Tearing up the pea patch | This Year in Business

22.12.2023 - 17:49 / gamesindustry.biz / Bobby Kotick

There's a Cantonese saying I've been looking for an excuse to use in one of these columns for months, and with the year drawing to a close, I'm going to drop it here as a little present to myself.

"Sik see sik zoek dau."

It means "finding a pea while eating poop," being in the middle of a distinctly unpleasant task and stumbling onto something that is almost pleasant by comparison.

With the abundance of layoffs and closures around the games industry, I think 2023 definitely qualifies as a heaping helping of poop we've had to collectively choke down. But that doesn't mean there weren't happy little non-poop surprises along the way, some colorful garnish or an occasional legume to break up our foul task.

So as we say goodbye to 2023 with our usual This Year in Business round-up, I thought it would be good to focus on the positive and find some peas in all this mess.

For instance, 2023 had a bumper crop of great games offering top-notch escapism for those in need. That's an obvious pea.

We saw new unions at Microsoft/Zenimax, Sega, Avalanche Studios, CD Projekt, and Experis Game Solutions giving those workers additional leverage. That's a very significant pea already, and it's likely to look even bigger in the years to come.

In somewhat related news, the US Federal Trade Commission spent the year considering a ban on non-compete clauses, so perhaps the days of that exploitative nonsense are drawing to a close. That's giving off big pea energy.

And when Bobby Kotick steps down from Activision Blizzard in a few days, there will be about 13,000 fewer people in the world who have Bobby Kotick for a boss.

Absolutely massive pea-ness right there.

See? 2023 had its share of peas; we just need to remind ourselves of them from time to time. The 52 stats and quotes will reflect a bit of everything: the good, the bad, the ugly, the things we think we'll look back and remember as the events and perspectives that defined 2023.

Barring major (and massively inconsiderate) breaking news, this will be our last day of work for the year. But just in case you need some game-related reading material in the interim, I'm also going to highlight a This Week in Business column from each month that holds up about as well now as it did when it was published. (Editor's note: No guarantees, your mileage may vary, notice we didn't actually say they held up well.)

Whatever your situation, we hope you enjoy a fulfilling break here at the end of the year, and we'll see you in 2024.

QUOTE | "This overall context has triggered a full review of our revenue prospects leading to increased cautiousness over the coming years." – 11 days into the year, Ubisoft sets the tone with a worrying announcement lowering its financial