You know, if you let gaming execs talk long enough, they all but hang themselves without your having to do anything – at least, that’s the takeaway from Chris Deering’s appearance on the My Perfect Console podcast. Deering is the former president of Sony’s European branch, and his comments are rightly being roasted across social media this week as they display an eye-popping view of the situations of developers and industry landscape.
He essentially suggests that consumers not spending on games leads directly to corporate decisions to cancel the next games (and therefore layoffs), rather than executives’ exorbitant salaries, greed, overborrowing, and overextending – you know, the actual problem the industry is currently facing. GameDeveloper.com notes that we’ve seen over 22,000 layoffs in 2023 and 2024, even as revenue from gaming continues to climb – meaning consumers are definitely still spending.
But the real “let them eat cake” quote comes later on in the recording, when Deering suggests that laid-off devs must “figure out how to get through it” and should just go “drive an Uber, or go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.” Even the podcast host, Simon Parkin, politely dragged Deering on social media for this wildly out-of-touch remark.
Of course, most laid-off game devs aren’t eager to become hobos living in a van down by the river, nor can they just tuck their spouse and kids in the back seat while they drive around an uber, all while waiting for the industry to get its shit together. They’re just gonna get the hell out of this industry, taking their coveted skills and institutional knowledge with them. We’re the only losers in this scenario.
And lest you think this sort of dehumanizing, ghoulish commentary is coming only from executives, RPS kindly zeroed in on an Ubisoft investor and hedgefund manager who penned an open letter to that company, accusing its leadership of incompetence and nepotism and demanding even more layoffs – including the ousting of the Guillemot family.
“We also suggest that Ubisoft should consider selling certain studios that are not needed for development of main IP’s in the portfolio. Ubisoft has over 30 studios, it’s obvious to every investor that this structure is too large for Ubisoft and its profitability going forward,” he says, arguing that “the layoffs that Ubisoft has made in the recent years which accounted to approximately of 10% cut of workforce but that is simply not enough.”
That’s enough of listening to these folks for the day, I think.
