Remember, every time you read about 10, or 100, or 1000 layoffs in the video game industry, they’re not cold statistics. Every one of those figures is a person. A life that has been upended, with enormous consequences for not just the individuals directly involved but their family and friends. Every single person affected by layoffs and departures has their own story to tell, their own history in the business and their own motivations for pursuing whatever comes next.
The hopes, dreams, and aspirations of generations of creative people getting exploited, overworked, and underpaid because they were willing to put up with that all to chase those hopes, dreams, and aspirations, all eventually got crushed in the corpo mill, only to be replaced by the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the next successive wave of creative people. That was always working as intended.