The Games Industry is in Serious Trouble

[A Black Falcon]

To briefly touch on what Microsoft's final decision was, it's to fire ~1600 people now and about as many more over the course of the year and spin off four or five studios, while not closing any.  "Not closing any" may sound good at first, but once you get to details like how a quarter of Obsidian's staff were fired or how id was gutted and lost at least half of their staff, you see serious cutbacks.  It's a very disappointing decision to say the least.

But don't worry!  For the studios not closed, the new, inexperienced, lower-paid staff they will hire in a year or two when teams expand again surely will do just as well as the experienced people they are firing now, right?  That's definitely how that works. :S


Meanwhile, Nintendo decided to join the party by announcing that the mobile game Mario Kart Tour is going to shut down in a few months.  Even though the game is mostly a single player game. there won't be a single player mode patch released; it's going to be made into lost media.  Now I think that MK Tour is a pretty awful "game", if you call it that with how limited control is, but that even Nintendo treats cellphone games like burnable trash really is disappointing.