If GoW E-Day cost $500m and did $25m in sales, its net loss was $475m. If it did $50m in sales, its net loss was $450m. If Concord cost $400m and did $0m in sales, its net loss was $400m. Unless GoW E Day did over $100m in sales, it is worse than Concord.

Netflix once said that they have to become HBO before HBO becomes them. Now Steam is becoming Roblox, and Roblox is attempting to become Steam.

These pieces are intellectually lazy at best and doing a disservice to workers at worst. Despite two years of Ball's reports on the industry explaining what has happened we still see arguments being made that the issue was a small group of people making bad decisions. The market is efficient. These layoffs started nearly four years ago. If the issue was bad decisions in game development and the solution was to make either different or better single player games we would have seen a rise in both new studios + old studios filling that gap and employment would have shifted toward those new entities. Instead we have seen recently more game studios closing down, including plenty of non-service game studios. There is no market that will fill 10,000 game developers on west-coast salaries. The jobs market has shifted overseas, and the games market growth has been absorbed by Roblox, China, Tiktok/Porn/Vice and connected console services. These are facts. The attempts at live services from Sony and others only extended people's jobs longer, but the market would be in the same place today regardless of those bets. We do a disservice to people when we coddle them and spread the fantasy that the industry is going to return to its prior growth state. The US economy will grow, the west coast economy will grow, but it is unlikely that games as an industry will ever produce the prior ROIC when developed on the west coast because if you want to make a hit game you can make it anywhere now. Game platforms, yes. Big believer in Roblox. And individual game studios will still thrive. It is a hit-based business, and hits will grow. The point here is a general trend. We will continue to see game development on the west coast shrink as the market changes. This is permanent, and will not return. It is easier, and lazier, to blame managers over the market because the former fits a convenient political lens. But grievance politics is not born out by the realities.