17
votes
Funcom, the Oslo-based studio behind the recently released Dune: Awakening, has announced it will be laying off staff
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- Title
- Dune: Awakening developer Funcom announces redundancies
- Published
- Oct 1 2025
- Word count
- 449 words
Pardon my ignorance, but perhaps the issue is treating seasonal workers like permanent employees. You clearly need more people to make a video game from scratch than to maintain the same game. So wouldn't it be better just to have temporary contracts for a lot of those people? Don't fool anyone into thinking they have job security in the first place. So they can make informed decisions.
While that makes sense, I think the gaming industry does that, under the consultant label, and it was a much abused system. So my guess is that devs just don't apply to such jobs anymore, if they have a choice.
But then you end up with stuff like this, which also isn't good, so I dunno. There definitely needs to be a better system for jobs like this, where you need temp workers that are also highly skilled and thus want a return on their education investment and stability
There already is, East Asia is full of "support studios" that you can just hire as an extra resource during development. The support studios keep full-time employees on payroll with stable jobs, and they just keep lining up new contracts to keep said employees busy. A commonly cited example is Tose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tose_(company)
It's just, you know, a middleman. When hiring a temp and firing them later obviously saves money.