PC Gamer taking a jab at the industry

That‘s how it is in Germany. You can only get laid off without a negotiated severance package, when the employer is in financial trouble. Even then you need start laying people off the employer needs to do it according to the social contract (e.g. single mothers last). Both is really hard to proof (in court) so usually everyone gets a severance package anyway. This means when you hear about big layoffs in Germany usually all of them get a severance package or agree to something else. These layoffs are not comparable to the USA. This is the shortened and positive descriptions of the process, but of course there are also (justifiable) downsides of doing it this way.

Wow there. We can't go around regulating things. What do you think we are COMMUNISTS?!?

Worked on a personal game for 7 years nearly every day. Signed with a publisher and gave up on the project the following year.

It's pretty easy on PC, with Steam itself and itch.io being pretty good for indies. Earning enough money from your game is a different story...

It's not unique but the games industry is worse than most.

There's a natural cycle to the development of a video game that's very atypical for most software products, involving a long slow ramp up of workforce followed by (unless you've been very very careful) a total lack of anything productive for 95% of any of those people to do for the forseeable future. What to do? Toss 'em on the street, that's what to do. Then couple that with it being a glitzy career that will attract lots of replacements for any of the hapless people you fired, which also applies to any way you want to abuse your employees or underpay them, and you have a recipe for lots and lots of abuse.

Yes, but the game industry has faced severe layoffs the last couple years while profits soar ever higher and higher and executives get bigger boats. So it's relevant.

Unionization is also super uncommon at these game development companies. Would definitely help prevent layoffs. True for every industry again, but they are underrepresented here.

I've noticed as well. Why does it seem like so many people hate PC Gamer?

how i see it, pcgamer sometimes has high effort posts like this and other times has some really low effort posts, sometimes almost cyclical as they often use the same image pool over several topics (e.g its a meme that anything witcher related, pcgamer will use geralt in a tub as a header image)

because of the less serious posts, it kinda blots out the more serious ones.

More like a haymaker.