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.