Let’s talk about the gaming industry.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world will be unboxing
video games and downloading new updates this week
adding billions of dollars to an industry that’s already richer
than both the global box office and the music business combined.
But the huge success of video games
has come at a cost to many people who make them.
So what’s happening to the workers behind the screen?
It’s pretty incredible, really, just how massive this industry is
and how much it’s evolved over the decades.
This was Nimatron, the very first game machine
that debuted in New York in 1940.
Fast forward to the archade games of the 70s
home gaming consoles, computer games in the 80s and 90s
online gaming at the turn of the century
and now mobile gaming and e-sports
where full-time, professional gamers fill stadiums
and earn millions, yes, millions of dollars.
Let’s wrap our heads around some numbers.
In 2016, a third of the world’s population were video gaming
that’s two and a half billion people.
In 2017, more than 660 million people watched other people play video games
on platforms like Twitch and Youtube.
In 2018, the gaming industry made at least 130 billion dollars.
And this is a business that’s still growing by about 10 percent a year.
That’s a pretty exciting industry for aspiring animators, developers
and coders to want to be part of.
And staff salaries for developers are a lot higher than your average job.
In the US, a developer can earn around $100,000 a year.
In India it’s about 500,000 rupees or $6.000 a year
a lot higher than the average person’s $2.000 yearly salary.
You know I am so glad I got into game design
it’s cool to be able to create the kind of games that we play.
And 2019 was the year we found out just how big a price
people pay to be part of the world’s biggest entertainment industry.
Crunch culture is still a huge issue in the industry.
It’s when workers are put under enormous pressure to work
overtime in order to meet game launch deadlines.
Before the studio Treyarch released “Call of Duty: Black Ops 4” last year
some testers said that “crunch time” involved working
70-hours a week for weeks on end.
The gaming website Kotaku, says some of those guys
earned only 13 dollars an hour, while Black Ops
made about 500 million dollars in just a few days.
“This multiplayer mode is super fun, dude.”
Some testers working on Fortnite, another massive
and free online game, also reported 70-hour working weeks.
And what happens a lot is that after a launch
many workers are laid off.
Kevin just mentioned women
and they have major concerns about the gaming work culture.
As many as a billion gamers are thought to be women
and only 19% of the industry’s staff are female
Ever since the #MeToo movement, more and more women
are coming forward with allegations of rape and harassment.
We spoke to one designer who even made a game
about what it was like to be a woman in the industry.
In 2014 a scandal known as ‘Gamergate’ consumed the gaming world.
It was a huge online culture war about a lot of things but at the heart of it
was the treatment of women in a male-dominated industry.
At the time, a developer named Zoe Quinn
and others received rape and death threats.
So much so that even the FBI was called in to investigate.
People like feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian
came under pretty heavy fire for posting this:
extremely toxic, patronising, and paternalistic attitudes about women.
Workers have been trying to unionise to demand things
like better pay, and fair treatment by gaming studios.
But it’s not been easy.
That conference triggered an online movement called #GameWorkersUnite
and it’s now an international organisation
whose mission even has the backing of US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
So is the industry doing anything right?
Gaming studios, including Treyarch, which we spoke about earlier
say they are trying to reduce the crunch culture.
The GameWorkersUnite movement has formally been accepted
into the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain.
And some companies like Blizzard Entertainment and EA
also made Glassdoor’s 100 best US companies to work for in 2018
although EA fell off that list in 2019.
For consumers and developers, there’s a lot to look forward to
and the hope is that as this industry grows and rakes in billions more
gaming workers will reap the benefits of a business that
at the heart of it, is meant to be about fun.