Man kan nærmest ikke se væk et øjeblik, og så er der en ny omfattende fyringsrunde fra både store såvel som små studier i branchen. Hvordan kan det være? Det er der en række grunde til, naturligvis, men spørger du Larian-chef Swen Vincke, der midt i al det her kaos faktisk hyrer ind til nye roller hos Baldur's Gate III-studiet, så er der en stor fællesnævner.
Under en talk ved GDC (via Eurogamer) siger Vincke, at det er udgiverens griskhed der i sidste ende har betydet at vi står der hvor vi er i dag.
"The speeches here have been so good and basically stole all my thunder, of the things I wanted to talk about, about stopping the war and stopping the greed which has been fucking this thing up for so long. I've been fighting with publishers my entire life, and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over and over and over, and it's always the quarterly profits. The only thing that matters is the numbers. And then you fire everybody and then next year you're going to say 'shit, I'm out of developers', and you're going to start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it's just been broken, and broken and broken. You don't have to. You can just make reserves. Slow down a little bit, slow down on the greed, be resilient. Take care of the people. Don't lose the institutional knowledge that's been built up in all of those people, that you lose every single time, so that you have to go through the same cycle over, and over, and over, right? Because it really pisses me off."
Naturligvis er dette en forsimpling, men Vincke blev dog mødt med stående bifald af hundredevis af udviklere, der tilsyneladende også er trætte af denne status quo.