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This is a very reasonable critique.
I should be clear that the Cadastral Map Bias lens is my strong prior of first resort for inexplicable behavior by companies. I am not well read enough on SBI to back up the truth of the grapevine claim.
What on earth is going on with the layoffs btw? Did the industry over hire? It seems really inexplicable from afar.
The simple story is afaik that covid was very good for gaming so they hired a lot and now it has normalized again, so they have to lay people off again. This is compounded by loans/financing being much less available currently than expected. Whether it was a mistake or just calculation is hard to tell, though I lean towards something like they knew it'll probably normalize again at some point but didn't know when so it would have been irrational to not hire more people for the time being when there's money to be made now. And as usual, there's probably a spectrum ranging from savvy experts hiring deliberately in a way that firing them later down to road wouldn't hurt the core business on one end and naive idiots hearing that everyone else is hiring a lot and business is booming so they just buy studios and hire like crazy on the other.
This is likely true. I'd like to add, as someone who has been playing online games since the text-based ones of the 90s over dial up, there are far too many of them. This leads to situations where say a mix of 20 mid to good online games ultimately fail for lack of a large enough player base, where if the bottom 1/2 of those games never existed in the first place the other 10 would probably have been fine. Everyone wants to be the next GTA 5/Online though, raking in billions for comparatively low continuing* effort by the publisher and the studio.
*not the original effort to make the game, which was a large project, but the "keeping the lights on" mode where most of the earnings actually occurred. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-grand-theft-auto-revenue-and-costs/
I don't even think it's "too many online games" that's the problem, it's more "too many online games that rely on matchmaking queues or any other server infrastructure the devs have to maintain themselves." If an online game that can run off of end-user-maintained dedicated servers comes out and bombs, it's sad, but it won't also be lost to the sands of time.
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