Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like
Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like
This is why we need to have 90 dollar games! /s
TL,DR: Company fires hundreds of workers. CEO makes $25.6 million.
Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.
I mean, if you want to emulate a corporate ethos, I don't think Japan should be the benchmark, either...
I think a lot of what comes out of Japan is better than the West because they haven't given up their idea of the company man.
Like it or not, having to switch jobs every few years is going to impact your performance.
Most of you have no idea how much easier it is to process information when you accept that you'll be doing it the same way for decades.
TIL Apex had writing behind it
It's set in the Titanfall universe, there's lots of lore scattered around. People work hard to integrate a narrative into the level and character designs, to imply plot in incidental dialogue or cinematics, or just literally write text entries that the majority of gamers will never read because only shooting and rare skins trigger their dopamine.
Honestly developer are making great work with how legends talk to each other during game. It's always really cool
Nobody asked to have some pointless story injected into their online shooters. I'm pretty sure the people that want world-building and narrative and lore in their games aren't playing online shooters. I know I'm not.
I hope these CEO's get their reckoning some way some day.
They seem to think it's all just business and cruelly wielding power is no issue, but I think they overestimate how isolated they are.
They won't get any kind of reckoning that we'll understand. They're rich, powerful, and insulated from pain. They've all got golden parachutes via their weaselly networks. There will be no karma, unfortunately.
If we want them to receive a reckoning, it's on us, the working class, to force it to happen.
I don't think they will receive a reckoning, but their children might.
It's especially disgusting when we realize rich people are setting their children up to inherit a world where everyone hates them for being rich from exploitation.
My question is when workers in game studios start to make unions. It's a massive industry and the people actually making the games are constantly fucked over.
Many years ago. But as you said, it's a big industry, and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.
in my head its because its an industry where going solo is viable and if they arent working at a company thats their goal so they have full contol over the vision and make all the money and one day they want to exert the same creative control over others and get overtime/overwork out of them
The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.
That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don't have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.
It will be used to justify raises AAA prices even more. Not that i care but it will be interesting to see.
On the one hand it sucks that a writer lost their job. And it'll never not suck. On the other hand I love when Apex Legends looks bad. I lost Titanfall 3 for that?
In a better universe apex and tf3 could have existed at the same time
Unfortunately we live in the universe where games as a live service is the only model that big companies run on, which means all resources must go to just that one game
And then they feed the documents to a LLM and iterate over it
That's sad and disgusting.
Apex has a story?
It's a spinoff from titanfall, a series with a lot of cool world building, it would be a bit weird to have no story at all.
It's also a live service so they need to copy fortnite have an in game explanation for the updates
No, they have "lore": a bunch of inconclusive and loosely connected animation shorts, vague plot points, and character bios that give just enough of a reason for their seasonal events to occur and for fans to drool over. Just like every other live service.
While I feel sorry for her as a worker, I do not feel sorry for her as a writer.
Live Service writing for AAA studios has got to be the most disposable form of fiction. I can find old short stories from magazines that closed close to a century ago, but I can't play the Destiny series from start to finish today?
Had over a thousand hours in Apex, while I quit way back because of different reasons, their actions definitely are not going to bring me back
I think at this points it's better to not join up with a large developer or publisher. The indie market has better job security.
Or better yet, organize like the Hollywood actors have WGA.
I got laid off 3 months after I launched a modern website to replace my former company's old platform that none of their other developers wanted to work with.
I did exactly what they told me, something they wanted for years and years, and then I got laid off as a thanks instead of a bonus.
lol
Though I ended up getting a job that pays 30% more so I guess it ended up okay.
Somewhat typical for type of work that has a clear end in sight. And they typically never tell about the project-based plans in mind. Sorry you had to go through this.
Had something like that when I automated stuff for a small company.
It wasn't a clear end in sight, there was still lots of content and systems that needed to be ported over to the new system, a new payment system to be integrated, and other new features they needed. They had two developers who were familiar with the new website, me and another dev. I did kind of suspect that something like this was possible, but I didn't think they would be dumb enough to actually do it. It turns out, they were dumb enough to do it.
They were just really cheap, and I was most likely their highest paid developer on my team, and myself and another dev were replaced by friends of manager that laid me off.
After that manager laid me off, I asked for a reference or a letter of recommendation, and was ghosted entirely. It happens.
This is why we need to have 90 dollar games! /s
Apex is literally free to play
Don't be pedantic you know what they meant.
The exact opposite of what they said?
I was gonna get snooty about being an indie game buyer, then I remembered that I bought a Larian game developed in partnership with Hasbro, so my snootiness will have to wait for another day.
Hasbro is a requirement for the D&D license, no?
Larian at least went against the grain of the AAAAA Industry and delivered something truly wonderful.
Sure, but they're still a AAA studio since BG3 is a AAA game. AAA studios can absolutely create wonderful games.
Haven't played since they removed Linux support. Will never play again.
This is why we need copyright laws
In a sensible world we would not allow our society to steal the work of artists and then throw away the artist.
Apex legends? The fully online battle Royale style competitive shooter? Can anyone tell me why a game like this needs a "character writer" anyway? I've never played it so maybe there's some grand story I don't know about, but to me this sounds like writing a character for Counter Strike which I think we all agree would be completely pointless.
I'll try to explain, I'm not a specialist in the lore of Apex legends. But the game is based in the world of Titanfall. It released in 2019 with a few characters. Each 1 or 2 season bringing a new characters with new abilities and background in the story. They have done a pretty good job so far and I really enjoy each characters.
CS at least back in the day didn't have a class based gameplay, each characters had the same abilities. So I guess it doesn't really compare.
It's more like asking why you need a writer for an Overwatch character than CS. The characterization is half of the point and, more importantly, sales on cosmetics, compared to CS/Halo/MW/Whatever
This is why they need to unionize.
This isn't unique to the gaming industry, this is capitalism writ large
I cannot wrap my head around why the game industry hasn't already unionised massively—I hear horror story after horror story and everyone working in the industry seems to have convinced themselves they're special and it won't happen to them
It’s called “a decades long campaign to erode trust and even awareness of unions by corporate business interests”.
It's not that hard to understand. The whole gaming industry is filled with people who are super passionate about games, like passionate to a fault. This makes it very, very difficult to unionize as there's almost always some other game dev out there who would take the job for less pay and more hours.
I actually know a friend like that. He was job jumping a lot, looking for game dev roles almost exclusively. He finally landed such a role. Far as I heard, he's working overtime a lot (voluntarily) and he earns less than half of what I earn as a "regular" software developer.
I’m sure it will get a lot worst with AI bs.
AAA dev here; it's not that. It's that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you're not careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker's rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company's unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio's previous identity has been lost. That's the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers' rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there's a "who watches the watchmen" situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don't even need remind anybody of the deluge of "toxic company culture" Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It's a tough nut to crack, and it's why things seem to be moving so slowly. We're pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.
We (large European gaming companies employees) have been trying to get a CBA for a year and a half now, sometimes it takes time.
To be in the entertainment industry you got to really really really want it. And when you want something that bad you learn to eat a lot of shit because the people with the money that can make it happen know how badly you want to be there.
I am in entertainment too and right now i pretty much work for free because that's just how it is.