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Thats pretty typical for studios after a launch. They release the game and scale back on staff till they have another game to cook up. Theres usually not much to do after a game release for a lot of the staff till they have a game in the pipeline again.
Typical doesn’t mean it’s not fucked up.
So leadership doesn’t prep for a new project towards the end of the current one? sounds like terrible project management is to blame.
They don't generally have the funding to have multiple games in the pipeline, so that each resource is busy at all times.
It's a shitty deal for the staff and they should contract more or something instead.
If they can't afford to keep the employees on bench for a month till they start another one then that sounds like terrible management.
This would be my gut reaction as well. I've met some game developers privately and got to know them better and after that a career in game development was out of the question for me. It's not even the fault of the game studios, many of which are being lead by idealistic game devs themselves. It's the publishers who only offer contracts that are so tightly knit, that many game studios go bankrupt after release if they can't get another contract quick enough. The whole industry is rotten and no amount of management will save that on the lowest level of the food chain. It felt too me that only idealistic devs with a high frustration tolerance go into game development and that is being exploited to the extreme.
I understand they have different types of staff with different areas of expertise, and they might be dependent on another thing being done first, like models before textures, but laying them off completely and bringing them back or hiring green employees does not seem like an efficient solution.
Imo it's only recently that it's become 'typical' for this to happen.
Video game developer here. It has been happening since the games industry started. Frequently, early games were made by contractors that were let go at the end of a project.
Many studios have done this for decades. Many developers actually like this as contract work pays differently than salary work and gives different freedoms.
It’s been typical for qa and similar staff for a very long time. This article doesn’t specify what roles were cut so it’s hard to say if this is business as usual or not.