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The closure of Monolith Productions, an innovative video game developer, shows what’s wrong with an industry in which game publishers have the ultimate power to shut down projects and fire workers.
The article didn’t speculate, but that may have been the point. “We’re miserable only making games out of WB movie properties, so you’ll let this next one through, or we’re gone, and someone else will surely have us instead.”
Problem with that is that WB likely owns the IP that they were working on and creating while they were owned or working under a studio owned by WB. WB owns all that work that these developers could have kept for their new studio if they had formed one. Now they have to start over again, meaning all that time they worked on it was wasted. They can’t use it, and WB sure isn’t going to.
I can tell you that no professional (non indie) gamedev cares about that. We know damn well we have no rights over the stuff we make for our overlords.
Creatives absolutely care about art they spend years making, professional or not. They definitely don’t feel happy about wasting all that time for something they can no longer work on.
Care might not have been the right word. I care about my code too, but we know our work belongs to the company so we don’t get too attached. The thing that hurts the most with these layoffs is stopping working with the people (or entire teams) you had a good work relationship with, and, of course, suddenly being out of work.
Thats true, but art and code are almost completely different. Nobody puts in their personal emotions into the code they write. Nobody feels personally attached to that code, as there is no personal connection to it other than “I wrote it.”
That’s not true of art. The parts of a game that are not mechanical (mechanical being code, gameplay design, the “ugly” stuff, if you will) are often created by people that put their own personal emotions, feelings, and other such things into the art. It has a part of them, often deeply personal that perhaps nobody else could understand except for them, and thus having to let that go can be incredibly challenging. Though a professional artist accepts that this may happen someday with their work, when push comes to shove it is generally not easy for them to completely walk away from it. It becomes effectively, from an emotional standpoint, like their child.
I am not saying it hurts more or less than no longer working with someone else, only that the artists that created the art are definitely not feeling good about having to walk away from it and never being able to work on it again.
It’s the same with code. It involves more basic logic than art but it’s still creative work imo. Hell, there’s even artistic forms of coding.