It took me a few days to fully process my thoughts on the recently-announced sad changes at Playful – “changes” being a polite euphemism for “a bunch of people just lost their jobs.”
While layoffs aren’t unusual in the game industry, this one hit uncomfortably close to home. Before I became a freelancer and started Scree Games in 2019, I worked at Playful for four and a half years, and I count many of the casualties among my closest industry friends.
The bright spot has been watching the Dallas-area game industry come together to find new professional homes for folks who want to stay local. Fantastic companies such as BonusXP, Gearbox, and BossFight have opened their doors wide – holding meet-and-greet mixers, making connections, and reaching out to the many talented people affected. There’s a whole lot of empathy going around because – let’s face it – we’ve all been there before.
And that’s the other side of the coin: we’ve all been there before.
The game industry is by nature both cutting edge and cyclical. Business models that worked five years earlier can crash and burn as the market shifts and technology changes. Many companies, especially mid-sized companies looking to break out and take their business to the next level, falter as project budgets and burn rates rise.
These factors combine to push developers to take big risks, but can also put them in a position where a single underperforming title leads to a round of layoffs. In many cases, the restructuring is limited; after a layoff round, a developer can rise from the ashes, chart a new course, and become stronger than ever. Sometimes, as with the notorious end of 38 Studios, the disaster is complete, total and surprising. For many large first-party developers working for big publishers, yearly layoffs can almost become the norm; during my time at Westwood in the late nineties, we shared a lot of dark jokes about EA’s regular post-Christmas firings.
No matter the circumstances, the toll the cycle takes on employees is heavy. It’s hard to lay down roots in the game business. At least in the United States, studios are widely scattered – many still are located on the West Coast, but large development communities have sprung up in many major cities around the country. Since companies are motivated to “bet large” until they can’t any more, there’s seldom a lot of notice when a downsizing rolls around.
The cyclical churn is difficult for those outside the industry to understand. Games make a lot of money. But unless you’re the lucky indie developer who hits it big, the majority of that money is going to people who aren’t the developers. Publishers, investors, and the major digital storefronts all get their slice of the pie. Most developers I know are middle class, sometimes comfortably so, but for the most part the people making the games aren’t getting rich.
As I continue to help former co-workers from Playful make connections, I keep thinking about the latest industry trends and buzz phrases. Mid-tier developers are vanishing from the scene, and the rise of a business model with a small core team supplemented by an army of contract labor – the Uber and Lyft models that so typify the gig economy – feels like the next wave. Outsourcing work to dedicated art or engineering houses, both at home and abroad, is increasingly commonplace. In fact, as a “consultant by choice” I’ve benefited from the flexibility such arrangements can afford.
Shipping a successful game is an exceptionally challenging task – one that in my view requires a close-knit team that balances both technical and artistic talent in equal measure. All the members of the team need to keep moving steadily toward a clear shared vision. Still, other creative industries, like the movie business, manage to build large-scale and successful entertainment projects by leveraging a diverse set of contracted companies coming together to achieve one vision.
But the parallels are far from perfect. The movie industry has a robust culture of unionized protections for its skilled labor forces. Further, making movies relies on proven technologies and a century of refined processes for both the creation and distribution of its product. Without better worker protections in place and a far more stable ecosystem, I don’t believe the movie industry’s path is a model that applies to building quality games.
There’s no question the global workplace is changing – not just in the game industry, but every workplace, all the time. The wheel turns; new methodologies replace the old. Agile replaces Waterfall. Private office layouts replace cubicles, and then cubicles are replaced by open floor plans (until everyone realizes working in open floor plans is horribly distracting).
The games the industry produces are also changing all the time. Platforms rise and fall. Entire genres come and go. Single player titles are pronounced dead, and then they’re suddenly the next big thing.
In fact, there’s only one industry constant I feel safe in predicting any more: it’s only a matter of time until the next layoff rolls around.
Stay safe out there.
We’re all in this together! Leave feedback in the comments below. I also give out hugs.