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Whenever I hear of a studio that has “grown 50%” since their last successful release, I get worried. So many companies grow way too fast. On the other hand you see small teams staying small, and doing great work for decades. A successful game can keep you afloat for ages if you stay small.

So I am glad to see more smaller studios using external development to keep a tight core of people with them for a longer time. Not only does it keep the knowledge in the company, it's also great for the stability of people's lives.

Why am I seeing so many strange takes about this article all of a sudden. We want people to have long term jobs in which they do not fear constantly being laid off, by staying away from boom-and-bust, which they intend!!

We want people who work externally to get credit, and they literally name a company in the article! It's not revolutionary, and they don't pretend it is! They literally mention how it's better for those in employment, and it retains knowledge. It's a win-win! They're honest! Wtf do you want??

There was another threaded discussion yesterday, and a conclusion out of that was that there may be a huge co-dev experience difference between the US and the EU. Perhaps US folks have it way worse, and EU folks have it much better: bsky.app/profile/ryst...

I mean for god's sake look at the replies on this post, it's horrible. People with no sense of what is actually going on, all incredibly upset at an idea they have in their head about how it must be, all yelling for the game industry to change for the worse.

Thankfully there are others, who like me, try to explain the situation and actually read the article. Shoutout to @kidtsunami.bsky.social and @soundaholism.bsky.social for doing the right thing, and yet getting shouted down for it! It's nuts!

It was literally said at the top of this discourse that there are over 1000 credits in this game, against the ~75 people-strong "core" team. And yet, someone still imagines that all these 1k people were hired as contractors _individually_? I guess at least 40 of the 75 core members are HR then.

I got enough motivation to do one round of replies and then noped out of the discussion. People want to direct their anger at something and they don't always want to be informed

So for all the big gamedev accounts here that made knee jerk statements exclaiming codev processes to somehow always be bad: Congratulations, you have convinced the gamers to hate on innocent people! Yes, you do that too! Complain about the journalist writing a bad headline instead, as many do.