say what feels wrong is that so few people benefit from this new status quo. Not that small team... Let me get this straight. The millions of gamers that now don't have to pay $80 for video games... don't count, but it's the 400 HR useless garbage jobs that add no value. They're the ones that we need to care about.

So the customer just isn't even considered. Well, there's no wonder this guy's a journalist. These are succeeding, but that too many people aren't a part of it. They then go back to Rigney and bring up a new example, Aaron Rutledge, formerly designer of League of Legends, Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends. running a consultant firm called area denial, basically a hired gun. The writer admits that his career sounds romantic, but then calls this model a structure that celebrates the few over the many, one that elevates roles like

design and programming while leaving out non-essential positions. What is this? How do you go from saying? You just self-reported. You self-reported it. You said it yourself. Non-essential. Then why are you there? is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million by themselves

to immediately following that with what feels wrong about this is how so few people seem to benefit from this status quo. Do you hear yourself? This is the benefit. That is the shift. We are no longer living in an era where you need to get a green light from a publisher, sit in a cubicle farm for six years, and then get your name buried in credits under five layers of management. Or do you think they think this way? A lot of people really like the I think that a lot of people don't understand the comfort that a large-scale bureaucracy brings because people can be comfortable and safe inside of it without having to worry that they're at risk, they're going to lose their job.

It's the status quo. Everything is normal. There's not going to be any big problems. Everything's going to be okay. Mediocre people are against meritocracy. Yeah. If you want to find out who the real losers are, figure out who doesn't. want to work on commission.

Witnessing one of the most democratizing eras in video game development history and somehow your takeaway is, but not everybody gets to enjoy the ride? Of course they don't, but that's always been the case. But now the door is actually open. Look at Path of Exile and Griding Gear games, a tiny studio in New Zealand that grew to a 200-person powerhouse. It's working on two full-scale games. Look at Expedition 33, built by ex-Ubysoft developers, a composer that they found on SoundCloud,

and Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, a former private equity investor who just wrote what might be this year's game of the year. The indie boom is not excluding people. It is including people that AAA would have never hired in the first place. That's what scares them. Is because they've built up an entire network and an entire apparatus that protects them and isolates them and makes them the sole beneficiaries of this industry. And now that the industry is becoming more democratized, now that it's becoming more open,

those traditional avenues are becoming antiquated and vestigial. And now you see these companies that operated like the Titanic, well, now they can't afford to move away from the icebergs anymore. And they hit them over and over, like with, Concord and Marathon and all these other games that are going to come out and have the same problems. Old system kept the gates locked. This new era is tearing them down. What you're seeing is an exclusion.

It's a healing process, a long overdue correction of decades of bloat, overreach, and creative stagnation. I'm going to get some people that are going to disagree with me on this. And that's fine. I do not believe in supporting these bloated structures, systems, and bureaucracy more than anything else. all the name of job preservation. I think that it is a pathetic narrative. If you can't earn your keep, then they don't need to pay you.

Nobody owes you a job. That's not how the world works. That's it. That doesn't work. I mean, nobody thinks that. The only people that think that are people that want to get money for free for doing nothing. And also, by the way,

the only people that are disagreeing with me are disagreeing with me because they're not in a position to have to lose money. That is driven by people that resist progress. And in a lot of cases, because they don't want to adapt, they want to make it everybody else's problem. This is something that has happened since the dawn of industries in trade. Anytime there are changes in the market, anytime new technologies introduce, all jobs go out, new jobs come in,

some jobs get displaced. And in some cases, like the video game industry, Well, the industry gets decentralized. That's why we see a private equity investor starting to write for video games. Well, how do you think somebody starts writing for video games? Do you think they have to go to school for four years and read Mario scripts and then finally they understand how to write for video games? They have to read every Shakespearean novel and then get a degree in a university and now they're qualified to write for video games? Who the fuck decided this?

nobody decided this it's ridiculous it's totally made up gone through the exact same thing otherwise you wouldn't have a guy that worked eight years in construction that has no journalistic background whatsoever that's writing reviews for video games

and writing video essays on YouTube I think the real problem for these people and really scares them is that average everyday people are getting involved in these industries and in some cases getting rich because of it they don't like that it hurts that

It hurts their bureaucracy. On top of that, these people do not have the credentials that they want. They didn't go to college for it. Sounds like a U problem, not a B problem. Yeah. Oh, well, but they don't even have $40,000 of student debt. Well, if they would, they wouldn't anymore because they just made a million dollars selling a good game. That's the problem.

is that you do need to go to college for certain things, but the majority of things you don't probably need to go to college for, except for a few specific things. I learned more about business from World of Warcraft than I did from business school, Sands Accounting was important. Everything else was a waste of time. Let's be honest, this article, especially coming from the media's point of view, this is more about control.

Hiti games are harder to predict, they're harder to market, and for them specifically, it is much more difficult. for them to monetize from the outside. Not for everybody else, but it definitely is for them. No more guaranteed preview cycles, no more demos behind closed doors, no more getting cozy with their PR team.

No, you're on even footing with guys like me, and I bet that keeps you up at night. Well, that's not what keeps them up at night. What keeps them up at night is making sure that they get all their applications sent in the Burger King so they can keep having a job. Maybe what keeps them up at night

is doing those late-night deliveries for DoorDash. because this reality already hit them two years ago. But this argument is going to shift now. Welcome home. Now instead they want to talk about who does not benefit from going indie. Because indie developers do not hire these specialists that only do one thing. And it's really funny because this feels like this is the only industry where doing more than one thing is a threat instead of just doing your job. The writer then goes on to say,

My Pax Trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this D professional. personalized world, artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. That's not true. Way more than three are vulnerable. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were roles that developers mentioned doing in some sort of shared or joint fashion. All three risk compartmentalization as asset creators, their work treated as products you can purchase off of a store shelf.

The writer then expands on this fear by pointing to broader industry shifts. He argues that in-house art positions are disappearing. his studios are increasingly outsourcing asset creation overseas to cut costs. This move he suggests is being reinforced by the rising use of AI generated art, something he openly criticized. That look like dog shit. What's really funny to me about the people that complain about AI art is that nowadays, my understanding is that a lot of AAA game development studios do use AI art and they do

use AI technology. And nobody knows it. They're already doing this. Yeah, it's already happening. You're so stupid, you don't even know that you're stupid. It's poor quality, but sees it gaining momentum anyway. In his view, the value of artists is being eroded, not because their work is bad,

but because it's now seen as something that can be cheaply replicated or bought off of a shelf. Even art directors, he noted, are surviving not on creative output, but on their ability to delegate. When it comes to the narrative, if the critique gets a little bit more personal, the writer cites industry layoffs, pointing out that writers made up the highest percentage of reported job losses in the last year.

He attributes this to two diverging trends, the success of games that minimize storytelling altogether, and the increase and tendency for story-driven titles to be written by a select few, usually the creative director, or maybe one or two trusted collaborators. The reason why a lot of story games are dying is because they're written by fat, boring, lazy, stupid, over-entitled theater kid millennials. And the stories that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote after his trauma inside of World War I versus the trauma that this person had because their parents wouldn't let them have a nose ring at age 14 are simply not equivalent.

These people can't write stories. They don't understand drama. They don't have any sort of relatable personality in any. capacity. All of their stories are basically coming down to what if every stupid thing that we thought when we were 14 was actually true and all of our parents were wrong and everything, every strong-willed character that is pig-headed and, you know, stubborn is actually the winner in the outcome. Do you want to know why they write stories like that? Because that's who they are. That's the reason why.

The reason why stories are being written that are garbage is because the people writing them are garbage. He also then reflects on longstanding frustrations that writers face in game development, many of them brought in late, treated as an afterthought, or positioned in conflict with the broader design goals. Some studios have tried to bridge this gap by rebranding writers as narrative designers, combining them with implementation,

but the implication, he argues, is clear. Being just a writer is no longer enough. As for music and sound design, his concerns are much more structural. Audio work, he says, is increasingly handled through asset libraries with implementation, often falling on the other team members. While some composers prefer the freedom to work across multiple projects, he sees this shift as another sign that audio professionals, like artists and writers, are being treated more like support staff than essential contributors.

And there it is, the famous self-insert, the emotive. and honestly probably the real source of this article's frustration it's kind of hilarious that they still can't see the correlation small teams prioritizing design and programming and those are the games that are succeeding I hate to be the one to say it but artistic roles are less essential at least at the start if a game isn't fun if it doesn't play well it doesn't matter how pretty the lighting or how cinematic the game feels in oh well if you look at the wrinkles on the character's skin and oh wow look at this is

See how their eyebrows are? Oh my God. Why aren't people bought, Hey, wait a minute. Did you, wait, you got laid off too? What the hell is happening?

It's so ridiculous. How can these people be so delusional? Indy is thriving right now because it's the exact opposite of AAA. It's gameplay and performance first, everything else after. That's what players care about. Now,

I'm not going to sit here and tell you guys that there's no value in talented artist, musicians or writers, hell, they're some of the most celebrated people in the industry. There absolutely is value in them. It's again polishing a turd. Like, for example, I was never interested in playing Skyrim, but I loved the music in Skyrim. It matters, but it's not going to sell a game. But let's be real, those roles only exist because of programmers and designers.

Without their core systems and mechanics, you're not making a game, you're making a slideshow with music. These creative roles, no matter how skilled, are built on top of a foundation that they didn't pour. They're contributors, not cornerstones. And those roles can only thrive if the studio is stable enough, profitable enough, and able to actually invest in things that aren't essential to core gameplay. What's wild to me is the complete lack of accountability here. This article paints it like it's some sort of injustice that small indie teams often share roles, where creative directors also write, animate, and score the game,

where people that are rigging the characters are also building the gameplay systems that they move through. But that's not dysfunction. That's adaptability. That's what a general... That's smart. Of course you want to have synthesis

inside of the different marketing teams and the different teams that you have. Why the fuck would you not want that? Obviously you want that. You want to have cohesion? Yes, the more that one person can do, the more cohesion you're going to have inside of a product.

Like, of course that's a good thing. How could you think that? The list is, that's how most industries work outside of gaming. Hell, I would bet almost everybody that is watching this video right now does way more than their job title suggests. When I worked in construction, I was constantly

operating outside of my role, handling HR things like hiring and firing, writing environmental reports, coordinating with government agencies, researching equipment, contacting suppliers, creating and fulfilling purchase orders. I'm even learning to read PNIDs and mechanical drawings. I got more involved in the process because that's what my job required.

That's what being useful meant. Wearing multiple hats isn't a threat to job security. It's a privilege. It's a responsibility. And in most industries, it's expected. Look at Ubisoft. They are bloated with specialists right now. Yet they are completely directionless.

You remember whenever that guy, they had like a specialist for skull and bones and he spent like 15 minutes talking about the water. I wonder how he's doing. The first Assassin's Creed trilogy was made with around 150 developers. Now they have over a thousand people working on a single entry. And every release gets further away from what made that series special. Gillum Broch, Sanfaw's CEO, is also the creative director of Expedition 33. When that team started with just eight people, they all had to become generalist,

taking on roles that they had never done before just to make it work. And in some cases, they ended up excelling at things that they had never tried. And you know what? That made the game better. It made it cohesive because when people are designing systems that are also touching the visuals, the animation, the design, you start to get alignment. You get purpose. You don't get this Frankenstein project where nobody knows what somebody else is building

or how this whole thing fits together. That's the real problem with over-specialization. It turns game development into a game of telephone. It becomes too granular. And this is a problem that I think Diablo 4 had too, is that no problem in the game could be solved because every single thing in the game was abstracted through so many different levels

that nothing could ever happen. That's the problem. Is that whenever you create a product, if you don't have one person at the helm of this product that understands what they're doing, you're going to fail 100 fucking percent. Like every single time you will fail. It becomes too bureaucratic.

everything takes four times as long. Yeah, exactly. Like, think about even like making a phone call to check something with somebody. That's going to take time. Pipeline the more distorted the message. What the designer envisioned at the very beginning gets twisted by the time it reaches the animators,

then further when it gets to VFX and it's lost entirely by the time marketing gets their hands on it. The more segmented the roles, the more disjointed the final product. Maybe the uncomfortable truth that this writer doesn't want to hear is that this industry was never meant to fully support specialists, or at least to the degree that they have. been. Maybe it's time for more people to take on more roles because the industry got into this

mess that they're in right now precisely because they put too much weight on how things look and not how they play. We've got studios that are dropping. Yeah, video games are over-designed. And basically, like, I think this happened that whenever this started, like, it probably started after the success of like, probably like Halo 3 and like Years of War. But it really started with The Last of Us. And ever since then, people have started trying to treat video games as if there are movies. And I think that the process of doing that has been overall negative to video games. Hundreds of millions of dollars on graphics and cinematics, but they can't even be bothered to optimize their games to run above 30 FPS.

We've got dev spending six months on hair physics while the combat feels like it was designed by an intern. What does the animation budget matter if the story's a joke? What does a beautiful world mean if the systems inside of it are broken? Maybe people need to stop clinging to being in a specialized role and take a step back and ask how they are actually contributing to what matters most. Whether these games are fun or not. So no, I do not buy... Imagine, imagine wondering, guys, is the game fun? Into this narrative of deprofessionalization, not for a second.

What we are seeing isn't the decay of the games industry. It is its next evolution in game development. And honestly, it's not even new. This is what the industry was born from. Small teams, self-starters, people that knew how to build the whole damn thing, not just a piece of it. Is a professional somebody that only knows how to do one job? Or is it someone who understands the entire process and can bring something to life from start to finish? Because I know which one I would hire.

This whole conversation feels less like a warning and more like job preservation for the sake of job preservation. And look, I get it. Transitions are hard. watching your field change around you is hard, but we're not entitled to the status quo. The reality is, you're not entitled to have this company keep your job on life support indefinitely

while you have overstayed your usefulness. That's just the way it works anywhere. You have to shift with it. That's not cruelty, that's life. Dust yourself off, learn something new, expand your role, and if you believe that your skill set is so valuable, then you need to go out there and prove it

in more ways than one. Yeah, just go do it. Before every studio wanted to balloon to 20,000 employees, most of this work was contracted. Teams were leaner, production was tighter, and when one game had ended, well, those people then moved on. But over time, these companies got greedy. They scaled up their output. They held on to these massive headcounts, and instead of letting people go when one project

ended, they slid them on to pre-production of the next project over and over until the weight of this all collapsed. That is not Indy's fault. That is your leadership's fault. Indy is not a threat. It's the path forward. It's the path out unless you genuinely believe that your entire career. He's completely right about this, by the way.

Like, the whole thing about like these big studios making these massive games, I think that you're always going to have GTA 6s and like these like really, really big games. But the future is smaller scale games that are just designed with less people in general. Like gravy train riders? Yeah, exactly. People are taking notice of this. Yeah, it's become so. obvious that it's happened. And I think that also like video games, it's kind of like how e-sports has had this happen to where people keep investing more and more money into e-sports,

thinking that one day it will pay off. But now I think what's happening is that the chickens are coming home to roost and there are no eggs. There's no fucking eggs. And so you go around and you're like, well, okay, well, we invested $800 million in the game and we made $90 million. Where the fuck did my $700 million go? Into the fucking void. It's gone. Someone else giving you a cubicle and a title. There's an opportunity for you out there.

People are buying these games. They are selling. And they're not just passion projects anymore. Many of them are growing into sustainable, expanding studios with the resources to be able to hire new specialists when they scale. That's the natural cycle. That's how a new forest grows. from keeping dead trees standing, but from planting new ones

and giving them the space to rise. So if you're standing around waiting for AAA to save your job, I have bad news. They're not going to. You're not going to have a job. Someone else might, or hell,

you might. You know, it's actually funny. The last time that I read an article from game developer. They've written an article that was called Yelling is not journalism by Brendan Sheffield.

And that article was essentially saying that, you know, the whole Baldersgate three drama when that was going to be, going on was an opportunity to tell players why they get unfinished games and basically why we should be okay with it and we need to be empathetic and we need to buy micro transactions and DLCs and how it's not the developer's fault. But the funny thing is we're customers. We don't have to be empathetic. And this entire thing yet again reads like a cry for empathy. But empathy doesn't

make better video games and better video games need to be made for these companies to be able to make nobody gives a shit. Literally no one cares. If you can't all, offer a product at the price that people want it and it's a worse product you're going to fail like how is something so simple so obvious so plain how is this so like how are how are so many people being confused by this gamers know better yeah they sure do don't they and uh it's funny to see but it's also a pretty big truth the audacity of this so shameless I know. They're so entitled. The money to be able to keep these specialists employed.

Jobs follow the money. So regardless of how necessary you think your job is or how much it needs to be protected, at the end of the day, we are the ones that decide what's necessary and what's not. Customer's always right. Inflation keeps going up. The cost of living continues to increase.

And now these game companies want to increase prices on video games. Players cannot gamble on $70 to $80 games. And those are the kind of games that these specialists are involved in. Why do you guys think that Doom the Dark Age? There's the man in chat. Legendary drops of the 10 gift that subs. This is a good video.

Isn't doing well in sales. It's because the game does not deliver on the value of the price that it's being charged for. It's also not as good as the old ones. That's what everybody has been saying. Like, I played it and it was boring. How the fuck do you get bored playing Doom in an hour?

It's just boring. Like, fuck. but they have to charge that price otherwise they can't make money back to be able to make the money back to be able to pay the specialists that they have working on the game right

industries and the world itself is constantly evolving and you cannot believe that you're you just knew what this reminded me of do you remember back the last blizzcon where the entire overwatch panel

was about deciding what tattoos the Samoan like tank character I forgot his name with the machine guns would have. Malga? Yeah, exactly.

And they're talking about like his tattoos and like the cultural relevance and everything like that. Was the Maori? Yeah, I don't remember exactly specifically, but like I think that was it. And it was just like, what are you like, who's asking for this? What are you doing with this? What is this? Who cares? Yeah, it's so weird.

Your job will be protected or that your job is somehow more valuable than other. I think that it is incredibly narcissistic for you to believe that the world needs to capitulate or protect you because you are only good at one thing or you only want to do one thing. Too bad. You can do that, you can be that person, but if you're going to be that person,

you have to live with the consequences of your lack of... We have to be really good at it. That's the reality. Is that... Like, there are still people who paint portraits for rich people. there's just hardly any of them. But the ones that are there still

are really fucking good at it. That's the problem. Is that these people don't make the cut? Flexibility. If you do not bend, you break. I think a lot of these folks are going to break. You are not going to get any pity from the average consumer.

It's just not going to happen. Well, especially you're not, whenever you're working in an entertainment industry perceived as a luxury job, inside of a world where people are being paid. I don't know. Like video game development's very weird because like some people get paid a really good amount of money

and some people don't get paid shit. So it's hard really for me to say. But it's going to be very hard for you to explain to a firefighter, a policeman, a lineman, a garbage man, a grocery store worker, a stocker, a warehouse worker. why playing video games is some sort of like sacred calf that cannot be defiled. And then look to look to them to see, oh, well, please give me sympathy. Please feel sorry for me.

It's a luxury. Yeah, it's seen as a luxury job. That's really the truth. And streaming is the same way, by the way. Yeah, it's the exact same fucking way. we all know that if we say something like that's not my job

that almost leads to that almost leads to that almost always leads to not having a job yeah and when it comes to writer artist or musician these are things that

in common society that we view as hobbies and you guys have the opportunity no you guys have the privilege of making that your job it is up to you to protect it not the world

entertainment jobs are also valued the most. They're valued the most and respected the least. If you guys did enjoy the video, make sure to share the video with your friends. Make sure to like the video, share the video. I already said share. Subscribe to the channel. Comment down below. Follow me on Twitch, follow me on Twitter. I'll catch you guys in the next one. Stay cool. Stay righteous. Stay safe. There it is. There it is. Family. Well, I pretty much agree with everything he said, honestly. And I think really what's going to keep happening is that these companies are going to continue getting smaller.

Give it a like. Give it a sub. I've been watching Legendary Drops videos for a very, very long time. And it is great to see these videos popping off, man. It is amazing. Look at this. Over half a million fucking views. That's nuts. How can someone say sharing roles is a good thing in small companies?

It's insanely stressful. I get the upside. But it sounds like a dude who wrote the... article has never worked at all um well the dude who wrote the article said that sharing roles was a bad thing and so i'm assuming that like this guy's you're referring to the guy that made the video um he said he worked in construction for seven years and he did shared roles all the time uh at the irs i did three or four different jobs like i i did uh basically well i i i guess i can say like uh two years since i had one case i was brother first video you watched was three

interviews. That was a while ago, right? That was a bit. And so like back then, uh, it is like, uh, I was like, I was doing the processing. I was doing batching. I did security. And I also did like basically what was loss prevention where it was like make sure that you don't throw away anything garbage. Anything that was garbage. I would literally go through the garbage at night because they were paying me at the time like $20 or $15 an hour. And I said, if you're going to give me $15 an hour, I will dig through whatever garbage you want because that was a lot of money back then. And so, yeah, that's what I did. Right. In that job, yeah, and you did, I was doing all four of those things sometimes in the same day, sometimes usually, sometimes one, usually two, and at some

points, all four. That's crazy? No, it's not crazy. That's just the way it works. That's the way it is. And so, yeah, I mean, garbage, we'll do it now. Yes. And so if you, if you can't do that, that's normal in my opinion yeah everybody was doing this by the way and the people that weren't doing it were just seen as annoying fucking losers doing nothing sitting on their phone complaining there's always drama with the lead there's always drama with the manager you're complaining constantly like yeah it's so annoying i hated those people they were awful and so anyway if you are getting paid a good amount of money and you're being treated the right way this is my opinion, I think that most people will volunteer and enthusiastically take on extra responsibility

because they enjoy their job and they have a shared vested interest in its success and they have a pride in the extent of that success. But if you demoralize, you take away people's accountability, you remove them from the fruits of their labor, you treat them badly, you disrespect them, you pay them not enough money, that is when you have people that quiet quit. That's when you have people that show up and that's it. And that, yeah, and that's the problem. And if you treat people the right way, they will meet you halfway.