Sure, I don't necessarily disagree with that, but does that make it right? Does that make their PR virtue signaling any less disingenuous?
I mean, sure, one can always point at a certain level of hypocresy in regards to a company's actions and what their PR says.
But, honestly, the writing was on the wall for some of these layoffs. Take-Two often gives their developers too much rope, to the point that they sometimes hung themselves with it.
You can see that being the case with Mafia III developer Hangar 13 losing their way for half a decade after they were given the chance of taking a shot at a new IP, making bad creative calls that ultimately resulted in that project being canned, north of $100M dollars being wasted, and now that they're back on track, Mafia 4 would be arriving an entire decade after the launch of its predecessor in 2016.
Also, Michael Condrey of Call of Duty fame had it's new studio, 31st Union, founded five years ago under the 2K banner. They're said to be working on a multiplayer game of some sort, yet five years later they've had nothing to show for it. Similarly, Cloud Chamber, the developer behind the new BioShock, have been operating in various capacities for over six years now and, again, they have nothing to show for it.
Regardless of what business practices 2K executives may pressure them to shoehorn into their games, no upper management would ever micro-manage a studio to the point that they wouldn't be able to get any game operational enough at a design, systems and creative level to the point that the studio would have nothing to publicly show for it half a decade into development.
And this is also not a problem exclusive to Take-Two's lineup, but an epidemic that's been impacting pretty much all Western studio organizations to some extent - one example of it being how internal creative heads or studio level managers were responsible for Days Gone 2 or any other Bend Studio project not getting off the ground at all during the two-year period that followed the release of Days Gone in 2019.
And what I'm trying to say with all this is, well, to some extent each of the internal studios within these larger corporations have brought these mass layoffs onto themselves, for not being able to get their shit together and get stuff out the door or, alternatively, not rallying enough media attention around the clueless managers or problematic figures at their teams that were making it difficult to successfully move on with the development of their projects.
Because what's an undeniable fact, is that the software output of Take Two, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony, and others, over the past 18 months have been nothing short of abysmal.
