Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams said at this year’s Game Developers Conference that executives responsible for mass industry layoffs “can all eat shit, I think they’re horrible, and I think they’re bad people.”
Speaking to PC Gamer, Adams was wondering what the future of Dwarf Fortress could look like. When considering the kind of decisions that need to be made to keep a studio afloat, he asked himself if he’d have “more empathy for the people that lay people off.” The answer was, decidedly, “No, I don’t fucking think so”.
He continued, “These decisions, they don’t sound practical. They sound like they’re driven by greedy, greedy people trying to make some kind of venture capital thing work out.” He believes this to be a problem that starts at the highest levels of business. “There is this stench of rot at the top of things where the reasons people get laid off is because of funding structures and bad incentives and stupidity”.
2024 has already seen over 7,500 layoffs within the video game industry. 2023 was considered a bad year, and that ended with over 10,000 people losing their job, meaning 2024 is well on the way to overtaking that figure.
Many CEOs have said they take full responsibility for the jobs that have been lost, but so far, few have lost their jobs or had their compensation packages reduced.
Dwarf Fortress was once a cult classic, but it gained renewed fame and interest after launching on Steam in 2022. It’s a procedurally generated colony simulator, like RimWorld, and fans delight at the myriad ways the game’s systems unexpectedly interact with each other. It’s currently 15 percent off as part of Steam’s Spring Sale.
In other news, Steam Families will now let up to six people share their libraries with each other.