You can get full developers for less than $3,000 per year?? That is incredibly cheap! How can anyone not develop their games there?

You pay peanuts...

Quite simply if there was a magic bullet to all this then they'd have used it. The value of those guys work is placed at $2400 a year, if it's worth more then people would start paying more. As you say, all games companies would outsource, because as someone else has said, the games industry is the worst place for employment rights. The reason they don't outsource, and probably the reason Squad laid them off, comes back to the first statement I made.

Reliable outsourcing has been the holy grail of tech companies for years. While there are sporadic claims of success, nobody has managed to consistently create projects that use it. It's why I'm still in a job.

Depends on what you mean by "full". And Mexico isnt even close to as cheap as you can get. SE Asia comes even cheaper. The expectation is North/West Africa will be bottom of cost ladder within the next few years when the infrastructure is more reliable. But god help you if you dont have a trusted local resource and you had best assume whatever they are working on is open source, if you want it to be or not.

The old adage holds not matter who you employ... generally speaking you get what you pay for.
I believe the claim was that was min wage, not what devs in particular received. But perhaps I misread.

One always hears of people being or becoming disgruntled, but never of them being gruntled in the first place, nor becoming regruntled later. It's such a sad oversight in press coverage.

It's the same with all things. Good news is no news. Everyone begins a job with a certain level of gruntlement, it's not news to report that. Equaly so, where the gruntlement has fallen to a point where disgruntlement has occurred, and the workers are considered disgruntled, that's the only point the news is interesting. Once the gruntlification process has been enacted by the employer, and gruntlement levels have returned to the previous engruntled state there's nothing to talk about.

I agreed it's sad, but unfortunately it's all about the news.

I was telling several of my friends, I don't understand why these big AAA game companies don't move their studios to 'poor countries' to higher 'poor staff', to make their game.
That would cut down on labor costs by a HUGE margin.

Image AAA game made in UK or USA, with a staff of 100 people on full salary for 2 years that ends up costing like $10 million dollars, where if it was in a 'poor country' it would cost for the same 100 people over 2 years only $1 million (I'm being generous here).

Directly stolen assets is one thing (like using actual code from them), but anyone that complains about 'stolen game mechanics' is just blowing hot air.

Because game development requires experience and skill. Execution matters an extreme lot (it's key in all formulas for estimating revenue from game projects) and you can't expect good execution from inexperienced cheap teams. And game development is both a tech and entertainment industry, both of which are dominated by rich countries. The talent is already there and foreign talent is rather recruited into the Western staff than building subsidiaries overseas.

Also your idea isn't new. There has been a whole bunch of cases where Western publishers had games developed in poorer countries but they are usually sub-par or shovelware. Heck, JoWood decided to have the addon for Gothic 3 developed by an Indian team and we all know how that turned out.

I don't know shit about the economy but I'll take a guess that outsourcing, especially to notably poorer countries and with large cultural differences, generally has a hugely negative impact on all sorts of things and there are many industries or at least aspects of them that are simply unsuitable for it.

Consider if you will, the pain of having to fix the errors of code outsourced to India. (This happens all the time in IT) Now consider the payoff of the code just running when it is made in Indiana. One should never skip on cost when it comes to code; but one also needs to consider a reasonable price. After all, the Apple Markup only works because people are idiots. You're not getting 3000 USD worth of computer when buying a Mac Pro. That may have been the case back in the 80s, but not anymore.

And that's just the code itself. Do you really want "Bollywood" art design when it comes to your sets, characters, and voice acting? Do you really want to have to hire a fix team because the player clips though the polygonal car model? The lower margin simply isn't worth the cost of having to bring it up to spec, as it were.

I know all that all ready, there has to be some talented coders in poorer countries... ah I know, they are making more money via other digitial means, getting paid for a regular programmer job in poorer countries is too little compared to how much you can make elsewhere with your talents.

Language barrier+competitive market+effort of organizing talent+getting talent to work together.