@apiotrw Designers and programmers. Artists and writers need to find new industries, probably back into normal software.
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Jacob Navok
5.9K posts
Jacob Navok
@JNavok
CEO & Emmy-Award Winner, Genvid. Previously 社長付 (President's Office) at Square Enix Holdings.
New York, NY Katılım Şubat 2010
865 Takip Edilen5.1K Takipçiler
@JNavok "Game devs who can move into tech jobs should"
"Start working on world models"
Which game dev jobs specifically do you mean? Artists, writers and designers creating datasets for world models? Or do you mean only Programmers (becoming ML engineers)?
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There's no better time to get on the AI tsunami than now. Start working on world models while the money is good or risk being the next causality paved over by technical advancement. History is littered with examples.
Pirat_Nation 🔴@Pirat_Nation
A new survey shows that 44 percent of video game developers are thinking about leaving the industry. North America has seen the most video game industry layoffs by far especially in the United States and California. >Roughly 61% of all layoffs since the big wave began in 2022 have been in North America >California alone accounted for about 50% of global layoffs in the earlier years and still makes up around 27% of 2026 cuts so far. >In 2026 to date, 55% of layoffs have hit North America, compared to just 24% in Europe. >The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry survey backs this up: 33% of U.S. developers reported being laid off in the past two years, higher than the global average of 28%. >76% of UK devs are now considering leaving games entirely.
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@shaunmmaguire @SethDillon It's also a blatant way to grab power by making people resent Western culture.
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If you love America but support Israel, you're "Israel First."
If you love America but don't hate Israel, you're still "Israel First."
The only way to be "America First," it would seem, is to openly hate Israel. The problem is that this group is dominated by America-hating Nazis, America-hating Islamists, and America-hating progressives. It's an Anti-American movement wearing the flag as a disguise, like a transgender wearing a dress.
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@awstar11 Proactive defense is warmongering now.
The area between "do nothing" and "bomb" is do nothing.
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I saw Warmongering Lunatics open for Anti-Islamic Blood Lust at The Rathskeller in Kenmore Sq in 1989
David Mongan@LawyerDave1
@awstar11 It might seem that way if you're a warmongering lunatic filled with anti-Islamic blood lust. The rest of us can see the area in between "do nothing" and "bomb them to the stone ages."
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Sure, it's very easy to point to successful games and say "Successful games are successful." Pragmata, a game that famously took way too long to make, is not the industry trend. There are movies that do well at the box office. You still don't want to be in the movie theater business, and what had been 6+ movie studios have consolidated to 4.
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@JNavok If you look at the top sellers right now, on Steam, these aren’t small budget games. Windrose, Pragmata, and Crimson Desert are all AAA games with big budgets.
Gamers will still pay for quality.
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The data is saying that the amount of money you put into a game is unrelated to its success, that there is more content today than yesterday and there will be more content tomorrow than today, and that the path to success has never been more disconnected from development. The high profile failures of games that have been well rated (eg Marathon) backs up these points.
If you’re a AA developer with a dream then location doesn’t matter. If you’ve been working in the AAA space like Crystal Dynamics or the places where the layoffs have been happening (per the quoted data in the OP) the odds of those jobs returning is small.
Most people who worked on large AAA games in North America will not find new jobs in AAA in the future. If you want to imply that AA can pick up the slack, maybe, but that’s bad advice to rely on. Many of the devs in their 40s with a family need steady work not to go back on ramen hoping that their game performs on Steam.
Better that they jump on the AI gravy train now.
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@JNavok Game development will happen wherever great games can be made. A mediocre game will sell a handful of copies. A great game will sell millions. If you can spend $10 million to make a mediocre game or $20 million to make a hit game, then you spend the $20 million.
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I'm not arguing that AI replaces game development.
I've consistently argued that outsourcing to lower cost areas replace NA game development.
This trend is irreversible. These jobs will not come back. It is cheaper to hire elsewhere, and AI coding + AI art pipelines will reduce the overall market costs (meaning labor hours).
Game devs who can move into tech jobs should.
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@JNavok Lol we’re so far away from “world models” matching what even a n00b can do with an off-the-shelf game engine.
Bad advice.
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The intellectual and moral collapse of the NY Times as "the paper of record." A play in two acts:
Act 1: In 2020, more than 800 reporters, editors, and staff at NY Times revolt and protest the publication of op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing that troops should be deployed, like they were in the 1960s, to quell nationwide riots that summer. The newspaper apologizes to the world for publishing the op-ed and the editor of the op-ed page is forced to resign (James Bennett).
Act 2: In 2026, NY Times publishes a massive puff piece *news article* (not op-ed) about "progressive" Hasan Piker, who has called for assassination of a U.S. Senator, says Hamas is "1,000 times better than Israel," says "America deserved 9/11," supports Islamic regime of Iran, and mourns the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When elites at the NY Times bemoan the loss of trust and respect for institutions like the media, they should take a long look in the mirror to discover the real reasons for this loss of trust.
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Jacob Navok retweetledi
I was at Disney when the Land launched. In fact, I personally wrote a lot of the copy for the Star Wars Land rides and the Star Wars hotel in the marketing materials and for the website.
When I say there was crushing disappointment, almost a feeling of betrayal that the whole thing was on the new IP and not the original IP, I am not exaggerating.
Disney made the decision to invest this money in order to support the new trilogy, which they thought would erase the old one in the minds of fans. The level of hubris around this is one for the business industry history books.
Bob Chapek, who was head of Parks at the time (since fired in disgrace), was in charge of greenlighting all creative in Star Wars Land. He killed things like a lifesize Bantha ride where guests would ride around the land on top of a Bantha. He killed the live show at the cantina. And most importantly, he gave the land its own lame subplot where you had to use your phone to scan kiosks and get some code messages deciphered so you were "part of the Resistance," but it had no payoff.
Then reality struck: they made a trilogy that destroyed the OG characters. They elevated an insufferably annoying mary sue girl boss, added a pathetic loser son of Han, a divorced Leia and Han, a disillusioned and bitter Luke, and then killed Luke, Han, and Leia.
Result: JJ Abrams' career was finished as a filmmaker. Rian Johnson was wrecked. Kathleen Kennedy is finally out as head of Lucas. Chapek out. Disney movies are garbage. The greatest entertainment IP ever created was lit on fire to appease the egos of the geniuses who bought it and thought they could outdo the original genius.
And now it's too late. No one cares that Darth will be walking around again to John Williams score. The new Leia face character looks like Brenda from HR.
By the way, Tomorrowland already HAD Stormtrooper) (the original ones, not the new fat ones_, Jedis, and Darth in a wonderful live show for years. My kids all took part in light saber battles against Darth Vader many times. It was hilarious and thrilling. Killed in favor of the new slop.
Absolutely over.
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Disney spent $1 billion in 2019 building a Star Wars theme park where you were not allowed to meet Luke, Leia, Han, or Darth Vader. Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland was set on Batuu, a backwater planet in a narrow window between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. By that timeline Luke was dead. Han was dead. Vader had died 30 years earlier. Leia was alive but had no canonical reason to show up at an outer rim smuggler outpost. Imagineer Scott Trowbridge spelled out the design rule in 2022. Characters on Batuu would stay locked to their specific era. No visitors from other Star Wars timelines. The immersion was the entire point. In practice guests flew to Anaheim for Star Wars and walked through a $1 billion set to meet Vi Moradi and Dok-Ondar. The locals of Black Spire Outpost. The parallel failure was Galactic Starcruiser. $5,000 for two nights in the same sequel-era window. No Luke, no Vader, no Han, no Leia. Disney wrote down $250 million to close it 18 months after opening. On April 29, Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland abandons the rule. Darth Vader will roam Batuu hunting Luke. Leia and Han will appear at the Millennium Falcon. Kylo Ren is being pulled from the land and relocated to Tomorrowland. The ambient Batuu music gets replaced with the John Williams score. Disney spent seven years defending the design principle. Then Galactic Starcruiser closed with a $250 million write-down. Luke Skywalker showed up for one limited event last year and got swarmed by guests. The rule quietly got dropped. Avengers Campus figured this out on day one. You put Captain America in the Avengers land.
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This dude is like Rachel Maddow as well… though I guess he has always been a fringe idiot.
None of that happened or is real, by the way, and the “Trump is the antichrist” is so 2016…
He is also “closeted” and thinks no one knows (we all know).
And why do all of these people that hated Charlie when he was alive invoke his name now that he is gone?
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@MikeIsaac Of all the difficulties in life, "What should I order at Starbucks" is generally not one of them.
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@MacBoucher1 For game development, yes. And the dawning of Chinese dev really shows that.
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In general as the rest of the world becomes technically proficient enough to produce anything comparable to American standards, the differentiating factor is cost. And the US has the most expensive labor in the world by far for pretty much everything.
If innovation will be defined by iteration speed, the world will surpass the US based on just that, no?
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It makes very little sense to develop games in North America under the standard models. Small teams for Roblox or AA Steam? Sure. But large scale production? Outsourcing has eaten that all.
The democratization of game development thanks to game engines cuts both ways. You now have equivalent talent in far lower cost areas. This is what happened to factories. It will happen for lots of software going forward.
AmericanTruckSongs9@ethangach
Iron Galaxy is facing another mass layoff barely a year after its last
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Zelda, let me try this plainly.
Hitler's whole identity in history is that he tried to murder every Jewish person on earth. He killed six million of them. That is what his image carries, wherever it is used. When you put his picture beside a picture of a Jewish Israeli leader and call it powerful, you are using the image of the Jewish people's executioner against a Jewish person. That is the hurt. The comparison wounds a community that has a thousand years of experience of being on the wrong end of exactly this kind of imagery.
You say the post is about Netanyahu, not Jews. But Netanyahu is the head of the Jewish state, and the Jewish state exists because of what Hitler tried to do. You cannot cut Netanyahu out of his Jewishness to make the comparison more comfortable, because the comparison only lands because of his Jewishness. Without it, Hitler in the photograph is just a man in a suit.
Your German example has it backwards. Germans were the killers. Jews were killed. You cannot swap the roles and pretend the image is neutral. If someone put a picture of a slave catcher next to a picture of a Black president and said, 'This is just about him,' you would not accept it for a second, and you would be right not to.
Some Jewish people will defend imagery like this. A Jew can express antisemitic ideas of course. People can always find a voice from any community willing to agree with them. This has happened in South Africa, and it's a very small minority, I promise you. That does not change what the image does, and it does not change how it lands with the overwhelming majority of Jewish people who see Hitler used against them and know exactly what is being done.
I am writing this tired, and I am very upset. I have spent a decade of my working life watching this country get more comfortable with this kind of thing, and today you have gone to real effort to defend a piece of it. That is what is hurting. Yom Hashoah was just the other day, and now this. It's deeply hurtful and cruel.
Zelda la Grange ©™✌@ZeldalaGrangeSA
@tim_meh87 @palesa_morudu .. 2/ do you call jews speaking out about Netanyahu and the war in the Middle East anti-semetic too? YOU are the one putting all jewish people in Netanyahu 's category. THEY ARE NOT. It as if to say all German people are Hitlers depicted in the image.
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Jacob Navok retweetledi
