this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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You don't get rich paying a ton of people 200k. You get rich not paying them. So what you are saying is actually not a contradiction!
You literally do, though. Because wealth isn't a function of the volume of currency you've amassed, it is the quality of goods and services that the currency can purchase. When you've got a ton of highly educated people working as a team to accomplish something exceptional, what you get back is far more than what you put in.
Just ask Billie Beane, a guy who is a testament to what the upper limit of $200k/player gets you in terms of a baseball team. Yeah, you can beat the average for a little while by one exceptional administrator squeezing the system on the margins. But the only way you win that final game of the season is with a budget like what the Red Soxes or the Dodgers or Astros bring to bare.
And in that triumph, you do - in fact - get rich. You fill more stadium seats. You sell more cars or phones. You build more elaborate buildings. You send people to the bottom of the sea (without them getting crushed to death) and up to the moon.
At some point, you've got to put forward an investment. You can't run an advanced economy on poverty-level wages. And if you don't have those advances in medicine and engineering and logistics and technology, what the fuck kind of rich are you?
Do you want to pay competitive salaries in Heaven or run a robber barony in Hell?
It's a wonderful idea but it's just not how the gaming industry is run. The gaming industry runs more like war machine production facility.
You pay some very good people lots of money to set things up, design how things are going to go, make up some prototype work. Then you set up for production, hire on tons of people to finish all the work. Once everything is up and running and all the products are out the door you cut back to a maintenance staff while you have the very well paid, highly talented core working on the next big thing. People are dying to get into the gaming industry so bad, the job pool waxes and wains in quality a little but there's never truly a lack of new talent when you need it.
The saving grace for the industry is live cadence games. The whole subscription side of things that we don't really want to see as gamers keep this ebb and flow of employment from happening. You stretch your production schedule out a little longer to begin with. You don't hire up quite so heavily and then for the life of the game you keep releasing features and options, You run events to keep people subscribing.
I like the ideas you're proposing, It just not a method that game companies are willing to try to entertain.
This tends to be a strategy that works well when you have a lot of people in the talent pool working in smaller shops and affiliated industries, as well as lots of people exiting college with an eye towards the games industry. I think that was much truer in the '00s than it is today, if for no other reason than the market for developers generally is growing tight and people going through recruitment are going to see some enormous pay-gaps between what EA wants to offer you and what - say - Exxon or JP Morgan have on the table.
Lots of people dying to get into the industry have no business being there. Lots of people managing the industry who are good at development are retiring. There's a core of talent that isn't getting propagated precisely because the business is so feast-or-famine. Same thing is happening in Hollywood. And at Boeing, for that matter.
The McDouglas Model of crunch-time hiring is a great way of improving your balance sheet between quarters, but a terrible way to retain institutional knowledge or cultivate industry specific talents and skills.
I mean, I think there's a business attitude that subscriptions represent a number you can give to an actuary and say "Tell me how much money I'll have in 10 years" with reliability. By contrast, its hard to build a long term model for a business around pre-orders and the random variable of first week sales.
At the same time, its very obvious that businesses can and do run under the "release a game / get a glut of cash / finance the next game with this income" model. It just relies on a business that plans to spend cash forward rather than one in which subscriptions are just revenues used for stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders.
What we've seen over the last two decades is bigger firms with loose credit looking for long-term revenue streams buying up highly recognizable brands as future income streams. Then busting them out until they're shells of their former glory, as all the money gets drained out the back door.
I don't really want to see talented developers working for these firms. I think that's a genuine waste. All the folks who spent years of their lives invested in Diablo 4 are - in my mind at least - talent squandered, as the game is morphed into just another DLC/microtransaction engine.