"The State for Workers in the Industry is the Worst it's Ever Been" - An Interview With a Laid-Off Video Game Worker
I spoke with a longtime video game developer about the state of their industry and how things could be a whole lot better.
The following is an interview I did with a video game developer who was recently laid off along with all of their coworkers from a shuttered game studio. With about 20,000 video game workers having lost their jobs since 2023, and with an incredibly low-rate of unionization in the industry, times are tough out there for these workers. This worker, referred to here as “Kai” for purposes of anonymity, has been in the industry since the late 1990s and has worked at both big-name and smaller indie studios. As such, they have a lot of expertise on many facets of their industry. Having just lost their job and been pushed into a highly competitive labor market, they feared that what they said to me may prevent them from regaining their livelihood, hence their request for anonymity.
We spoke about a range of issues, including working conditions, unionization, mass layoffs, and diversity in the video game industry. The plight and perspectives of everyday workers such as this are very important to air, discuss, and think about. This interview has been lightly edited for style and clarity. Portions of this interview originally appeared in Jacobin.
KODY CAVA: Based on interviews with people working in the video game industry, the mood seems at once dismal and hopeful. On the one hand, people are being laid off left and right, crunch culture is in full swing, companies contract out jobs as a way to get around hiring people full time and then drop those contracts at will, precarity is everywhere, demoralization is rife; while on the other hand there are some gains being made with workers such as Zenimax Workers United-CWA and others choosing to unionize, and workers in general understanding that they’re being exploited and choosing to band together. As someone who has been in the industry for a long time, how would you diagnose the general state for workers in the industry today? What’s the mood? Do you see material signs of change?
KAI: I think the state for workers in the industry is the worst it's ever been. People are struggling to not lose houses they were lucky enough to buy, spending six months at a time trying to scrape by on savings or unemployment while trying to find a new job, and the jobs themselves are either few and far between, or come with impossibly high standards that filter out applicants so aggressively that people who could do a job get skipped. The mood is one of defeat and hopelessness. 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.
Change is definitely on the horizon, when you look at things like the the GDC Survey turning up that the majority of game developers now support unionization. Companies themselves (when they aren't laying people off) are working harder to maintain people's work/life balance, remote work has allowed access to significantly more jobs, and the industry is significantly more diverse than it was 20 year ago.
CAVA: Some have characterized the video game industry as one that is just inherently unstable for workers. It seems like this didn’t used to be the case. With your institutional knowledge, how have you seen the industry change for workers in the past twenty years? What have been the biggest disrupters? Do you see a way for things to become more stable right now? Are there things that are worth returning to from twenty years ago?
KAI: It's hard for me to say if the industry itself is more or less stable. … But what definitely changed over the past decades has been the introduction of layoffs to boost share prices. That just wasn't a thing early on. I don't know if predatory publisher relationships leading to studio purchases and closures was much better, but I can say for a fact that these cyclical layoffs aren't only bad for workers, but for the companies themselves. For example, Bioware laid off a significant portion of their employees last fall, and they are now cold-messaging people on LinkedIn trying to hire for positions like short term contract programming. Which likely means that they literally can't finish Dragon Age with the people they have. So when a company lays off workers, they lose institutionalized knowledge and throw their remaining employees into fear based instability which affects performance, but they also clearly do so without thinking about how it's going to impact their active development.
There is only one path to stability, and it's the protections offered to employees by forming a union and forming a bargaining contract that gives them power and agency. Right now employers engage in layoffs with impunity because they literally have no financial reason to care about employees. But mandatory severance and limits on layoffs enforced by a collective bargaining agreement and job actions would slow that down pretty fast. And “work to rule” [on-the-job slowdowns] or malicious compliance campaigns would grind any large development studio to a very sudden and violent halt.
But no, there's literally nothing worth keeping from the industry 20 years ago. It was a shitty boys club dominated by the loudest voice in the room, with employers who believed people needed to live at work, where losing (or even trying to change) your job almost always meant moving across the continent unless you were lucky enough to live in one of the few places in North America with multiple development studios.
CAVA: If you had your druthers, what would be your top demands in a union contract? Besides wages and benefits, what do you see as the biggest game changers that could be secured in a collective bargaining agreement? Revenue sharing? Right of first refusal for new projects? Guaranteed hours? Layoff protections? No subcontracting? What are the demands?
KAI: Without a doubt the top demand would be remote work without location based salaries. The ability to work with remote people has been a key part of game development for years before COVID-19 pushed people to work-from-home, and it allows game developers the opportunity for stability, not having to uproot for each new job. And location based salaries are nonsense. If you can't pay a San Francisco salary then simply don't hire people who live there. Don't screw someone who lives in an inexpensive place out of a comfortable life to compensate.
A close follow up to that is to enforce that layoffs cannot happen if the company is operating at a profit or a temporary (and survivable) loss. The big industry companies like EA do layoffs without real need. EA’s last round of 'restructuring' took them from what would have been a profitable year into a loss. Add mandatory severance to this as a poison pill against layoffs and we can protect jobs from predatory capitalists.
And of course we need to nip "AI" in the bud. I don't believe it's a true threat to game development, but while CEOs believe they can replace workers it will remain a threat to workers themselves. Those of us who make games know that all the promises people make about AI are nonsense, but CEOs don't make games, so we need to enforce it ourselves.
CAVA: Given the current state of the industry, what would you tell someone who is wanting to enter into the industry today? Someone who is interested in attending an industry trade school? What should their expectations be? As a mentor, what advice would you offer?
KAI: Absolutely do not. Get a valuable job doing something that provides a social good without sapping your own creativity for the sake of making capitalists richer, and instead approach game development as a joyful art. If you absolutely must focus your career around games, then first and foremost you must never invest yourself in someone else's project. They will weaponize passion against you and you will have no real control over anything. Be a professional and hone your skills, but always be aware that you are making someone else's project. Don't give them your best ideas, don't work a minute longer than you have to in a day, assert your rights, and absolutely organize your workplace.
CAVA: Is the nature of video game workplaces conducive to forging strong relationships amongst workers? Is there camaraderie in the workplace? Not necessarily between workers and management, but between workers on the same level? In other words, is the workplace conducive to worker organizing? What challenges are there to worker organizing? Is it dependent on what department it is, such as programmers vs. quality control vs. writers?
KAI: Yes, absolutely. Some of it is trauma bonding, some of it is simply the us-against-them mentality of workers being trod on by the only people who have a real say in a project. But this doesn't make organizing easy. Organizing is hard. There's no magic path to getting it done which saves the significant time and effort investment that it takes. The biggest hurdles to organizing are cliques, apathy, entrenched anti-union sentiment, and the unfortunate fact that game developers love to believe they can do anything from scratch without learning. You cannot organize your workplace without training and knowledge. You have to have the foundational elements of organizing internalized before you start, or you'll fail before you even begin. But beyond that, game developers tend to be an introverted lot, and organizing requires a lot of face-to-face time talking about uncomfortable topics, and making peace with people that you might otherwise not get along with.
As for dividing by vocation, I personally believe that a game developer is a game developer, and everyone needs the same protections and rights. Any organizing campaign that doesn't include every eligible worker is setting itself up for failure, and a lot more workers are eligible than people think. It's not a management vs worker thing. In games, management is a pretty fast and loose term and many managers could easily fall within a bargaining unit.
CAVA: In the wake of 2020, there was a lot of talk in creative industries about “reckonings.” I saw this in the live theatre industry. People realized their work-life balance was atrocious and workers started questioning a lot of fundamentals about their industry. DEI became a big thing, but these 4 years later, it’s hard to point to much material change in the industry. Did this kind of shift in language and philosophy cause much material change in the video game industry? Was it all for show, or did any of it have some substance to it? What do you see as the ideal mechanism for creating a more just industry? It seems that executives using social justice language is often anemic at best and cynical at worst. How do we actually achieve what we want?
KAI: I think that largely the game industry is still paying lip-service to diversity more than anything. Even when you are at a place that champions diversity and has a notably diverse workforce, it is a very quick slide to meetings being filled with bearded white dudes. If the industry truly cared about diversity and inclusion, they would take a stand and call out hate campaigns for what they are, and be clear in public that they don't want support from bigoted consumers. And yet here we are 10 years on from Gamergate, and companies are still silent while Sweet Baby [a script consulting company], game developers, and companies themselves are targeted by hate mobs.
Achieving true diversity and safety in the game industry requires investment in equitable interviewing and hiring practices, including standardizations, blind evaluations, and ending the reliance on industry experience. Companies end up predominantly white and male because those are always the people with the most impressive resumes. It also requires empowering HR to act on reports; I suspect it's still common for people who complain about harassment at work to be chased out in favor of disciplining or removing a star employee. HR needs to be a group that works for workers, not for employers. And of course, having a union rep in the room for every complaint and disciplinary action will go a long way to improving this as well.
But something I think people often miss is that building and fostering diversity requires hiring people with little or no industry experience, and being willing to train them and help them grow in a safe workplace.
CAVA: Since you've worked at both big name studios and smaller outfits, do you have insight into how things like layoffs, unionization, and general working conditions are different or the the same across different sizes of companies? I imagine that smaller companies would try to sell themselves as being more of a tight-knit family, while also still arguing that they simply can't afford for their workers to be unionized (like most companies do) because of less funding. What are some observations you have from working in both worlds?
KAI: I can't say how the differences would affect unionization, since I have yet to be part of any games union. As for organizing I don't think it makes any real difference. Worker rights are worker rights, and every worker deserves to have a seat at the table, regardless of company size. What might change is what's available for bargaining, but you can't know that until you have the power to demand it, because no capitalist is going to be open and forthcoming. As for layoffs and general working conditions, I don't think there's as much of a difference as people think. Every company that requires overtime has failed at fundamental basics, and any company that's going to do layoffs does it in order to conserve money, whatever the reason. The weaponization of passion, the “one big family” thing, these happen at both large and small places. But at the end of the day, your question about funding is really a false assumption; unionization isn't necessarily about being paid more. It's about making sure people are treated fairly and humanely. While pay can be a big part of that, sometimes the value of unionization is as simple as making sure there is a proper process in place before someone can be fired, so that a toxic workplace or problem manager can't retaliate against an employee with zero oversight.
CAVA: What do you make of the argument sometimes bandied about that games are getting more expensive to make (because consumers apparently demand the steepest production values) and therefore are inherently riskier projects for companies to take on, thus "forcing" companies to downsize a whole lot of people if the product doesn't do so well? Same for the argument of pushing microtransactions in games. Are you concerned that increased unionization will cause companies to double down on the narrative that games are too expensive to make and the company needs to recoup its costs by any means necessary? How can workers fight those narratives both internally and in the public?
KAI: Games *are* too expensive to make. Big AAA ones anyway. If you run the math on some basic numbers, you'll see how unsustainable AAA development is. It's not even about market failure or poor reception; a game that costs $200 million to make has to sell like 10 million copies to break even, and that kind of success has never been guaranteed. Games could be made much more sustainably if companies simply stopped chasing pointless levels of fidelity. I'm sure there are some people who do want that, but gamers are fickle fucks who will buy and play literally anything even while they complain about it. I think the industry spends way too much time worrying about obnoxious and loud channels like Digital Foundry instead of just making good games with fun and interesting mechanics. The difference between two games with the same general genre and mechanics, but with high fidelity vs. just a cool non-realistic art style is like 1000 artists, and that's where all the cost bloat comes from. The core team for any game (designers, programmers, gameplay animators) is like 50-100 people on most AAA games. The cost comes from that high fidelity.
All of that aside, the reality is that it doesn't matter. Developers deserve protections from predatory layoffs and bad workplaces, and there's no amount of cost that justifies those things. I also think that the cycle of layoffs is nonsense on its face; see EA/Bioware laying off a ton of the Dragon Age team and then immediately trying to hire contractors to finish the game. These companies lay people off that they are going to need to do the work. They don't do it because of performance or costs, they do it because it pumps their stock price.
There's a ton of ways that big companies could smooth out these transitions while making even more money, without layoffs. They just choose not too. For instance, between projects when you have a ton of people who maybe don't have explicit work on the next sequel or something, these companies could have them develop smaller games for different markets. Games that take less time, take less manpower, cost less to build, and still sell hundreds of thousands of copies. You have to remember, these people are the professionals that make these games successful to begin with. You take a good set of developers and let them loose on passion projects or even novel new ideas, it's like letting a field lie fallow. Instead of grinding out sequel after sequel, the developers get to do something fun, and the market gets something novel. It's diversification for both people's skills and company portfolios.
But AAA games companies have forgotten that they exist to make games. I've personally seen, and have heard others attest to similar, that 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. That's insane, right? We've hit a point where if the profit isn't eight or nine digits, it somehow doesn't count.
Circling back to the original question, however, if employees were unionized and it cost more to lay them off than to just point them at a small project to make profit (or even just keep them on the books idle), everyone benefits. Unionization is good for companies, they are just too shortsighted to see it. It would reduce turnover, protect institutional knowledge, and lead to a happier and more productive workforce. This is fundamentally the narrative people should be embracing. Games are buggy because people are burned out and overworked. Games ship late because companies trim their workforce in order to save money. Games are underwhelming because the creative people who work on them live in fear of losing their job.
I guess that's a long way of saying that no, I am not concerned that unionization will accelerate any kind of problems. It simply won't. Companies fear unionization because they want to pad C-suite salaries and make investors rich, but they forget that the people who make them their money are the developers. I've personally contributed to the original success of franchises that have made companies billions of dollars, and what did I get out of it? A flat salary that barely rose over my entire career when adjusted for inflation, crippling stress-induced health issues, and ultimately, laid off like everyone else, because some rich capitalist decided that they couldn't make enough money.
What I really want is the ability to retire; I'll never get that in the games industry.