“Heartbreaking news today as Something Wicked Games had to lay off most of their staff. As someone who has been in the industry for nearly 25 years, I understand the challenges of finding a new position during these tough times. I specialize in human and creature locomotion and Mocap, with some key framing experience as well, and animation team leadership. If anyone has any leads or opportunities, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you all for your support.”
NuScale had a nuclear power plant project in the US that got clobbered too, when interest rates shot up. Nuclear power plants require capital up front and pay out over a very long term period of time, so interest rates play a big role in what their return is.
I suspect that you could look at any field that requires a lot of up-front capital and a return that only shows up years later and be seeing stuff like this. Game development is just something that this community happens to (unsurprisingly) pay attention to.
Also, I don’t know how much of a factor this is, but for games, I’ve seen consumer spending listed as being a factor. During COVID-19 lockdowns, a lot of people stayed inside and alone. Gaming spending went way up. That ended, spending dropped.
I’ve also seen inflation listed; inflation has put pressure on consumer spending and games are an easy luxury to reduce spending on.
It’s not inflation - it’s price gouging by corporations. Wages aren’t going up nearly as quickly as corporate profits.
It’s definitely inflation. Normally, we see around 2% annual inflation.
Here’s what it’s done recently in the US:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm
It’s not as bad as it was in 2022 and early 2023, but it’s still high relative to the norm.
That’s not necessarily bad; it was in significant part driven by the Federal Reserve holding rates down during COVID-19. If that hadn’t happened, there might have been a recession, lot of people losing jobs back then.
And then 5 trillion more were dumped in by congress. Half during the Trump admin and almost that much under Biden’s