 The past two years were savage for the indie game development industry. We had massive layoffs, we had Unity making one mistake after the other, we had a lot of oversaturation in the market because people were in their houses just trying to create some entertainment and this includes games and this creates a massive shift in the industry. So let's try to understand what happened. Let's try to understand what may cause the mass layoffs first because this will set the tone from the industry right now. So let's understand what we had in 2020. We have a lockdown that created a huge demand for entertainment. People were inside their houses, they were not going out with their friends, they were not going out with their family. So this created a huge demand for entertainment, they had to spend their time in their houses. So they had to listen to podcasts, they had to listen to music, they had to watch movies, they had to watch series and they had to play more games. Due to that increasing demand for games, now we are going to stay with games specifically, game studios had to hire more people to supply for this demand. So they had to create more and quicker and the only way that we can create more products and quicker is to have more people working on them. After the pandemics, after the lockdown finished, this demand decreased. So the business model that these studios created during the pandemic was not sustainable anymore because there were not many people paying for these products anymore because they were doing other things, the things that they've been doing before the lockdown. So this is one of the reasons why studios had to make a cut in their payment check because they can't sustain a business model that don't supply as much for the demand because the demand decreases. So this is the first reason why their layoffs were such a thing. But this was just one of the reasons why this mass layoffs may happen. The second reason is what I called residual public. So think about it for a second. People were in their houses watching series, movies, listening to podcasts, with high quality podcasts, listening to music and also playing games. Some of these people were back to their locks, they were back to other forms of entertainment. They could go to a cinema, to a movie theater, to watch movies. They could just watch their series. But some people kept in touch with games. But they now expect that games had the same visual quality and visual production as the series, as the movies, as the podcasts that they were watching because they had contact with all these other media as well. Due to that, they demanded that some games were at the same level as some high quality production series such as The Mandalorian for instance, which was created with Unreal Engine. So people expect that all games that were made with Unreal Engine had the same quality production as The Mandalorian, which is completely unrealistic, right? So with this increase in demand for high quality games, the studios had to create such a game with such quality for these people, increasing the production costs of many games. With increased production costs, less people investing on games, less people buying games, they also had less revenue to invest on the people. So they had to fire many people as well. So let's talk about the third reason why I think these layoffs happened. In the previous period, we had many merge and acquisitions in the game dev industry. So we can think about, for instance, Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard, right? When you merge two companies, there are many roles that you don't need two people to be performing. You can think about, for instance, accounting. You don't need two accountants. You just need one person to keep the bills on place and to keep you up with taxes as well. But this also happened in the production section of the company as well. So for instance, you don't need two project leaders. There's only one leader, right? So you don't need two technical leads as well. Many of these roles don't need to be two people or more performing. So this is one of the reasons why I think that the mess layoffs was such a thing. Because when you merge two companies, there are many people that won't be performing their job anymore and they can fit into other roles as well. So they need to be fired. Now let's talk about Unity because there is no way that we are going to talk about mess layoffs in the game development industry and not talk about what Unity did. Unity alone is responsible for more than 2,900 jobs lost during this period. Only on this year, 2024, Unity fired more than 1,800 people. So what happened? What caused that? Now we have to think about Unity nowadays as a public offered company. Which means that anyone can buy stocks and anyone can be an investor. So Unity had to give very good explanations to convince people to invest on it. And mainly this means that they will have to convince people that they will be a profitable company. That is nothing wrong with that. So profit is a very good indicator about a company's health. So the more profit the company has, the better its health is. And when things are not going well, the stocks tend to go down, right? And this may cause the very company price itself, so the resources that the company has available to drop as well. And with some investment dropping, they will have to make some changes in the company itself, so the structure of the company. Which may cause them to think about new strategies. And every good strategy starts with very good questions, such as, do we really need these many people on the workforce? Do we really need these many jobs on this company? Do we really need these roles on this company? Do we need these people on this company? And every decision that they made will cause a repercussion. Because the public will now know these strategies. Because they have to give very good explanations publicly to everyone. And well, this may cause a negative feedback loop. Because if they have bad decisions, the very people that are investing on them will think that they will not be profitable anymore. They will withdraw the investment and will decrease the available resources for the company to invest on itself. Which means that they will have less resources to pay the people that are working on the company. And well, this is a snowball that will cause every negative effect to create many other negative effects which can lead to 2,900 jobs lost. Now think about it for a second. All of these people that lost their jobs are now working by their own. So they are now indie game developers as well. But 18,000 professionals that work on AAA games that work on the tip of the market that has a lot of experience are now competing with amateurs. Or solid developers, like me or you. This changes the whole paradigm of this industry. Because these people know how to conceptualize, design, plan, manage and release games. So they have the whole package and they can basically just release high quality games, basically AAA games and convince the public to spend their money on their project. How will we compete with that? Now my proposal is that we learn how to create, release and earn faster in this industry. So we have to keep very quick development cycles because otherwise we will lose revenue to these people because they know how to make this.