Hello, just wanted to share my story as a reminder with all the lay offs in the gaming industry, it has been terrible outside of it too. I've been working as an automation QA for a pretty decent software company and I was about to hit like 11 years on the job. Also on the side I've been trying to get my own indie game dev studio off the ground with releasing 3 small games in the past 3 years.
After saving for like 10 years and living in small rented apartments, last summer I finally managed to secure enough money so I can get a loan to buy my first apartment. After a year of dealing with contractors (yes, they are that slow!!!) I finally moved and was hoping to be able to focus my free time on my game again. However literally first Monday we have a meeting with a head of our department and they said we are practically being replaced with A.I. So around 60% of the company is gone across all offices in 3 different continents...
I guess my dream has always been to go full time game dev, it's just I was hoping to be able to do it on my own terms and not kinda being forced into it. But with no real money coming in from my previous games I might not be able to make payments for the place I bought and spent most of my adult life saving for.
So now I guess I don't have a choice but to go all in on my current game. If you want to check it out and leave feedback on how it looks or even wishlist, you can so here STEAM
Wish me luck guys and gals!
And the funny thing is, the company isn't even doing bad. I found out from a friend who still works there that they are aiming for a sale at the end of the year, so effectively this is a way for them to pump up the stock. They will say their profits went up by 50-60%, but it didn't come from more clients, but from not paying wages. And this way stock go up. Also same friend said they are struggling a lot with AI. It can be helpful with coding, but It can't do everything, and they are literally asking it to do everything or at least hold long enough until the sale goes trough . Just greed... and hundreds of families put in a bad spot, so already rich people on top can make a lot of money fast instead of also a lot of money, but slower...
Well, on the bright side, at least this teaches you the real value of AI is that it tells people what products to avoid:
If it wasn't AI it would be something else though. Working for the man always sucks.
We will watch your career with great interest
Thank you!
If you really want to sell the no gen AI thing, you might want to consider cleaning up the steam page translations. For example the finnish translation contains these lines:
which roughly translate to:
Personally I don't mind AI being used for the store page translations, and I can see how easy it is to make a mistakes like that, but maybe anyone reading that would get a slightly better impression of the game without those extra bits.
I've been on the receiving end of "making the bride look good" for selling the company too, 3 times in my life. Either you still have a job but everything around you falls apart because there aren't enough people to keep shit running, or you lose the job; both variants suck. I always was on the team "keeping my job", but it also always ended with me fleeing as soon as i could because working conditions deteriorated fast.
Wishlisted your game !
Thank you! We actually had a few changes in ownership before, but it didn't really impacted us. This time the current ownership got real greedy!