-It is a book about why the video game industry
is so volatile and what happens to people
when game studios shut down and how they move on,
how they feel, how they recover.
It tells a bunch of human stories
and kind of tries to capture some of the issues
that the video game industry faces
and then tries to present some solutions to those issues.
Why is the video game industry,
even as it makes exponentially more money every single year,
so -- have such a tough time
keeping its workers happy and stable and employed?
-How did you decide you were going to write about,
you know, studio closures versus focusing on layoffs
or crunch or any of the other issues
that you've written about before?
-It is a book about volatility,
and I think that for all the attention we pay to crunch,
which is a good thing, and excessive overtime
is definitely a problem in the games industry,
I think that it's the volatility that drives people out.
It's the thought of having to take a new job every two years,
having to move across the world,
move to new cities every single time.
As the pandemic started and it suddenly became clear
that more and more people would have to be remote
and eventually most of, if not the entire,
video game industry, at least in North America,
was remote, it became more of, like, a question of,
is this sustainable long term,
and, like, what are companies gonna do moving forward?
-It might change the way that studios handle relocation
is what you're thinking? -Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I think just the idea of, like, okay,
if I'm in a studio -- 'cause, like,
maybe there's no way to prevent a studio from shutting down.
Maybe there's no way to have stopped,
like, Irrational Games from shutting down.
Maybe it was always gonna shut down.
But if I'm working at Irrational Games
and I'm in Boston and I love Boston
and I don't want to move my family out of Boston,
my options are either, like, go indie,
go to another industry, or work remotely for another company.
And if, like, suddenly that wasn't an option in the past,
but if suddenly now moving forward
it's an option, the industry becomes a lot more approachable
and accessible and sustainable.
If I'm no longer having to move across the country every time
I need a new job,
maybe I can actually have a career at this thing
and just work remotely the whole time.
-When you're describing the video game industry
in your book, I couldn't help but think
about the journalism industry.
And do you think there are some similarities
there in terms of those work conditions or volatility?
-Yeah, no, definitely.
The thing about media and journalism in general
is that there's a lot of failing business models in journalism
and there's a lot of --
like, the ad model has just been devoured by Facebook and Google,
and so we've seen a lot of media companies suffer as a result.
There are a lot of media companies
that just have struggled
because they aren't able to make enough money,
whereas in video games, the games --
games revenue has just gone up and up and up and up.
Like, this is a -- I think the latest figure
I saw is $180 billion industry, so this is an industry
where, like, a lot of people are making a lot of money,
unlike media, where it's a little more understandable
when people can't -- when companies struggle.
In games, the fact that, like, there's this volatility
while the industry as a whole is making,
like, obscene amounts of money, that, to me,
is really the biggest difference between this and media.
-But what do you think needs to kind of happen for developers
to be able to find stable, like, financially secure jobs
while not crunching to the max?
Is that even possible? What do you think?
-So crunch is one issue.
Stability is another issue.
There are a few solutions that I explore.
The one that I think is gonna be the most important,
the most effective is people organizing
and creating unions in the video game industry,
which, I mean, it's kind of silly
that that still hasn't happened.
It's kind of weird that it still hasn't happened.
Workers should have a seat at the table
and be able to have some sort of influence
and say as to how the company that they operate moves forward.
If you look at situations that we've seen recently,
like where a game studio is suddenly shut down
and nobody saw it coming at all, like Telltale Games
most recently or 38 Studios,
just the fact that that can happen and people
can just be left completely screwed because they're, like --
they don't even get severance or anything like
that isn't going to stop the company from shutting down,
but a union contract could force the company
to wind things down a couple of months earlier
and give people proper severance and proper notice
rather than suddenly abruptly shutting down
because they ran out of money.
I think that is really essential.