‘I think the industry is over’: Disco Elysium spin-off Summer Eternal on how things could get better for game developers

It’s been a pretty depressing year for the gaming industry, with more layoffs and cuts than anyone can reasonably expect as corporate bigwigs are still taking huge paychecks or jumping on golden parachutes. Developers are doing everything they can to try to fight back this wave of pain, but it’s a tall order, as the developers at Disco Elysium’s successor studio, Summer Eternal, know all too well.

The group made it clear when announcing the organization that they did not believe it would be an ideal solution to all the problems the gaming industry currently presents developers with, but rather something that had to be tried and exist in the best way it could in an established within the scope of the system. With this in mind, I recently asked some of the developers behind Summer Eternal what they thought about the opportunities for the gaming industry to truly change in order to provide developers with a brighter future than our current bleak status quo, as an interview part, you can read the main part here.

“The strikes and pickets we’re seeing at Ubisoft’s offices these days are the first step in fighting for more power for workers in the industry,” Alexander Gaff, who was instrumental in developing the structure of Summer Eternal Aleksandar Gavrilovi told me, “I personally subscribe to the accelerationist view that the only way to achieve better conditions is to get into crises that highlight social contradictions and force us to reshape the world.

“The last few decades have been quiet for game developers, and my own union efforts have had only limited success (a handful of people signed collective agreements locally) because the timing wasn’t right. Now, amid tens of thousands of layoffs After all, it seems it’s time for game developers to stand up for their rights against systemic greed.

“I’m still eagerly awaiting the second crisis, which will highlight the biggest structural problem in game development – a third of all PC revenue for all developers (from indies to AAA) being diverted to Digital territories, and Valve is one of the most egregious examples of this, I can imagine there will be more worker power in the near future, but I lack the imagination to envision replacing Valve’s with community-owned alternatives.” Winter Castle “won’t fall that easily, but we should at least start discussing alternatives openly.”

Meanwhile, former ZA/UM writer Dora Klindíi said: “It’s true that Eternal Summer won’t fix the gaming industry, although as a by-product of our operations we may generate solutions to agriculture, astronomy , inaccurate bus timetables, hoax messages aimed at your mother, local elections and a miracle cure for syphilis. I think the industry is over, but thankfully video games are not.”

To reflect more on the state of the video game industry in 2024, when it feels like the good (great video games), the bad (layoffs and closures), and the ugly (layoffs and closures, too) are all flowing in our rivers. More than ever for fans of dizzying volumes and rhythms, check out this feature.