Double Fine’s Tim Schafer recently gave an interview to BBC News about the state of the games industry and explained why he thinks the industry is seeing a large number of job losses.
The interview with BBC News sheds light on Double Fine’s departure from Xbox, including that Double Fine wasn’t aware Xbox was considering shutting them down and only learned about it through online rumors. “We have heard the rumors, then the rumors were true, and then we decided we wanted to go it alone, and worked in negotiations, and now we have sprung forth into the world again,” he said.
But an interesting point in the interview came when Schafer gave his opinion on the games industry and video game economics, and why there were so many job losses.
Someone is Being Greedy Somewhere
“I don’t understand the economics of making games, to be honest. I often, for years, I thought I understood them, because there are layoffs, which is bad, and then the people who make games realize ‘oh we need people to make games‘. The executives are like, ‘oh we fired everybody; we need some people to make this game‘, they hire them back, and I always assumed they’d be in this cycle of ups and downs, ups and downs, but it’s been down for like four years, and I don’t know why,” he said.
Schafer continued, “Because people are playing games and people are making money, so I don’t know why there’s a big loss of jobs. I just assume that it’s just someone being greedy somewhere.”
“But I hope it is a cycle, and I hope it bounces back, but I think there’s a lot of life, excitement, and creativity in the indie games industry now,” he continued.
On the indie game front, Schafer was brutally honest about the realities of indie game development, though, saying that “but in indie games there’s no guarantee of not laid off, but out of money, so they both have their risks”.
“What I’ve learned is that people in the game industry didn’t just come here for the stability, or come here for the lifestyle; they came here because, in their head, there was no other choice, but they had to work in games. It’s just what they decided to do and they love it.”
You can watch the full interview below:
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Tom Henderson is Insider Gaming's Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief. When he's not running one of the industry's leading independent video game websites, he's probably playing an FPS like Call of Duty,…
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