Stephanie Stirling has been right all along. She’s always insisted that video game company CEOs were heartless, greedy monsters, and now one of them has stepped forward go confirm their well-deserved reputation. The CEO of a company called Ustwo, Maria Sayans, made a speech declaring what she thinks is the future of her business.
We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.
I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.
There’s the capitalist ideal: the company is an empty shell that houses CEOs who get extravagant salaries, but no employees. The actual work, the output the company produces, is to be farmed out to external contractors on the cheap. A game, the purported purpose and product of this company, is to be produced by an executive with an MBA who has no artistic talent, no creative talent, and definitely no ability to code.
Instead of getting rid of the employees, how about firing all the CEOs?
I’ve long thought that that would give a company a pretty good bang for the buck.
As the great late Shamus Young once quipped about CEOs as villains in his analysis of the game Prey.
It’s a nice idea but who’s going to fire them? They’re absolute dictators in their own little domains. I suppose in theory you could put them out of business by the contractors refusing to do business with them but that’s not going to happen because the contractors need the business. Maybe if the contractors unionized. CEOs hate unions.
The gaming industry is notoriously cutthroat and constantly trying to keep production costs as low as possible. But I’m not sure her numbers will add up in the long run.
My employer (not gaming) is going in the opposite direction. My team is losing all of our offshore (and along with them a good bit of knowledge) and hiring a smaller number of internal employees in their place. Something like a 3:1 reduction. Which of course means everyone has more work now.
CEOs move to get rid of employees and move to contractor based business. Next? Contractors start guilds. CEOs go away, that position is fulfilled by contractors. Wheeeeeee!
I’ve seen companies downsize and get rid of huge numbers of employees.
In order of best and brightest first.
One major company almost went bankrupt this way.
Sure, the employee head count and expenses went down.
So did the output of the company and it’s future.
The Board of Directors had an emergency meeting and fired that CEO for cause.
seversky @3: “It’s a nice idea but who’s going to fire them?”
Particularly when the BOD gets hand-picked by the CEO, to only include sycophants and even close relatives. Musk’s BOD was created that way, including his own South African apartheid brother. The BODs of many companies are often composed of the CEO’s from other companies, and this is exactly why the BODs readily approve of massive salaries for their CEOs. This totally incestuous relationship has been going on for decades, and it is also why so many CEOs are literal morons.
I have seen a CEO climb down into a pit to push on a hydraulic mechanism in an attempt to speed it up. If it had reversed, it would have crushed him like a grape in a vise. The second-in-command at that company was also a crook who routinely used company labor and materials to build himself a large concrete hulled sailboat. The CEO was just the fall guy, and far too stupid to realize it. The company eventually went bankrupt and was bought up by other companies. There lots of are other CEOs who are terminally stupid, but greedy enough for their positions. Look at just how many CEOs are buying into the LLM AI hype (no employees, and no health care coverage to pay, etc.), and who are alsovery solid Felon45 supporters.
From what I can see, they want to get rid of people entirely. Their action say that what they want is to not have to deal with employees, suppliers, or customers, and just watch the money roll in. People just cost money and complicate things. Products (i.e., what companies ostensibly make) require work and money; they just complicate things.These capitalists haven’t just lost the plot. They have lost reality; they live in a dream world where money is the only thing that’s real.
Cryptocurrencies are an excellent example of this abandonment of reality. They have no intrinsic value, they are only worth something to the extent that people will buy them off of you. (The same is true of national currencies, but they at least have central banks and governments that try to make sure that you can buy real things with their currencies. And if they fail — well, look at the Zimbabwe dollar, which eventually became utterly worthless.) At some point, the bubble will burst and they will become worthless.
Doonesbury had comics on that back in the 90s, in the advertising industry where the same thing happened: they dropped all the employees and then hired them back as contractors. On the surface, the employees made more money…but they lost all benefits, of course, and so had to pay for insurance, manage their own retirement accounts, etc, out of pocket.
In the mid 90’s I had a temp job in an electronics factory.
My first real job,
It was a week to week contract.
There was plenty of work with lots of overtime.
I had been working with them for 9 months when they decided they were going to get rid of all their direct employees both temp and permanent with the exception of a small core of direct employees.
However we could keep our jobs by signing with their contractor who was from now exclusively supplying them with labour.
If we agreed we would continue to work as normal, if not then goodbye your temp contract would not be picked up for another week.
We were told the terms (pay) and informed that they were better than our current deal.
However they were very wrong.
Although we had temp status we had been getting the same pay, overtime rates and holiday pay as permanent employees.
Also the production line I was on had been getting a special extra overtime rate because we were not working at our employers factory and were getting bussed to work at a different site 40 minutes away and being paid an hour and a half OT each way. So three hours pay for sitting on a bus before and after our shift.
The “amazing” new offer was 20p more per hour than our standard rate*, no holiday pay and not overtime rate including the travel time. I did the calculations I would have earned 20% less than I did for the 9 months I was with them on the new terms. I even asked about holiday pay – “Claim unemployment benefit” for any holidays was the stupid response.
I walked away because I was young enough, living at home with no commitments. The sad thing was lots of folks in their 30’s and 40’s with full family commitments that just had to suck it up. I even had a couple of them try to convince me not leave and that it wouldn’t be that bad, it was a job and plenty of OT.
I got a new job within a month that lasted 7 years.
*even this was wrong as the employer increased your standard rate after 3 months and all of the people on my production line had been working long enough to have the increase. So the 20p increase more was actually 80p decrease.
As a particular example, nobody from Hawkins, Indiana will have a remote job:
. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/workers-at-wizards-of-the-coast-maker-of-magic-the-gathering-to-unionize/
(Which is not at all a surprise with the tangled history of WotC… and the less said about the accounting used over the years — even before being purchased by Hasbro — in actually paying their independent contractors, the better.)