Tearing up the pea patch | This Year in Business

gamesindustry.biz:

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