I’ve worked in the games industry for 10 years, this has been a rumor about release layoffs. It doesn’t happen if the studio can prevent it. You typically don’t lay off a huge team if you can avoid it, even if the game did terribly. A terrible game is a learning opportunity and if you just lay everyone off then everything they learned during that game is lost knowledge. You’ll never make a profitable studio filled with experts in their craft if you lay people off after every release. Even small studios have another project going so when they near release they don’t have idle hands.
So, this rumor comes from a couple of places. 1) At the release of a project a lot of people will quit. This is usually because they are fed up with the studio or the studio’s next project doesn’t interest them. 2) Smaller studios during the indie boom assumed that they’d get paid on release. This has changed but before, the release was an unpaid publisher milestone. Some indie studios assumed this to mean they’d get profits on release which also isn’t the case because the publisher typically takes 80% to 100% (usually 100% if you are small) of the profits until they recoup all the money they spent during development. So the studio goes unpaid for 1-6 months or longer. They then are forced to lay off their team because they can’t pay them even if the game does well. There are delays in payments from Storefronts, Publishers, etc. when it comes to these things, and when smaller studios forget that, they lose people. So sometimes now, people write into the publisher contract that release is a paid milestone or they go for DLC milestones or they start another project nearing release and hope to get it funded and move the team over.
Overall, no large studio lays off a whole team on the verge of release if they can avoid it. It doesn’t make sense and it’s a myth.
I’ve worked in the games industry for 10 years, this has been a rumor about release layoffs. It doesn’t happen if the studio can prevent it. You typically don’t lay off a huge team if you can avoid it, even if the game did terribly. A terrible game is a learning opportunity and if you just lay everyone off then everything they learned during that game is lost knowledge. You’ll never make a profitable studio filled with experts in their craft if you lay people off after every release. Even small studios have another project going so when they near release they don’t have idle hands.
So, this rumor comes from a couple of places. 1) At the release of a project a lot of people will quit. This is usually because they are fed up with the studio or the studio’s next project doesn’t interest them. 2) Smaller studios during the indie boom assumed that they’d get paid on release. This has changed but before, the release was an unpaid publisher milestone. Some indie studios assumed this to mean they’d get profits on release which also isn’t the case because the publisher typically takes 80% to 100% (usually 100% if you are small) of the profits until they recoup all the money they spent during development. So the studio goes unpaid for 1-6 months or longer. They then are forced to lay off their team because they can’t pay them even if the game does well. There are delays in payments from Storefronts, Publishers, etc. when it comes to these things, and when smaller studios forget that, they lose people. So sometimes now, people write into the publisher contract that release is a paid milestone or they go for DLC milestones or they start another project nearing release and hope to get it funded and move the team over.
Overall, no large studio lays off a whole team on the verge of release if they can avoid it. It doesn’t make sense and it’s a myth.