No, Mass Layoffs Are Not Just Part of the Videogame Industry's "Culture."
You must understand, people are lying to you in order to exploit you.
I made the mistake of listening to NPR today and, I gotta tell ya, folks, it’s bleak out there on the airwaves. The UK is experiencing a shortage of tea (gasp!) because those meddling Houthis are blocking international shipping lanes, but NPR can’t be bothered to tell you exactly why the Houthis are doing that (they’re trying to stop a genocide). The Department of Education, under pressure because delays with its FAFSA program are destabilizing much-needed funds for low-income students, is choosing to pay for additional administrators to fast-track those FAFSA applications, but NPR can’t be bothered to ask the Department why they don’t instead just give out more Pell Grants without means tests, or, you know, abolish tuition as any civilized society that values education should. I envision a day, not too far in the future, when NPR’s Ari Shapiro, the formerly hip young attractive host now considered the outlet’s resident wizened sage, is interviewing the strong girlboss CEO of ExxonMobil about how she’s had to abandon her house on Martha’s Vineyard due to rising sea levels and Shapiro “forgets” to ask her about those damning climate studies her company suppressed.
Now, I’ve already said practically everything I could ever say about NPR in this (very long) article that I wrote for Current Affairs (as well as this video version which more people should watch). So this article is not a critique of NPR itself, but rather an examination of a specific story on the videogame industry which appeared on All Things Considered. Before you ask yourself, “Why should I give a shit about the videogame industry?,” let me tell you that as someone who has not played a new videogame in nearly ten years, this story has many implications that go far beyond just videogames.
The story is about the astounding amount of layoffs that videogame executives have imposed on their overworked and precarious workforces in the last year, with approximately 16,000 people losing their jobs in 2023 and 2024 alone. Now, the way I framed the layoffs with that preceding sentence contains the central issue here which establishment news outlets are totally ignoring: corporate executives impose these layoffs, and they lie to us by acting like their decision to fire thousands of people while increasing their own salaries and shareholder earnings was an act of god. NPR and the IGN reporter they interviewed for this story made zero mentions of the words “executive salaries,” “stock buybacks,” “unions,” “burnout,” or “capitalism.” A story about mass layoffs with glaring omissions such as these is not informational, it’s corporate propaganda.
Now to be fair, the original IGN story by Rebekah Valentine does go into more detail about how the executives have been shortsighted and made their employees pay the price for their constant mistakes. “There didn’t seem to be any strategy or plan other than KEEP MOVING,” said one game developer that Valentine talked to, “and by the time we were laid off the CEO had sacrificed hundreds of employees to keep moving towards a destination that we never got any closer to.” Valentine correctly concludes: “there’s something deeply wrong with how video game executives are choosing to spend their money, and rank and file developers keep paying the price for it.”
But it is quite telling that this (relatively narrow) critique is largely left out in the NPR interview. Instead, Valentine and NPR’s Ailsa Chang paint a picture which is far more flattering to the CEOs, where we’re told the main causes for the layoffs are 1) games are just getting more and more expensive to make, and therefore riskier: “You need to have the best graphics, the most content, the most things for players to do,” says Valentine. “And as a result, they take even longer to make. So games that, you know, previously may have only taken two or three years to make are now taking four or five, six, seven, maybe even longer. And therefore the cost is just skyrocketing to make these big games.” And 2) the videogame industry “is kind of a fundamentally unstable career,” says Valentine, and this is chalked up to an inherent “culture” of the industry.
To the first point about expense inflation, there is much more to the story. Game publishers and developers constantly argue that they have to spend tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of risky dollars developing games because apparently it is the consumers who demand that they push graphics and game duration and nebulous “content” to unsustainable extremes. Notice that this excuse puts the blame squarely on the consumers, despite the fact that many gamers have become wise to and fatigued with high-production, bloated games with filler content that are produced at enormous personal cost to the people who are forced to work overtime and sacrifice their physical and mental health to make already rich executives even more rich and then still get kicked out on the street even if the game does sell well.
“I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding,” is a meme in the gamer community for a reason. There have been many high-profile stories in the videogame 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 expensive abuse are games which nickel and dime them and give unsatisfactory gaming experiences. Companies are making literal billions of dollars just on microtransactions alone, which are cynically designed to manipulate gamers into reflexively and addictively paying for more content on top of the baseline retail price of $70 for a single game, and yet those billions of dollars can’t seem to save workers their jobs.
The “games are getting more expensive to make” argument would be more sympathetic if more of the revenue was going to the workers. But it’s not. Videogame executives have some of the most disparate salaries in the country compared to their rank-and-file employees. Bobby Kotick, CEO of videogame publisher Activision Blizzard has an estimated net-worth of $7 billion. Kotick made $154 million in 2020 alone. Meanwhile, some of his employees were going hungry. “One employee wrote that they had to skip meals to pay rent and that they used the company’s free coffee as an appetite suppressant,” writes Time Magazine. “Another said they would only eat oatmeal and bail on team lunches because they couldn’t afford to buy food at the company cafeteria. A third said they and their partner stopped talking about having kids because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford it. That contrasted with pictures they saw of more senior Blizzard employees enjoying vacations to Disneyland with their families.”
These executives are literally laying off starving people in order to “save money” because their games are “too expensive” to make apparently, while an inordinate amount of the drain on the company is actually coming from the overpaid CEO!
To the second point that the videogame industry is just “fundamentally” unstable, why must this be so? Industries are not natural phenomena. Economies are not governed but immutable laws of the universe. They are created through human choices. Unmentioned in either the IGN article or the NPR conversation is the fact that just the mere announcement of mass layoffs can cause a significant jump in a company’s share prices, thus creating a perverse incentive to fire as many people as possible. And even when game companies are massively successful, they still cut jobs. Activision Blizzard once fired 800 people “despite posting ‘record-setting’ revenue.” Tech companies often lay people off not because they are losing money, but because they are growing at a slower rate than before. Microsoft recently fired 10,000 people even though the company was still profitable and expanding, just not as fast as the shareholders wanted. What’s a quick and easy way to inflate those share prices? Get rid of 10,000 people. Did they bother cutting executive pay and bonuses? Share holder returns? Did anyone stop to think that the whole concept of infinite economic growth within our corporeal existence is a fever dream? Nope. Throw those bums in the gutter.
And the reported tens of thousands of people who have been laid off this year is not even the whole picture. Companies hide their true numbers of layoffs by outsourcing employees and hiring people as temporary contractors with the promise of future work. This way, once the contracts are over, the companies simply cut ties with hundreds or even thousands of workers and they can say that it was just the end of the contract, as opposed to mass firings. This is all representative of shortsighted, industry-wide business practices that can only be considered sane at a financial level because the very human costs, sometimes life-ending, are not borne by the executives, they are forced upon the workers. There’s nothing inherent or “fundamental” about any of this. But in the interview on NPR, this is all simply chalked up to “culture”:
CHANG: Well, do you think that the culture then within the video game industry is just fundamentally incompatible with job security, stability, predictability?
VALENTINE: Yeah.
CHANG: (Laughter).
VALENTINE: Long term, it certainly seems that way.
The (Laughter) is enraging. This isn’t a game. These are peoples livelihoods. To say that any industry is “fundamentally incompatible with job security, stability, predictability,” is to be profoundly incurious and dim about the many ways things can be better. Reporters who diminish alternative possibilities to this cruel and unsustainable economic model are presenting a vision of the world which is fundamentally anti-human.
This is not to say that there isn’t a definable “culture” in the videogame industry. There absolutely is. The concept of “crunch,” of killing yourself with overwork in order to get the thing over the finish line by the deadline, is indeed driven into people’s heads. One videogame college in Washington is infamous for teaching its students to accept exploitative crunch culture. During crunch periods, where people work up to one hundred hours per week (that’s not an exaggeration), some have had heart attacks at work, lost their marriages, and are pressured to show up even if they’re actively puking from the flu. Workers call these “death marches.” People who have nervous breakdowns are labelled “stress casualties.”
But to call job insecurity and instability just parts of the “culture” is to obfuscate the very real, identifiable decisions that powerful executives make which cause these economic insecurities in the first place. Chronic mismanagement, deliberate attempts to undermine workers and hurt their “performance” as a pretext to firing them, and imposing mass layoffs simply for profit maximization are all part of the executive’s predictable playbook. These decisions have material effects on people’s lives. Grinding workers to dust is not “culture.” It’s the result of a psychotic economic system.
This is not unique to videogames. I have written about how the live entertainment industry, a field not dissimilar from videogames and which I have given over a decade of my labor to, could be a hell of a lot better to its overworked and underpaid workers. Combatting this persistent and pernicious lie that, well, it’s all just part of “the culture,” is essential to improving our working lives. I can’t really put it better than Josh Loar, a fellow theatre technician, when he wrote in Current Affairs:
From Hollywood to the music industry, theatre to video games, the people who make your entertainment do physically grueling work for exceedingly long hours, and the rate of burnout is high. The usual response to any complaints about working conditions is that our industry is “glamorous,” and that the sheer excitement of working in entertainment must surely offset any negative impacts. This mindset keeps us working such long hours that we can’t be present for birthdays, weddings, funerals, and other major life events—because the show must go on, right?
Similarly, Valentine interviewed one game developer who said, “I've been in the industry for 15 years and I've never seen things this bad. Everyone is scared and waiting to see if their studio is going to be next. I am worried that this year is going to cause real, permanent damage and scarring to the game devs affected, and it's not going to be good. The aftershocks of this are going to resonate for the foreseeable future. Games are ultimately a labor of love and creativity, and a demoralized workforce is not going to be at its best.”
So what to do about this depressing state of affairs? Valentine shrugged her shoulders in the interview: “And I think this has been a wake-up call for a lot of people in realizing that this thing that they love to do and are very good at — making games — is maybe not a place that they're able to retire in. And I don't know that we have a solution for that yet.”
We do have solutions for this. This is not the way things should be. This is the product of an economic system which relies upon ever catastrophic booms and busts in order to expand its profits. An essential tenant of capitalism is the reliance upon the lie of endless growth, endless profit maximization, unlimited expansion, without which the system crumbles. To use a constant refrain of James Stephanie Sterling, one of the videogame industry’s most stalwart critics, “Videogame corporations don’t just want some of the money, they want all of the money.” This, simply, is insane.
The whole concept of mass layoffs does not have to exist. By accepting this framing, you are accepting a world where every industry is precarious. Where every worker exists at the whim of executive monsters and an unchangeable culture which tells them that they deserve nothing better. I know that humans are generally blind, stumbling, and amnesiac creatures, but we must not forget that unionized jobs with guaranteed pensions used to be something that was achievable and sustainable in this country. Unions didn’t kill that dream. Globalized neoliberalism did. The executive class sells us a world where this is proper and good. It is our job to show them that they are full of shit, the slobs.
When people say that corporations are legally obligated to prioritize shareholder value (meaning the profit motive) over and above all other considerations, they are technically correct, but they often do not then make the next necessary step of saying, “such a legal obligation is inimical to a just economic system and should (and can) be abolished.” Accepting recurring mass layoffs as an unalterable reality is a profound failure of the imagination. We can pass laws, or strong unions can bargain contracts, which stipulate that not a single employee can be laid off without first cutting executive salaries, bonuses, and shareholder payouts, even to zero, for however long is necessary. I assure you, billionaire videogame executive Bobby Kotick would continue to thrive on zero income for a year (or even the rest of his life!) if that was the alternative to firing thousands of people.
Additionally, regulations could be put into place to clamp down on, or even totally eliminate, the ability of companies to hire people as independent contractors instead of as full employees. Such regulations have been used against Uber and other exploitative gig economy companies and they can be used against videogame companies too.
Besides these worker protections, more public funding could be secured to make the arts industries less volatile as a whole. Other countries such as France give enormous amounts of state funding to entertainment and the arts. This allows for more risk taking and creativity without the fear of bankruptcy, as well as an elimination of the profit motive. There is precedent for this in the United States. The Works Progress Administration gave opportunities for more radical creators to make a living, leading to a flourishing in public art. The National Endowment for the Arts is an existing mechanism by which we could do this and it must be funded more. Getting rid of the monopoly of corporate and vulture capitalist funding would open up space for work that is more experimental, less regimented, and which provides for the livelihoods of tens or even hundreds of thousands of videogame workers.
Now, here I must say that much of my analysis on this topic is basically exactly the same as what James Stephanie Sterling has been making, with Sisyphean endurance, for going on twenty years. You can’t find better critique along these lines than Sterling’s weekly show The Jimquisition. Sterling puts a fine point on all of this:
We’ve gotten far too used to the dehumanization that allows executives to upend thousands of lives without remorse, reflection, or regret. And no matter how many times they wring their hands, no matter how much they claim the decision was “hard,” they truly feel no guilt about this. Because they could stop. They could stop the routine of mass hirings followed by mass layoffs. They could stop awarding themselves millions of dollars and being by far the biggest unnecessary financial drain in any industry. … We should stop pretending that this is complicated, because it isn’t. It’s a choice. The billionaires at the top of our economic system choose to horde wealth and the millionaires under them enable it, by choice.
And here I am reminded of an unforgettable passage from Matt Taibbi’s important reporting on the 2008 financial crisis. Taibbi said that with all of the banking executives, wall street hucksters, and blood sucking parasites that he interviewed, many of them told him with surprising frankness, over and over again, that they knew that what they were doing was wrong; that they were committing fraud; that they were setting up the whole system to fail; that it was probably all illegal; and that a lot of people would be hurt in the aftermath. But they kept on doing it anyway because, well, nobody was stopping them.
Nobody was stopping them.
There is no use in trying to persuade the ruling class to be better people. They are constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than what they do. We shouldn’t ask them to make different, more humane choices. We should force them. We should abolish them. We should ensure that they can never exist again. That is our task. We cannot accept the precarity within the videogame industry, or any other industry, as immutable, as just a quirky part of the “culture.” This ensures continued exploitation and immiseration for millions of people.
Also, if you’re listening to NPR, or any other establishment media outlet, those great purveyors of apologia for the worst crimes that humans are capable of, please, for the love of god, at least just listen to some alternative media as well. By masquerading as being "balanced" and "objective," NPR and all the others are in fact obfuscating their very real and pernicious distortions. Mere assemblages of facts are not the truth. And, as I try to demonstrate, what the establishment leaves out of their stories is often the most important part.
I’ve had my fill of NPR for another year.