Phil Spencer Blames Capitalism For Bad Games

Why do you keep using the term "sweatshops" to describe external production studios?

To my knowledge the term "sweatshop" is used to describe a factory with unhealthy working condition and below average pay. Not all outsource studios have overtime and not all have below average pay. Some of the art studios that I know of actually pay better than less-profitable game dev and they are harder to get in, due to AAA
clients having bigger budget than less successful game dev struggling to make money.


It is true that low gdp country workers will have an advantage when they compete with high gdp country workers. But that doesn't mean companies in low gdp countries are "sweatshops". It is not sweatshop if your salary is higher than average. It is only sweatshop if you get paid less than everyone else.

Calling every outsource studios sweatshops just isn't fair.

They outsource to save money, they lay people off cause they are expensive. A lot of the underling companies they use are located in places in the west on paper, but this is just for tax purposes or PR and if you look into it you'll see they are almost all located in places with cheap labor.


This is the same reason everything we buy now (that isn't game related) is made in China, cause the companies setup factories there and pay the workers practically nothing, have no unions, no red tape save loads of money.

Nobody cares if a load of workers are abused, work long hours and are paid nothing in china/india. That gets no traction on twitter.

Ironically as workers in the west get more and more rights and higher wages, the companies are setting up factories more and more overseas (the road to hell is paved with good intentions right). Cause our politicians do nothing to stop it, they could easily put import charges on companies doing this if they wanted to protect workers but they don't.

Yeah, studios in high gdp countries outsource to save money, that does not make outsource studios sweatshops. You can say Western studios don't care about their employees instead of attacking all outsource studios.

There are hundreds of outsource studios everywhere, whatever
Keyword studios do doesn't represent everyone in art production
industry.

Stop randomly attack people everywhere for your problems with video games...


What do you mean by people get paid nothing in China and India? Which company? Name them and give me evidences. I'll report those company if evidence is provided.

If you can't name the company that actually hire people but don't
pay, don't make *** blanket statements like this.

What do you mean by that gets no traction on Twitter? If one company don't pay (or even pay way less than average) everyone will witch Hunt before you even know.

I'm not attacking anything, I'm having a discussion on a forum.

Calm yourself.

You accuse certain outsource company in China and India pay nothing. And I am asking for the details and evidence.

I posted above, also look in the credits of the games.

Wait what? The statement that I had issue with was "outsource studios pay nothing", not "game studios outsource their works"....

Pretty sure credits in a game doesn't have bank statements of those poor workers in India....

I'm not gonna reply to you anymore unless you have something sensible to say, not gonna just bicker forever.

dang who came back from the past with all the vim and vigor of olde....feisty today, are we?

Yeah it's weird seeing him. This is a very standard practice across the entire IT industry, including game development. Games maybe part of the "entertainment" industry but much of the mechanics of building them is solidly in the IT category.

Here is a personal example. We are in the process of re-platforming our loan processing system, this is a system were the average loan is over 1.5 million USD. Re-platforming requires a ton of work as you need to redesign / rebuild every connector and data transfer system, lots of glue work involved. Did we suddenly expand our development staff by 500%? No, we went with an outside "talent firm" to bring in a bunch of "developers" because it was cheaper. And guess what, almost every last one of them speaks with an Indian accent and can't code for ***. If it's not built into Spring Boot they can't figure it out. Out of that entire group there is maybe one or two guys who are half decent and those are H1B's who are stateside and working on citizenship status.

This is how bad it was, the overpaid guy responsible for architecting the dataflow only knows Microsoft technology and did the entire design for a .NET system. The primary language for our platforms is java (don't laugh) and the OS is RHEL. These "developers" wrote a bunch of code that moved files using UNC naming then had an emergency meeting when it completely exploded inside dev. Core issue is RHEL don't understand UNC, that's a Microsoft thing. Overpaid data dude quietly faded away and went missing while the contracted java devs just went in circles on how they were going to do this. A week later, I got tired of having to deal with them, so took 10 minutes to write java class using JSCH that transferred a file using SFTP. Setup OpenSSH on the destination Windows server they were trying to get it to work on and demonstrated how to do it.

That is how low the quality out of the Indian body shops is, but companies are willing to pay because it's cheaper on paper.

Modern day gamers have been infected by live service games to the extent that they dont understand the concept of a single player game reaching completion.

https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-hogwarts-legacy-no-more-major-updates/


Thread somewhat related, so I put it here.

We see the same ***when people talkin about how Palworld fell off cuz no ones talking about it anymore. We saw the same comments about FF16 and theyre starting to creep through with Rebirth.

***like this likely ties in to why games are less profitable: theyre continuing to pump money into a game that is all patched up and finished (actual DLC content not withstanding).

Literally no one was questioning if outsource was used though....The question was are they getting acceptable wages compare with everyone else in the same country.

Outsource codes and system is also drastically harder than outsource art assets, due to the nature of codes works differently from art. They can't be directly compared like that.

If you ain't got 15 minutes, watch literally the first minute.

Don't get too fiery, gentlemen. I love to see discussion. I don't like quelling it.

I watched the first 2 min, and I thought the video was made by Radial lol.

The basic pattern was that they all noticed a legit "problem" from some games, such as Ubisoft and their empty open world games being made over and over. But instead of discussing exactly what is wrong with Ubisoft internally, and the process that leads to such decisions, all they did was made a "it is capitalism's fault!!!!!" statement. (Or change the term capitalism to woke here)

A little too simple to identify a complicated business problem with 1 simple statement, isn't it?

It's a complicated problem, but it's not summed up in a statement.

It's summed up in a single word.

Money

All the problems, all the solutions, the everything, caused by and solved by. money. Pursuit of it. Need of it. Desire of it. Money.

Do "___" to get... money. From an investor. From a customer. From the gov. All roads lead to money.

Q: My company is losing money, what can I do?
A: Money.

Q: I am getting blackmail in my company.
A: Money.

Q: Our IT system was hacked and all data stolen.
A: Money.

Q: This outsource company has Indian accent that I don't understand and they suck at coding, what can I do?
A: Money.

Q: My newest live service game has low retention rate.
A: Money.

Q: My newest game is getting negative review bombed on Steam.
A: Money.

Q: My employee is sexually harassing another employee.
A: Money.

Q: My manager doesn't like me.
A: Money.

Spend on marketing.
Pay them.
Pay them.
Didn't pay enough, pay a better company.
Didn't spend enough on marketing, spend more.
Didn't spend enough on marketing, spend more.
Pay them.
Win them over with presents.
(Threaten them with loss of money, or be threatened by loss of money works too, for most of them)

Always money.

I think it creates more bad games like this than solving the problems lol.

It DOES! Theretofore and thusly what Eiryl said, forthwith

Mostly this issue I think is mainly just with public companies, but since almost all of them are public now that's not saying much.

I think a major part of the problem is that corporations are no longer afraid of their customers, they know their customers love brands and they know how human psychology works.

If they can layoff thousands of workers, control the narrative and use sweatshop labor they will do it. If they can put loot boxes in the game they will do it. They will do anything if it means more money, and if they think they can weather the backlash they are gonna do it.

This is why companies will happily burn a fanbase to the ground, become hated and still keep on trucking. How is Blizzard still functioning when they are hated and all their games are review bombed into the stoneage? cause they know their customers can't stop playing and buying their games anyway, and once they understood this it was over. They stopped caring what the customers thought and went full money mining mode.

The insatiable hunger for money is probably worse today than it ever has been for corporations, and there are very few limiters as there used to be. In the past you had things in place to stop the insatiable greed of money to a point, those are mostly all gone and money is literally all that matters. These corporations are global now, so they don't even care about the country they are situated in.

Fire thousands of Americans and outsource the work to sweatshops, making worse products?! sounds good to me! Fiduciary responsibility bro, gotta do it!

It's sad but outrage culture has effectively taught all these companies to no longer fear angry customers, cause they have been shown they can withstand it and the customers will still be there when they move on to be angry about something else next week.

I think more and more people are starting to wake up, albeit aided by a declining economy.

You finally get it?

"Blizzard" doesn't represent all the game dev. Customers don't like their games =/= all games are bad now.

Spider Man 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Alan Wake II....Those are all very recent successful games that has positive rep. And that is only listing newer western AAA games from the recent years. Adding japanese dev or games from a few years ago or indie games the list of good games is actually quite large.

But you can always list one company like "Blizzard" then go one spamming negative doom and gloom posts like every game on the planet are as bad as D4. Geez.



Japanese dev outsource their works too. FF7 rebirth still scored 90+ on metacritics. Does outsource even matter if games are fun?

Blizzard is AWESOME. Screw you guys.

One of these games is not like the other.

Hogwarts was dragged so hard by the woke mob they literally made a curator list to harass and boycott streamers who were playing it. Multiple streamers were left in tears over the harassment. It ultimately backfired, Streisand effect kicked in and became one of the best selling games of 2023.

Did it become a best selling game because "bigot TERFs with extra disposable income" bought the game to spite the woke mob? Maybe, but thats a LOT of sales from non-gamers made out of spite (and if were gonna talk spite, look at WB's decision to continue with live-service games despite how horrible SS:KtJL is doing). I havent played it, but from what I saw and have heard, its a very well done game.

As a racist Terf Bigot, I played none of those games. But man. Hearing Spider man 2 got my national flag wrong after giving money to blue hair sweet baby inc makes me happy I'm a super racist bigot terf.

This is all true, but I don't see how this is a defense of capitalism. (I might be misinterpreting your intent here, and if you're not suggesting this, then I apologize--- it's just that I see this argument used a lot as a defense of free-market values because "government regulation is actually the problem!!")

Regulation like this exists because capitalism is fundamentally broken.

Laissez-faire economy is most obviously untenable, but hey, communism bad, so we can't do that instead. Let's instead add rules to our capitalist system to make it less obviously broken. That works for like 5 minutes but then oh no, somebody found a loophole to exploit in the name of capital gains, and now you can legally defraud your investors! Better patch that. Oh wait... ***, now some *** found out how to increase profit margins by exploiting child labor in the USA. Better patch that. Oh wait... now that we don't have child labor in the USA, capital owners are now exploiting child labor in *** Brazil and Argentina. Well, we should probably patch that, but if we did, then Nestle would *** collapse and the ripple effects would damage other service sectors. So I guess you can still exploit the Global South, but we will wag our fingers at you and pretend to care.

Oh, wait, corporations are making too much money and now the productivity curve is accelerating faster than wages are, so now interest rates are through the roof and cost-of-living is increasing while workers are barely getting by. Let's add minimum wages! OH WAIT, WHEN WE ADD MINIMUM WAGES, CORPORATIONS REDUCE COSTS WITH MASS LAY-OFFS SO THEIR NET EXPENDITURES DON'T INCREASE. After all, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders! How do we fix this??? ......And so the cycle goes on and on.

Government regulation on free-market capitalism isn't the driving reason behind why our economy sucks ***. It's that the government is constantly fixing holes in a ship that is designed to *** sink. It is exactly capitalism, the placement of value in private property, that is at the font of all of these issues.

---I haven't even touched the effect of late-stage capitalism on the production of art, either. Why you are fed *** slop and not ***that people actually want because to do so would increase cost and marginally set back investors. So, instead of making good products, you are gaslit into thinking that you want this shitty slop because you are such a good piggy, aren't you? What, you don't like the new Ghostbusters game/movie? You love Ghostbusters! Remember how funny that movie was? It's a classic! You definitely love this new game/movie, too. Bill Murray has a cameo in it!

bro i still have hopium for breath of fire remakes after the new Capcom Voting thing, even if square goes to ***we still have 11 ur right

Capitalism does not equal Greed

Capitalism equals freedom

You are free to be wise about how you do business,
or you are free to be foolish.

Keep the company private and make good games.

if you were not impatient and greedy, you would not have this problem.

Notch if a stellar example... until he sold out :P