Triple Click - Why There Are So Many Video Game Layoffs

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Xbox laid off nearly two thousand people last week. Before that, Riot laid off hundreds more. Why does this keep happening, and how does it affect people's lives? This week, Jason, Kirk, and Maddy talk about the video game layoff epidemic and try to pinpoint the causes and effects.One More Thing:Kirk: One Piece (Netflix)Maddy: True Detective S1-S2Jason: Cultish (Amanda Montell)LINKS:Ezra Klein on the hollowing out of media: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/opinion/pitchfork-gq-internet-media.htmlWith an excerpt from Netflix’s One Piece theme by Sonya Belousova and Giona OstinelliSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Okay, that wraps up Q4. Another success, according to every metric. We're going to keep all three hosts on Triple Click from now until eternity. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about games industry layoffs. From Riot Games to Epic Games and Microsoft's Deep Cuts to Activision Blizzard post-acquisition. Was all of this really necessary? I'm Maddie Myers.

I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton and hello. Hello. Hi, my friends. It's us again. Made it back to the Triforce table once again. All of our hands holding on to our respective triangle. This isn't an episode about Zelda. That's just the vibe that I'm entering into this show with today. Nice. Man. Yeah. And this is a listener supported show. I'm just charging on in. I'm just going to get it out of the way, you know? Get it done, Maddie. We believe in you. Rip off the bandane. It would be painful if I dragged it out. So I'm going to rip it off. Okay. Now we're starting to slowly tug it.

Band-Aid, rip off the band-aid. Okay, okay, we're a listener-supported show. What does that mean? Well, you can go to Maximfund.org slash join, and you can find out, but also I'll tell you right now that you could become a member for a $5 a month fee. You could get a bonus episode from us every single month. So we just recorded a bonus episode that was our One More Things of 2023, and that would be our book, movie, TV show, and album and podcast that.

kind of wrapped up 2023 for us or just is a cool thing we liked in 2023. Think of it as a one more thing, but it's super long and it's an entire episode and all three of us do that. That's the kind of thing we do as a bonus episode, but also we spill the beans about a game we all played

or a movie we all watched or any number of other things. There's a ton of bonus episodes in the backlog. So maximum fun.org slash join is the place to go to become a member and support the show and make triple click as amazing. as it always will be for all time. And with that, I pass it over to Jason.

What's our topic today, Jason? So this week we're talking about some sad news, which is the epidemic of layoffs that are hitting the world of video games. Also happen to be hitting the world of journalism, which is another kind of beat that is relevant to our lives. But I think we'll mostly talk about the games world, games and tech worlds today, even though there are some intersections.

But we'll get into that. For now, the headlines that come in Fast and Furious, I'm sure everyone out there has seen them. Blizzard, well, Microsoft, which just bought Activision Blizzard, just laid off 1,900 people, or about 8% of its workforce, mostly across Activision Blizzard. There were a few people hit here and there in other Microsoft divisions like Xenemex, but it was mostly Activision Blizzard. Two days before that, there were mass layoffs at Riot Games, which laid off some 500-something people.

A couple weeks ago, there were mass layoffs at Unity. They laid off another 1,800, 1,900 people. And the list goes on and on. This has been going on for the last 12 months or so in a really big way. Although, I mean, to keep it real here, the video game industry has always been like this. And I think we're just seeing kind of the numbers get a little bit bigger and the high-profileness of these layoffs all coming around the same time. So we're

going to get into today the why of it, the how of it, the who of it, the one of it, the I guess I already did the one of it. And what it all means. But yeah, I mean, before we start tackling the big questions, I guess we should talk about kind of some instinctual reactions. All three of us have been writing about and covering and following the video game industry for a lot. time. Does it feel like things have changed? Does it feel like this is kind of a particularly bad time or does it feel like business as usual? Kirk, you've been watching from outside the industry and haven't been really covering it other than on this podcast. Has this seen like a particularly bad time to you from your standpoint? It's hard to say at least from my sort of

limited view and the limited amount of time that I spend studying this. Like clearly there is more coverage of it, or at least I am seeing a lot more coverage of it, which may or may not mean that there's actually more instability, though this current sort of layoff around, this narrative that's happening right now seems to be based on something that is actually happening. Like, this seems to be pretty pronounced since it's across so many big companies. I guess the thing that I've noticed that I'd be curious for the two of your take on is that this seems to be hitting really big companies.

Like this is happening at the biggest company. which is a little different than what's happening in media, or at least, you know, in some other fields. And media is the other one that I'm aware of. So that's my main question, I suppose, and how it feels watching it from the outside. Yeah, big successful companies. I mean, it's happening in media, big companies, LA Times, for example, just slashed a bunch of people. That's a big media company, but it's an unprofitable media company. In this case, we're talking about, I mean, Riot Games is a big games company.

Their financials are private, so we don't know how profitable they are, but we do know that they are big and have been successful in the past. I guess you could argue. I guess there is a world in which they were not profitable this past year, just like the LA Times, and so that's why they made these cuts. I don't know. Activision Blizzard, a very profitable company. That is a company that Microsoft just absorbed, and they looked over their spreadsheets and said, hey, we need to make some slashes here. And there could be a variety of reasons for that, but certainly not because the company is not making money. And also Epic Games, which we didn't list yet, but at least a few months ago, that was a surprising one because I think, at least I think of them as a huge company, hugely successful with Fortnite.

But it's going to speak to the overarching narrative that I know we're about to get to, which is really big investments during the pandemic, really high player numbers. and interest during the pandemic, and that changing in the past year or so as some of those numbers dwindle and as some of the ways that these companies and their games have operated change, like in the case of Fortnite specifically, the kind of petering out of the microtransactions,

live service version of reality, changing over time and being something that isn't sustainable and the same, way as it once was. But the story, not to just dive right into it, the story with Microsoft, I think is really fascinating and surprising to me, at least. I don't know how you felt seeing it, Jason, but I did not assume that upon acquisition closing, that Microsoft would immediately start slashing in the way that they did. What did you think of that? And that they would slash so much, so deeply, and so into game development. Like usually when you see an M&A go through,

There's some kind of redundancies. Companies look over and say, hey, you have a marketing team. We have a marketing team. We don't need both of you. But this was a deep cut into game teams and into a lot. Yeah, let's zoom out for a second. Let's set the stage here and kind of I want to expand a little bit on what you were talking about. So 2020 comes along, the pandemic hits.

Every single game company just jumps up in terms of revenue, in terms of users, in terms of bringing people into their ecosystems because so many people are at home playing video games. And that's everything from like the live services, the Fortnite's, the destinies, the Call of the World, to the mobile games, which also just are going out of control. I believe Call Duty Warzone came out just as the pandemic was starting. So that was pretty wild timing. And that game, of course, was a mega hit.

And then that, of course, inevitably leads to some decline as the pandemic kind of winds down. I mean, some people would argue that the pandemic is not over, but it's a lot. certainly we've returned to normalcy at this point. And so that means that the kind of sudden growth has tapered off. And in fact, by some measures, the growth since even pre-pandemic has tapered off, has gotten pretty flat across the entire video game industry, which, of course, means such a wide swath that it's kind of even hard to know what that means exactly because that counts for like both flops and hits across console, PC, mobile, everything.

But that's the trend that we're going to. into. And so, of course, during those boom times, all these game companies are like, hell yeah, like, I have all this cash. I'm going to go spend money on hiring and R&D and bloat. Get bloated. I mean, you say, of course, but I guess we can argue whether or not they should have done that, but it's true that they did. Well, no, by, by of course, I just mean, of course just means like this is executive brain. It's like, oh, the growth will last forever. I am a smart executive. No, well, it's like, it's, it's kind of like, it's, it's kind of like, like so much of the way that our business world works, it just kind of incentivizes short-term

thinking. And so you are thinking in terms of just like the next year's results, because that is probably, if you are a CEO at a major company, that is where your paycheck, the majority of your compensation is based on like your growth, you're hitting these targets for the upcoming year, stock targets, revenue targets, whatever it is, operating income targets. And so you're looking ahead and you're being like, oh, if I hire 500 new people, I can hit that bonus. And then who knows what will happen after that. It can't be my problem. And so, yeah, by, of course, I'm being a little facetious there.

The other part of this equation, by the way, is that interest rates have spiked quite a bit. So interest rates for, as anyone out there who knows, if you've tried to buy a house or borrow for a car or whatever else, you could get crazy, crazy low deals, crazy low interest rates. The mortgage rates for houses, like, was sub 3% in 2021, and that has totally jumped up. Now it's like 7, 8%. And so that means it's no longer easy to go out and borrow a bunch of cash, which is what a lot of big companies do when they're making big expenditures. And so money is no longer cheap to borrow.

And that also plays a major role in how many investments a company can make. VCs are no longer investing in game companies at quite the same rate as they were. A couple years ago, if you just had a PowerPoint presentation that said Web 3 on it, you could get investors to hand you $400 million. that is not happening anymore. So yeah, a lot of those are the kind of macro factors. And then if you look at each individual company, that's a different question because like those all have their own reasons for for making their slashes.

Yeah. That's part of why it was so surprising to me to see the Blizzard response or the Activision Blizzard situation because I do understand. I mean, I'm not saying I like it, but I did understand the logic behind, say, Tim Sweeney's statement about Fortnite a few months back when he was basically like, we made a bunch of money, we spent it, it's gone, now we need to cut back. And I have my own non-executive brain judgments about that. Like, hey, maybe when you're making a lot of money, you save some of it, but what do I know? I'm just a layperson with a bank account. But the

Microsoft version of that is fascinating and a little scary to me because some of those cuts, or several of those cuts are people who I wouldn't consider redundancies. Like, there are cuts of people that have worked on successful games or been very talented or worked at Blizzard for a really long time. Yeah. So the survival game at Blizzard that had been going on for a while, or had been in development for a while, had a lot of people on it who had been at Blizzard for many years and had worked on other projects and were pretty good at their jobs, at least as far as I've heard.

And so kind of looking at it from that really zoomed out perspective, you might think if you're, if you're an executive coming in, okay, this survival game for whatever reason, it's not going to go well, we're going to cancel this game. But the reaction there doesn't have to be to lay all those people off. It could be to look at those individual people and be like, well, could some of these talented folks work on other projects or be reabsorbed into other areas of Blizzard, which is kind of historically what Blizzard used to do with, projects. Like, you just get shuffled around if something got canceled. And we talked about that on our Overwatch episode, how Overwatch kind of came out of a project that didn't pan out and then became Overwatch. And to just lay people off who aren't redundant and are instead actually experienced developers just working on a project that itself could maybe get canceled, that's very weird and alarming to me and is very different from, say, we balloon too much during the pandemic and now we

just need to cut back. Do you know what I mean? Like that's a piece of it that really wards me out and I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, it seems clear to me that Microsoft once they had Activision Blizzard under their umbrella and could go over all the spreadsheets and P&Ls and all the other businessy stuff, they weren't happy with something they saw because like I said before, I mean, you expect a certain level of layoffs after any sort of giant corporate acquisition, but this went well beyond that. And so like the Odyssey team, like you mentioned, that's the name of the survival game, was cut. That's like around 100 people, I believe it was. They didn't cut everybody, but they cut the majority of that team, including,

to your point, some people who had been there for 20 plus years, really like experienced Blizzard people. They also made deep cuts into the Overwatch team and the Diablo team. At Activision as well, They cut some crazy number of people at Sledgehammer games. They cut some big chunks of other Call-Duty Studios too. So this to me suggests that they look at the numbers and they said, hey, like these, we're not happy with what we're seeing here. We're not happy with the amount we're spending on people at these companies. And who knows what was going on behind the scenes. We'd love to chat with Philly S and hear more about what they were thinking.

But yeah, it's ugly because. you would think that they bought this thing knowing exactly what they were buying and not that they weren't coming into just like cut costs and slash things and burn things. But that's what they did. Yeah. It also makes me wonder, and I don't know if we can answer this, do layoffs actually help companies? I mean, I guess there's no one size fits all answer to that. But I guess when we as lay people outside of, at least outside of the games industry, kind of look at them, we might think, okay, you're going to trim the fat, you know, all this executive language, you're going to cut out the people that you just can't afford right now, but you're going to rehire them later, like marketing people when you aren't currently marketing a new game and you're just heads down on the beginnings of a project, for example. That's kind of a classic cut or QA people who are so often disrespected, and we talk about that a lot on our show. But that, even though I don't, I'm not in favor of it, it makes sense to me. It's just interesting to see that contrast. with kind of a stereotypical Microsoft mentality of shipping games, getting games out the door, and that being prized above kind of maintaining long-term talent, which for better, for worse, Blizzard also does. And you could even argue that's been an issue for them, what with, say, the lawsuit and harassment allegations that they've faced. They held on to a lot of senior people there for a very long time. And you could argue that that's where the, the, the,

kind of culture rot comes in if you just hold on to people for a long time and you don't investigate that. But we also talk on this show a lot about how maintaining those teams and keeping them intact can preserve talent and idea creation and inspiration across those teams in a way that is just inspiring and cool and like a reason to try to keep teams together even if the project fails. So I guess I'm There's a lot of ideas, but I have so many feelings heading into this episode about just layoffs and all these stories I've been reading about them and whether or not I think they really work and what they do to these companies in the aftermath of it. So I think there's a question to ask here about success or maybe about growth, one of those two terms, but I think let's focus on success since we were talking about the pandemic and how video game companies in the games industry at large had a great deal of success. And then that led to this over expansion, or at least what these companies are now saying, is an overinflation of their personnel and their budget that they now need to correct for. So it led to them growing too much and now they're shrinking back down to the size they should be at.

And in the process, of course, causing a lot of harm and disruption and unnecessary turmoil. So I guess my question is, is success the worst thing that can happen to a company? like great outsized success. Is it actually bad if you succeed too much? Wow. Maybe. I can elaborate on that a little bit, but I just wanted to throw that out there first

and see what just that question prompted in the tour of you. Yeah. I would say it's not success that's bad. It's just kind of you have to know what you want with the company and you have to kind of, from the beginning. I had a fun, I had an interesting conversation with someone who pointed out something that I thought was genius,

which is he told me anyone who ever starts a company with their friends or whatever, should get together with their partners and coworkers and say, hey, no matter what happens, we will not grow past X number of people. And like, this is our cap. I think that's a really great story that kind of illustrates, at least where I feel like

the answer to this lies, which is that second word, growth, because success doesn't have to be bad. It's all in how you define success and what you do with it. And growth as a goal winds up being... That sentence, Kirk, success doesn't. doesn't have to be bad as if like, yeah, we're all assuming that success is bad. Well, I mean, success does not have to lead to a bad outcome. Let me be more specific. Because it depends

on how you define success and then what you do with your success. And by success here, I mean financial success, I suppose. And I guess it comes down to growth then, because growth is, if growth is your goal, you just seem to run into trouble very quickly. And that conversation is so important for people to have. And it just seems as though not only is that conversation not happening. in especially companies of this size, these massive, like 10,000-plus people corporations, no one's having that conversation because it goes without saying that the goal is to just grow like a cancer across the world forever.

And that seems to me to be a pretty ruinous goal when you look at the actual effects of it, where, I don't know, I am a small business owner. I own a podcast that I make called Strong Songs, and it's just me, and I don't want it to grow. And I had a very serious conversation with myself about the level of growth that I want to achieve. Not with chaty BT or? No, not with chat chagipt, just me. And it was, I think that's like a really important thing to consider whether you're just one person making a podcast or your four people making an indie game or you're a team of 20 or your team of 100 or whatever size you are. Because so often these stories wind up being the same where a company starts small.

They make something that's really successful. they get bigger, they make something that's even more successful. And then at some point, they have some level of success that's so big that it destroys everything and winds up just leading to catastrophe. And I feel like we've seen it repeat so many times that it would be nice to get the sense that more people were looking at those stories and then drawing lessons from them and acting differently with their own projects and their own future endeavors. Well, so part of the problem here is that,

A lot of these companies, especially the ones that have done layoffs over the last 12 months, are companies that didn't just make successful products and release them and made a bunch of money and then, like, grew to make the next one. There are companies that made successful products, made a bunch of money, and then had to expand the teams that were working on those products because those products were actually live service games that need to be perpetually growing and releasing content. And because of that, kind of the nature of that model, the teams have to be growing. And the games have to be growing, right?

So, like, look at Bungy, for example. They made this game, Destiny, let's jump ahead to Destiny 2. Destiny 2 was a success by their standards. Maybe not a success by Activision standards. But for Bungy, Bungy saw a game, they could continue updating and keep sustainable for many years to come. In order to release the amount of content that players expect when they're playing a game like that and continually buying expansions and season passes and all that other stuff, Bungy needs to expand. And now there's some, like more than a thousand people there, a large chunk of them working on Destiny.

And that means that the game has to keep growing and sustaining its player base in order to keep up with that the number of people who are working on it. Like they have to pay all those salaries. And so if the game at any point hits a plateau or like an expansion isn't received by players quite the way that Bunchy had hoped, which is exactly what happened last year, then layoffs are inevitable because the company is like, hey, we can't actually afford to keep these people working on this game. So really, I think that it's a live service model that has become such a humongous issue here. The problem, the other problem, or kind of the parallel problem is that the non-live service world, the world of like, hey, I'm going to go make a game and then go sell. it and then go make another game, that is also completely just like shot because the quality bar has gotten so high, the kind of graphical fidelity bar has gotten so high, that we've reached a point where essentially if you're going to make a new game in the AAA world,

you need hundreds of people squirled away for five, six years to go and make it happen. And that is also not sustainable by modern day economics. So really you're just kind of- Because you can't afford for it to be a dud. I mean, we've seen that. Exactly. The risk is so high. Yeah. It has to sell like 15, 20 million copies to break even, right? So we're talking about damned if you do, damned if you don't. Like, it's just a lose, loose scenario in this industry unless you are like a PAL world or like the very, very top of the heat. We'll check in on Powell World at some point in a few months from now and see how they're doing. And that's kind of a freak occurrence too, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's hard to build your strategy around that. That's what I mean, Kirk. Like a freak of current. Well, but also I think Powell World might be a great example of a preview of what Kirk was saying. success can be a curse. Like, they're way more successful than they ever thought they would be. And I don't, I mean, we'll see what happens to them. But. Well, I just meant that power in the sense of like, you have to be a viral smash hit in order to succeed in this world. And it kind of feels like, I was listening to, I believe it's hard fork, the New York Times podcast. They're talking about the media world. And I kind of alluded to this earlier. The media world has gotten, has been hit by this. There was an analysis. I think it was actually Ezra Klein who made this analysis. The barbell. The barbell. You guys. heard it. Right? So it's like the how you have this barbell curve where like the really small creators are doing well and then the really the monolith big companies like the New York Times

are doing well. In the middle it's all getting hollowed out. It's all just getting completely slashed and burn. And I think the video game industry is really the double A games. Yeah, yeah. We're seeing a, we've seen a similar trend. Although now we're also seeing the big, big Titans like suffer as a result of some of these instances. And that's because they're releasing games, even though they're companies are releasing games that land in the middle and aren't the massive hits or on either side of the spectrum, the massive indie hits or the massive AAA game hits. And so like you look at NPD charts for like the top 20 games of the year. If you're not at the tippy top of that chart or God forbid you haven't charted it at all and you're a big budget game company, you are probably

starting to make your plans for layoffs before the quarter ends. So to go back to the idea of service games, since I do think that distinction between service games and sort of single-player or standard AAA games is important, and they both are challenging in different ways. Looking at service games, it occurs to me that a big problem is that so many of them are free, as opposed to a subscription. And that, I think, like, that's a big difference between World of Warcraft and Destiny, right? The World of Warcraft are Final Fantasy 14. Those games were able to sell a subscription.

And if you're selling a subscription, you can just theoretically. anyways, have a sustainable amount of money coming in to pay for the staff required to keep the game going and then you just keep the game going as long as people are willing to pay to play for it. And for a little while that was kind of the norm and it didn't

ensure the fact that you had to be constantly growing, developing new systems, new game modes, new characters, new maps and have all of these people developing it. You could just have enough people to do player support and community and keep the servers going and pay for the servers. And then

you're just getting a subscription. And that's like kind of like what we do. Obviously we're not selling a subscription to triple click, but it's the same idea where we just have an amount of revenue. It fluctuates, but it's pretty consistent and we can plan around it. And then we just like built our company according to

that revenue to work. And you could theoretically do that. It's just that because the whole thing shifted to free to play or even just to games that you only buy once, the whole model kind of changes as a result of that, which is something I think a lot people actually don't always think about, is that that shift to free really changed the internal

dynamics of what it required to make a service game and turn it into something that had to be growth focused. And now we're in this world where like every service game has to just grow and grow and grow into this impossible thing that then, of course, eventually falls apart because it just can't grow forever. And then everyone loses their job and the game collapses and it's a whole tragic story. Yeah, that's a really cognizant point. And I think that like there are all sorts of metrics out there showing that like if you have a service game and you have um some number of players you'll pretty much always have x% of those players who are willing to spend stuff and that all kind of based on your monetization and your strategies and like how you're monetizing and what you're

selling and yada yada yada that could change here and there but like at the end of the day the amount of money you're making is directly tied into the number of players that you have and so that metric is so key for these companies that like again looking at destiny too because I I've heard a little bit about when it went into that. They made those layoffs and told staff when they were doing the layoffs, they missed their projected revenue targets by something like a whopping 45%. Like that, that's how far off base they were. And one of the major reasons for that was that the most recent expansion for Destiny 2,

I believe it was beyond light, players did not like it. And they just tapered off. And so it wasn't so much about like, hey, players are coming, but they're not spending money anymore. It was just straight up. We have lost so much. of our player base that we are not hitting our targets. And I think that is a really just kind of existential threat with a lot of these games. And so many times I've heard stories. Overwatch 2 is a good example of like a game that totally spiked and had a massive player like a launch, a launch

with a massive number of players. And then they totally, it totally plummets. And then the game just cannot sustain itself long term. You know, it's really interesting too, because I think back to Destiny 1 and how people love that game. And I wonder about if they did something like World of Warcraft Classic, like where they re-released Destiny 1 and you could just go chase Fatebringer again and all the drops and all of the weird warts were back and Peter Dinklidge was back in it. Oh my God. That's such a good idea.

The dink back. You could kind of see if they just made something like that. I could see a lot of people wanting to go and play that. That's how Wow Classic works basically. It's just on nostalgia. Yeah. That'd be so good. Yeah.

Well, and people want to play it. Like, it was a fun game. Like, and so it's, I think that is like, that almost underlines what we're talking about here, where growth, again, adding new features, changing things. It also leads to player dissatisfaction. I mean, so much of the story of destiny was the story of them changing the game and people being like, why did you change it? Like, why did you nerf this gun that was super fun to use? Why did you need to add this stupid feature or take out this other thing that was cool? We were having a good time.

And I honestly think it's all tied to that the fact that they needed to sell expansions. They needed to sell eventually micro-transactions and season passes because they weren't getting subscription revenue from the game. And like I really do wonder

if you could just totally rethink the way that you make a service game and just make something that as long as you play it, you pay a little bit each month and that allows them to just keep making it and then they just don't really change it drastically.

Maybe they release another one later or something. I don't know. It feels really radical to even imagine it, and it's hard for me to get my head around it, but it might be a better way. Here's my counterpoint rock band. So this isn't on our list for today, but I keep thinking about it as we talk about this, especially with Kirk's message about success and how it can be a bad thing. And I'm not just bringing this up because they've been acquired by Fortnite and rock band is over now. And the only way you can play rock band is in Fortnite. That is a cautionary tale, though.

But my memory of rock band was that it was kind of fad base. Like it was a phenomenon in the way that a lot of games we love are. Like I get what you're saying, Kirk, about how during certain periods of time, and Destiny 1 and Destiny 2, people would be like, this is fun. Don't change it. But people do get sick of things, no matter how fun they are. And it'll only last so long. I guess. So rock band is an interesting example because harmonics really went a little too far.

Like part of it was like the plastic instrument aspect of rock band, I think makes it unique. And they leaned so far into that that by Rock Band 3, there were really elaborate instruments. and these crazy guitars that you can plug an actual Squire. And it got pretty far in the weeds of actual music and pretty far away from the initial appeal of rock band. But then again, I look at something like Rock Smith, Ubisoft series, which they're still releasing. And that game actually, I don't know if it has a subscription model,

but it might. But it's more of a service, like a just learn guitar service that you sign up for, where there's a lot of songs and lessons and ways that you can learn. I haven't used it so I shouldn't, like I should say that I haven't used it and I don't know all of the particulars about it. But that does strike me actually as a much more long-lasting and sustainable way of doing something like rock band. And I could have imagined a game like rock band.

The plastic instruments, again, are kind of an X factor. But something without that, like a karaoke game or something, that just was the one thing and that you pay a subscription fee for it if you want to have karaoke parties. And then you just do it. And it kind of is around forever. Like, I could have imagined it. That's kind of how Just Dance works incidentally. Like there's one every couple years and I have a copy of it.

I don't even remember which year is on it and the music is subscription based. Like on top of buying the game, all the good tracks you have to pay additional money for, which I don't mind doing because it's a fun party game and they just keep on updating it and it'll probably just keep quietly being successful for the rest of our natural lives. At least it is as far as we know. But there's a difference between that and the harmonic story that I remember, which was rock band being so successful that harmonics was capable of expanding and then not really having another thing to do after that, you know?

Like not having another game or another project beyond rock band to invest in that made sense to do next. And that gets into that executive brain thing that we were talking about earlier, where the belief is that if you made a bunch of money, you then have to grow your business and expand in new projects, which like, do you? Do you have to do that? I don't know. You could just say, we want to have this many people. We want to put out regular content packs and we want to pay them forever.

And then they can kind of do whatever they want. We'll just see what happens. And we're not going to hire a bunch more people. Well, I don't know. I don't think that's super fair. If you come out and you make rock band and it's a hit and you have to keep those people working on it to keep updating it and adding new songs and stuff, you're like, great. But I didn't start a company just to make one game.

I want to start a new team also. So I have to hire people for R&N. and to like start thinking of something else. Well, that's the question, right? Like, that's the premise, I guess, that I'm kind of questioning is, did you, does everybody start a company to make a whole bunch of games to make like many, many projects to expand to become a kind of creative empire? I mean, I think if you're creative-minded, like, you want to do multiple things.

Like, it's not when you're selling products and you're just making one product and you're, you sell it and then you are like done with it. I mean, you get sick of working on the same thing for, amount of time. And if you're a creative-minded person, you probably want to be working on other products, too. Like, you don't want to just settle for one hit. You don't want to be a one-hit wonder. Like, I don't know. If you're a band, you're not going to go out and make one album and be like, all right, we're done. Our creative energy is gone now. Right. It's a tension, I guess, that lies in any creative endeavor. But at the same time, if you're starting a band, you want to get to

the point where you can tour, make records, and feel pretty settled. But then again, so many people and so many bands are always living in that tension of, well, all right, well, we have to do this tour, we have to finish this one thing, but then I'm really just going to be able to, like, sit in my cabin and focus on the music, man, because I've lost sight of the music. It's no longer about that for me. So even bands grow beyond the ability to do the thing that they want to do, like that made them happy that brought them fulfillment in the first place. And I do get the sense that a lot of these game studios grow beyond the joyful creativity that was the spark. at the beginning. Maybe the answer is that more people just need to end things, like just

end their companies and start new ones. I mean, yeah, maybe that's the answer. I don't know. So we've talked a bunch about the business. Before we take a break, I want to get into a little bit about the human side of all of this. I've seen a lot of people talking about how the climate has gotten so bad and like we're in this like unprecedented and awful time for the industry. I don't really know if that's true. I mean, the numbers seem higher than they have been in the past, but I've been covering this industry for a long time, and it's always been this unstable. And in fact, it was even more unstable before I started covering it. I wrote a book about this called Press Reset. It's all about the volatility that happened way before this current surge

of pandemic fueled growth and whatnot. But the one thing that keeps, I keep thinking about, is that so many of these companies, including Riot and Blizzard, that just held mass layoffs, had previously asked all of their staff to return to the office. And in press reset, I wrote about how, like, there's no real solution for video game industry volatility. Like, the games industry will always be a hit-driven business where, like, if you make a flop, your company's in trouble. There's no such thing as stability in any sort of creative industry, because that's just the nature of it. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. But there are ways you can mitigate that.

And I wrote in the book about a bunch of different potential solutions. I wrote about organization. I wrote about kind of different outsourcing models, and I wrote about remote work. When I was finishing that book, the pandemic had just started, and it was kind of this perfect test case for like, hey, can people make things remotely? And over the past three years or four years,

we've discovered that, yes, people can make things remotely. Some companies have certainly found with their own internal data that there's like a productivity hit of X percent when people are working remotely and that it's better for creativity in the business when people get together. And maybe that's true. Let's assume it is. I think studies are pretty inconclusive on that. But let's assume that's true for a second.

We no longer live in a world where people have to relocate for jobs, and there's no longer makes sense for that because there's no promise that your relocation will lead to stability for even the next year, let it on the next five years. So why would anybody, like, relocate for a job in this day? And why would any company ask that? It is such a, like, it is so dilatory, delete. It is so harmful for a

it is so it is the negative repercussions of asking people to relocate only to then hold mass layoffs are so long term damaging to these companies that it just doesn't seem worth whatever productivity boosts you're going to ask for. And we live in the world now in 2024 where just like on top of that like not having remote work will cost you talent will lead to attrition, will prevent senior engineers from coming to your company.

It's just like so myopic and short-stated. To give a concrete example, Odyssey, right, the survival game that you were talking about earlier, Maddie. As I reported on Bloomberg, the main reason that that game was struggled was because of their technology. They used a proprietary game engine to make the game, and that led to, it created a very slow process. And one of the things I've heard over the course of talking to people who worked on that project is that they had either lost some engineers or had trouble hiring engineers. And that one of the reasons for that, in addition to Blizzard, just being in the news for all the wrong reasons, is that they were asking people to return to the office. So you are actually costing yourself talent when you do this sort of thing,

when you don't allow people to work remotely. So God, it just, it's insanity to me that companies aren't allowing for this in 2024. And I hope that if any, if companies take away anything from all these layoffs, it's not like, you cannot ethically, you cannot, uh, it's just, it's immoral and it's bad business to force people to relocate for jobs in this day and age. Yeah. I totally agree. Neither of us are going to fight you on that. This is a podcast we record from three different major cities. That's true. We can do this. We're in favor of remote work here at triple click. Uh, no arguments. Yeah. I mean, you say companies should learn a lesson. from this, Jason, but I feel like they're not. That's the other thing about reading about

this news that is making me feel like I'm in a separate reality from these companies. And it's hard to even fathom what they're thinking to just be like, wow, you have access to all the talent all over the world. I work with people across time zones. It can absolutely be done in a creative field. It's possible. Like, there's so many programs that we have now in the modern day of age that make it possible. and even easy to do. And the response is, no, you need to come into the office. And also you need to create a hit game or else we're going to fire you tomorrow,

but also take creative risks and constantly keep innovating and being surprising and creative at all times. It's just, it's, it's, it's completely contradictory and maddening. Then then add on the infinite growth directive to that. And it's like, well, okay, what if we get every single. person in the world playing Fortnite. What then? We can't grow anymore.

Like, there's a finite number of number. We have seven billion users. What are we going to do now? Yeah, it's wild. It does feel like it would be nice to see more people in positions of authority questioning more fundamental assumptions about what any of this is supposed to be about or how it's supposed to work. That's kind of how I feel from the outside anyways.

Well, but the problem, Kirk, is that you don't get into a position of authority by taking risks. you do it by being as risk-averse as possible. It does seem as though the system reinforces itself. That's true. It really does. It does. I mean, risk aversion is how so many of these executives keep kind of failing their way ups or landing in cozy positions.

And, yeah, it's unfortunate. But, I mean, yeah, I hope that that's at least one takeaway from this because the layoffs are not going to stop. The volatility is not going to change, but the way that we work certainly can. And I wonder, too, if this is going to result in like a double A indie boom. I don't know how that would work because there's no investment pouring into video games right now. But with all these people being laid off, I'm just like, surely they can all get together and create a series of companies that would be more successful and maybe take Kirk's advice of really thinking about growth and success and what it means for them in a double A world or a single A world and not be beholden to these absurd direct. that don't even match with reality.

That certainly sounds nice. Yeah, you never know. Yeah, I don't know. You kind of answered your own question there. There isn't a lot of money footing around like a couple years ago. If you were like ex-Ryat or X Blizzard, you could go start a company and get like immediate seed money from a venture capital firm. I mean, some people have done that. Like the Marvel Snap developer.

Like there's certainly examples of people have left Blizzard and Riot and other big companies and created little AA studios. But yeah, I guess in 2024, that's not a. easy to do. I do appreciate your attempt to end this on an optimistic note. I'm trying. Well, we can't just end it by talking about unions again. We do that all the time. I was trying to mix it up a little bit. Universal basic income and unions. They're both great. Hey, let's make those two things happen. I think they should all just start podcasts. All right. Let's take a break and we'll be back with one more thing. The Eurovision song contest. Hundreds of millions of people watch it every year. I played a part in a Democratic Revolution in Portugal.

It introduced the world to Riverdance, and it launched Celine Dion's career. But you might have never watched it. It's got so much history and so many storylines that it can feel overwhelming to get into. It's like a real housewife season, but everyone's a better singer. Well, sometimes. But that's where we come in. I'm Dimitri Pompei. I'm Oscar Montoya.

And I'm Jeremy Bent, and we're the hosts of Eurovangelists. If you're new to Eurovision, we'll tell you everything you need to know to start enjoying the world's most important song competition. And if you're already a fan, we'll dive deep on its wildest moments. like when Ireland sends a turkey puppet to sing for them. You're evangelist. New episodes every Thursday. On Maximumfund.org or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Jordan Cruciola, host of Feeling Seed,

where we start by asking our guests just one question. What movie character made you feel seen? I knew exactly what it was. Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Joy Wang slash Jabutupu Tupaki. That one question launches amazing conversations about their lives, the movies they love and about the past, present, and future of entertainment. Roy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I worry about what this might say about me, but I've brought Tracy Flick in the film election. So if you like movies, diverse perspectives, and great conversations, check us out. Oof, this is real. New episodes of feeling scene drop every week on maximum fun.org. Kirk, Maddie, we are back. It is time for one more thing. Maddie, start us off. Sure.

So, Dina and I've been watching True Detective, but we're not watching the new season because we never watched all of True Detective to begin with. So we have recently completed True Detective season one, had a great time. But holy moly, what a 2014 television show that is. I had a really tough time watching it the first time around in part just because I was pretty depressed. in 2014 and you got to get on board with Rust Cole's depressed man energy on that show. It really is just, McConaughey just saying depressive existential monologues every other scene. While Woody Harrelson encounters it with, please stop saying odd shit, which remains iconic. You're really bothering me, please stop.

Yeah, like, I mean, their dynamic is wonderful and it's why people like True Detective season one, but I just didn't have the stomach for it in 2014. I'm very glad I finally got through it, though, because now I understand way more memes than I did before, and that's the main reason to watch any famous television show. But also, I'll check back in about this later when I finished it, but we started True Detective Season 2, which we were nervous about because I remembered the reviews

for it at the time being pretty bad. But actually, I really like it so far. We're only three or four episodes in, I think four. And I really dig it. It is very different from season one, but I also think that going back in time and just watching something kind of divorced from the media analysis of its time period and the expectations that people had after True Detective season one and just watching it on its own merits has been really interesting and different. And I simply love a good murder mystery. And that's what every season of True Detective is. So I'm really glad to find. finally be watching a famous television show that I didn't watch at the time and to eventually catch up to season four, which is the hit new thing everybody's talking about. And I've avoided spoilers so far. So yeah, those are my thoughts. True Detective, pretty good TV show. If you're out there and you haven't ever watched it, just be aware it's really 2014. It's got some cringy stuff,

but overall a good, a good mystery. And we liked it a lot. I never watched it. I'm out there. And I never watched it. Oh, you've never seen it, Jason? No. Wow. Well? I will just say that I'm currently watching season four, and I will reserve judgment

and probably make it one more thing when the season is over. But three episodes in, it's got the juice. The first three episodes are very, very strong, so I'm really liking it so far. You said they're kind of reminiscent of mayor in Easttown, right? Which is a fantastic show. Which we all three like.

Yes, it feels as though it has taken some notes from Mayor of Easttown. Though, of course, it also very much feels like True Detective Season 1. different showrunner, very different vibes. Jody Foster starring set in a night, night locked northern Alaska and really, really strong vibes on the show so far. Cool. My one more thing is a book.

I do not remember, Kirk, if you either recommended this to me or if this is your one more thing at some point, or maybe not, maybe I'm misremembering. I'm reading a book called... No, I know the book, but I haven't read it. I'm reading a book called Cultish by Amanda Montel. I feel like someone recommended... It wasn't me either.

Well, it's a cool book. It's really interesting. So Aminamantel is a linguist, and this book is about the way that language is used to kind of get people, to some extent to join cults, but also to just kind of follow them along. And this book is super fascinating because it dives into not just actual cults, like, for example, the Jonestown and the infamous massacre that occurred 40 years ago, but also kind of like what she describes as cultish kind of thing. like, for example, CrossFit, or, like, it made me think of video game companies. And she talks about... Multi-level marketing. Yeah, multi-yes, exactly. Perfect example. And she talks about the kind of the ways that, like, not only do these cultish organizations develop a shared language, so it feels like you have your inside jokes with people

and you're part of the same tribe, but also the way that, like, leaders of these cults kind of use specific types of language, whether it's love bomb, or kind of other kind of using, I don't know, using language to make you feel like isolated from other people around you. And like you can only find kind of your tribe by going to them and all sorts of other kind of linguistic tricks that she dives into that are super fascinating and really interesting to read about. The book is, it does a couple of kind of structural things that annoy me.

There's a lot of references that are like, we'll cover this in part five and part six, which really bugs me. I wish that the book would just stick to what it, to the part that it's on. But aside from that, I'm really enjoying it. It's really just a great read. I'm almost done with it. And if you're curious to know why, I don't know, why that commercial for whatever sounds so culty to you, so cultish to you, this book is very illuminating in terms of that. And it also explores a lot of really interesting topics. It just gives you kind of history based on those topics. And so the book, it's part memoir,

part reporting, part kind of cultural, sociological deep dive based on historical research. So the author has her own connections to cults or cultish organizations, including a personal experience about how she and a friend, like when she was 18 or something, wound up doing a Scientology interview and like going in there and like had that kind of creepy experience. She also talks to like survivors of various cults and people who are parts of them. them in various capacities. And she does her own kind of historical research on a lot of these kind of organizations and what they did and what they looked like. So if you're very curious about cults, which I know many, many people are. Yes, cults are fascinating. And just tribes in general

are interesting if you're a human in trying to exist in the world. Any non-humans listening won't be able to relate to this. No, they won't. They won't get it. Any rumbas out there. Get back to work. Rumbas, yeah, get back. AIs. Get back to the. the content minds and get back to taking our jobs. So yeah, it's cool. It's, again, cultish by Amanda Mantel, and I am really enjoying it. All right.

Kirk, finish us off. My one more thing is an anime adaptation that Emily and I watched on Netflix that then got me thinking about these sorts of adaptations in general. So we really randomly watched the One Piece adaptation. The Netflix recently did the live action adaptation

of the anime, which is itself an adaptation of a manga. And it's pretty fun. It's pretty weird. I didn't know what One Piece was at all. And I feel like I had just seen articles somewhere saying that this adaptation was good. And it was a real algorithm brain Netflix moment where we had watched, I think, an episode of the F1 show. And we're like, I don't know. What do we want to watch?

And it was just right there. And I was like, this thing with the smiling man in the straw hat. Let's see what it is. So it turns out One Piece is about pirates, which I didn't. No. And the One Piece is itself, a pirate treasure that everyone's looking for. In a pretty cool world, a very interesting, like sea planet, basically, with just oceans. It's like four different oceans, the East Blue and the West Blue, divided by the Grand Line and the Red Line.

And it's all very evocative language. Windwaker World Building, a little bit. It's like a pirate world where everyone's a pirate. By far the best thing to recommend this show is an actor named Inaki Godoy, who is a Mexican actor who plays the lead and is absolutely incredible. I don't know what Monkey D. Luffy, who is the main character, is like in the anime in the book. I'm guessing he's like this. He's this like irrepressible, enthusiastic, good-hearted kid. He's very young and he has this stretchy magical ability to stretch his body. And he wants to be a pirate even though he is really nice and wants to help people

and like isn't really very pirate-like. And he wears the straw hat. And he's always just so winsome and smiling and looking off into the horizon. And this actor is... Guy brush energy, basically. I was going to say, yeah, very guy brush. You know, he's like guy brush, but he's even more positive. Like, he's so... There are really, like, touching moments in this show, all due to this actor's performance.

He is really, really wonderful. It's always fun to watch him. And then it kind of, it's very strange. I mean, it looks like... It kind of looks like that movie hook. Like, everyone has anime hair, but they're real people. But then a lot of it has that kind of... soft focus. I just have to say like Netflix

CGI look where it all looks fake. And so and the camera a lot of time is doing that thing where it's a wide angle lens zoomed in. So everything is kind of distorted in a circle around people. And it has a kind of sickly sweet energy at times. I don't know. It's hard to describe. The aesthetics are strange. It has a kick-ass theme song every time the like theme music fires up. The one piece. Do you recommend it? Is this something like would you tell people to watch it? I guess. So the reason I really wanted to

bring it up is because it was plenty fun enough, but there were certainly better things I could have been watching. But it's interesting as an adaptation because I think it serves an actual function because one piece of anime, I believe, has more than 1,000 episodes, and the manga has been running forever, for 500

years. It's just existed forever. And it's kind of impenetrable or at least very intimidating. The idea of starting a really, like, a cult-followed anime with a thousand episodes, to me at least is I'm like, you know what, No, like I'm not going to do that.

There are a lot of anime out there like that that I know are really good, and I'm like, I don't need to watch this. So I think that this adaptation at least serves the function of, I can now say sort of that I know what one piece is. Like I kind of, I get the vibe. I know what it's about. I don't know if I, like, need season two or I'm obsessed or nothing like that. I just, I thought it was fine.

It was fun. But I've been thinking about it in the context of the upcoming Avatar Live Action Adaptation, Avatar The Last Air Vender, that I keep seeing trailers for it. and I keep feeling the same hesitation, and it's the same hesitation I felt with the Cowboy Bebop live action adaptation, where with those, I think that there's no good reason that those exist.

And if people say the Avatar adaptation is good, I'll watch it. I should say for anyone who doesn't do this, like I love Avatar The Last Airbender, our dog is named Appa. It's like one of my favorite shows. I think it's so great. But the thing is, the Avatar of the Last Airbender, it still exists.

You can just go watch it on Netflix. It's three seasons long. It's super good. It's still really good. You can just go watch it. And the same thing goes with Cowboy Bebop. It's like two seasons. It's not that many episodes.

They're all killer. And then it ends. And then you've watched it. So why do they need to make those adaptations? So I've been thinking a lot about that distinction, I guess. Same is true for these Disney live action adaptations. We're like, The Lion King is the Lion King, man. Why do you need to go watch photorealistic-looking animals doing the Lion King again?

Why do we need these live? I mean, obviously, they want to make money off of them. But I don't know. Like, I'm looking at Netflix just constantly doing this. I was looking at a list of anime adaptations that they've done. They've done so many. Like, you know, all these shows, Death Note. Full Metal Alchemist, they did three movies of that.

Even though, like, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood exists and is really good, and you can just watch it. There's actually two different animas of Full Metal Alchemy. We're right. And apparently there is one that's kind of not as approachable. And then Brotherhood sort of re-does it and makes it more approachable. That's the one that I watched. I mean, we could debate that. but I'm not going to derail you.

I'm not sure about that either because I've only seen Brotherhood. I know way too much about it. I feel like that's the worthy distinction. Does this adaptation actually provide a service or is it just a second version of a thing that you could just go watch the original and the original is better?

Are these like strict recreations, like faithful recreations of the source material? I think they're adaptations. I'm sure they change stuff and modernized stuff and, you know, they make tweaks. I think that's a good question though. Because when I kind of think of the Lion King musical, for example, the Broadway musical, it's pretty different from the Lion King.

It really changes a lot of things. The look is totally different. I wouldn't argue that adaptation shouldn't exist. Whereas the live action, Lion King, didn't really add anything. That's a good point. That is a good point. Well, the reason I ask this is because the game I cannot wait to get my hands on is a remake, an adaptation, if you will, of a game from many years ago.

I feel like that's different. Definitely different, yeah. The big difference is that it's not a faithful. recreation and so I can't wait to see what they're going to do. That's like the HBO Watchmen series, which was not an adaptation. It was actually kind of a sequel and like reimagining it. That's a good parallel there. Yes. Yeah. That's a whole different story. Those can be very, very cool. I mean, if they made a Cowby Bebop show that really built on, I mean, we don't need to talk about Cowby Bebop. Kirk. They could have been cool, sure.

We could just go on and on about this. Well, they should all just be super remake pluses, supertero remake pluses. I guess, yeah, we made a whole taxonomy. me for this. And yes, that's true. Super Turbo remake plus is the way to go in general. Yes. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Super Turbo remake plus. I think we are. All right. Who wouldn't be? That's why we can't wait for Final Fantasy 7, Rebirth. Can't wait for it. On that note, Kirk Maddie, I will see you both next time. Yeah, see you next time. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show

and also wrote our theme music, our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member

of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.