Video Game Execs Are Ruining Video Games
The cycle of mass layoffs in game development isn’t a problem of the industry’s inherent “instability.” It’s a problem of exploitation.
jacobin.com
Much of what we feel and debate of as well on this forum with alot of common sense.
“Video Game Execs Are Ruining Video Games
The cycle of mass layoffs in game development isn’t a problem of the industry’s inherent “instability.” It’s a problem of exploitation.
Gamers play a new video game at the EA PLAY event in Hollywood, California, on June 8, 2019. (Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images)
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For over a year now, video game workers have been crushed by one mass layoff after another. And both CEOs and mainstream media insist that this is just the norm in a “fundamentally unstable” industry.
“The state for workers in the industry is the worst it’s ever been,” longtime game developer Kai — a pseudonym — told Jacobin. Having worked fairly consistently in video games since the 1990s at both big-name companies and smaller outfits, Kai was recently laid off along with their colleagues when their studio unceremoniously shuttered. “Even when you believe you’ve found yourself the right job, it can evaporate in an instant, and then you are suddenly competing against hundreds or thousands of people for every job position,” Kai said.
Approximately twenty thousand people have lost their jobs in game development since 2023 alone. To an untrained eye, mass layoffs may indicate a crisis in profitability, but video game companies are actually doing quite well. Revenues surpass those of the music and film industries combined by over a hundred billion dollars. A single game, Grand Theft Auto V, released over a decade ago, continues to rake in millions of dollars a year and has netted its developer, Rockstar Games, over $8.9 billion.
“There’s people at the top making a lot of money, and then there’s the people at the bottom making the thing that makes that money,” Wayne Dayberry, a game tester at ZeniMax, a large video game company based in Maryland, and member of the recently formed ZeniMax Workers United–CWA, told me. “Everybody’s not getting paid what they should be getting paid.”
With the sword of Damocles always hanging over video game workers’ heads, the media has a responsibility to clarify why workers in arguably the largest entertainment industry are facing worsening conditions — a trend that has everything to do with boosting share prices. Yet, sadly, the mainstream press often lends legitimacy to corporate-friendly notions that the industry simply has a cultural problem. Precarity is part of the biz and workers just need to “get good” or get out. All this obfuscates the defining characteristic of today’s video game industry: unmitigated exploitation of labor.
Mass Layoffs, Mass Profits
In yet another round of mass layoffs at its gaming subsidiaries this year, Microsoft last week shuttered multiple studios in what one developer described as “a fucking gut stab.” From industry giants like Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft to smaller indie developers like Possibility Space, no studio seems immune to the ruthless mandate of corporate cost-cutting. The casualties of this profit maximization are the countless game developers who bring virtual worlds to life, only to find themselves discarded once the product is shipped, regardless of how well the game actually sells. Microsoft imposed these layoffs shortly after posting profits of $21.9 billion in the latest quarter, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.“What definitely changed over the past decades has been the introduction of layoffs to boost share prices,” Kai tells me. “That just wasn’t a thing early on.”
The industry as a whole holds the dubious distinction of having several of the most overpaid CEOs, with Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (and known sexual-abuse enabler) reported to have a net worth of $7 billion. Kotick made $154 million in 2020 alone. At the same time, some of his employees were going hungry.
Despite the industry being immensely profitable, video game executives have lost any compunction when it comes to imposing astounding layoffs on their workforces, wielding tens of thousands of firings as a blunt instrument to appease shareholders and boost short-term profits. The mere announcement of mass layoffs can cause a significant jump in a company’s share prices, creating the perverse incentive to fire as many people as possible.
Tech companies often lay people off not because they are losing money but because they are simply growing at a slower rate than before. In 2019, Activision Blizzard fired eight hundred people after posting “record-setting” revenue. Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company, fired ten thousand in 2023 even though the company was still profitable and growing, just not as fast as the shareholders wanted.
The true number of layoffs is obscured by the practice of outsourcing employees and hiring temporary contractors.
Yet reports likely underestimate the carnage. The true number of layoffs is obscured by the practice of outsourcing employees and hiring temporary contractors, often with the promise of future work and benefits that never materialize. Once the contracts are over, companies simply cut ties with hundreds or even thousands of temporary workers and can say that it was just the end of their contracts, not a mass firing.
With the prioritization of stock prices, video game companies are following the same path toward the “enshittification,” as it has come to be known in the tech industry, of tech products. Kai points to the widespread detrimental consequences of cyclical layoffs not just on workers but on the companies themselves:
Companies often argue they need to cut jobs when an expensive project doesn’t sell as well as predicted. But workers aren’t buying this argument anymore. Regardless of whether or not a game that went through expensive development loses money, Kai argues, the burden should not be placed on developers. “These companies lay people off that they are going to need to do the work,” Kai says. “They don’t do it because of performance or costs; they do it because it pumps their stock price.”
“You Don’t Really Feel Like a Human Being”
“This industry took off so fucking fast,” Wayne Dayberry of ZeniMax Workers United told me. “I think the morality of it is catching up all of a sudden.” He says that the combination of a burgeoning, unregulated industry and the “pure passion” of many of the workers flocking to it created a perfect storm of exploitation. “It was just this money-producing thing. As long as everything was working, then why stop?”Dayberry works in quality assurance (QA), the team tasked with testing games to identify bugs and systemic glitches before they get released. These workers are often the most exploited in the industry. Since QA is generally regarded as an entry-level department, many workers are paid minimum wage, six-day weeks are common, and burnout and turnover are high. “You have to get in somewhere,” Dayberry says. “We’re the thing that just gets replaced.”
Part of what contributes to that burnout is what’s known as “crunch,” or overwork, usually in the lead-up to a game’s release date. During crunch periods, people can work up to a hundred hours per week. Some have had heart attacks at work, lost their marriages, and been pressured to show up even when actively puking from the flu.
Workers call these “death marches,” and people who have nervous breakdowns are labeled “stress casualties.” “You don’t really feel like a human being,” Dayberry says.
There have been many high-profile stories in the video game press about the widespread abuse that employees suffer at the hands of development companies and publishers. And gamers are realizing that the end product from all this abuse is undercooked games that nickel and dime them in the form of microtransactions and recurring “battle passes.”
This profit maximization also distorts the kinds of games that developers are allowed to pursue. “Big companies will refuse to do small, cheap projects (think $1 million or less) that are almost guaranteed to make a profit, because they wouldn’t make enough money,” Kai says. “We’ve hit a point where if the profit isn’t eight or nine digits, it somehow doesn’t count.” The result is a hollowing out of the middle, as it were, where the only projects that get made are resource-intensive blockbusters or no-budget indie games.
But the video game industry — motivated chiefly by profit, run by amoral executives, and greased with the labor and passion of highly exploited and disempowered developers — is beginning to change.
There’s Power in a Union
Dayberry has been at ZeniMax for seven years and is one of the lead organizers with ZeniMax Workers United. A few years ago, he began reaching out to his fellow workers about their grievances and bringing those issues to HR. Those meetings went nowhere fast, and that’s when he started floating the idea of forming a union.ZeniMax Workers United is currently bargaining their first contract with ZeniMax, recently acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion. The QA team has formed its union in the midst of several other successful drives in the industry, with QA workers at Raven Software, Blizzard Albany, and Keywords Studios also unionizing. It seems no accident that perhaps the most stepped-on department in video games is leading the charge.
Executives currently operate with impunity, accountable to shareholders but not their workforces.
Dayberry has been in contact with workers at other companies and sees widespread discontent. “The more we’ve had conversations with people in other studios, it’s all kind of the same issues,” he said. “Everybody has collectively reached a point where it’s not sustainable anymore.”
ZeniMax Workers United specifically is trying to change the mentality that keeps QA at the bottom of the barrel. “We’re trying to push toward this new idea of, why not retain skilled employees?” Dayberry told me.
“Unionization is good for companies. They are just too shortsighted to see it,” says Kai.
Executives currently operate with impunity, accountable to shareholders but not their workforces. Electronic Arts, for example, spent $325 million on stock buybacks in just the third quarter of 2023, right before a spate of mass layoffs, and has spent a total of $1.3 billion on stock buybacks over the course of just one year.
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