During the GDC 2024 a group of developers came together to shout at the top of your lungs as a sign of protest against i numerous layoffs that are happening within the gaming industry over the last year.
This initiative was organized by Caryl Shaw, the former producer of Epic Games, and by Caryl Shaw, designer of Fortnite Vestival, and took place at 3:00 pm local time yesterday afternoon (8:00 pm in Italy) with the aim precisely to express in the most direct and frank way possible the feelings of the developers in the face of the crisis in the sector, that is, by shouting at the top of their lungs for about a minute, as you can see in the video below. For those who don't know, between 2023 and 2024 they were As many as 18,000 workers were fired.
“The gaming industry is falling apart around us, and we're all flocking to San Francisco for a week to pretend everything's fine,” reads the game's announcement. GDScream event. “Let's take a minute to stop pretending and express what it feels like to be a game developer in 2024.
Sweet Baby Inc. also targeted by the protest
In an interview with PC Gamer, Siegel explained that the idea of organizing the protest was born out of frustration with the very high number of layoffs in the last two years and also with the controversies related to Sweet Baby Inc.a narrative and cultural consulting company hired by many publishers and accused by some gamers who say it is influencing the games themselves with “woke” themes, reignites discussions similar to those of GameGate.
“When you have so many people coming together in the video game industry, going to all these events, attending presentations and awards ceremonies where not everyone is necessarily talking about the layoffs or the current state of the culture, it all seems absurd” , Siegel said. “At the end of the day, It's hard to be here and pretend everything is fine in our industry, not to mention in the world, when things are not going well at all.”
“So all I wanted to do was… be able to bring people together for a moment of catharsis – just one minute, in the middle of the whole GDC, we can have a cathartic moment together, even if we can't say anything else, Even if we feel like there's nothing else to say right now, don't let GDC pass by without acknowledging that we collectively feel that things are not going well and we want them to be different.”