Destructive Imbalance: The Need for Game Developers to Organize

Here we go again. 

Last week, the game industry was rocked by 800 layoffs at Epic Games, nearly 16% of their total workforce. The announcement is just the latest in a string of “reductions in force” across the game industry – Striking Distance, Relic, Amazon, and Probably Monsters among them.

I can’t remember a more challenging time for game developers between jobs – or, worse, for someone new trying to break into the business. That said, while this year is particularly bad, the game industry has never offered job stability. Five or more years at a single game company is a lifetime. 

On a personal level, I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had an extended run at studios in the Dallas area game scene since 2001. I bought a house,  married, and raised my son, putting down roots for the first time.

Yet even a reasonably successful career in the game industry feels fragile. I’ve worked at both start-ups and big companies. I’ve made a small bit of money a couple of times from stock purchase plans or studio acquisitions, though those events were far from life-changing and certainly did not put me on track for early retirement. I’m still a working stiff who needs to pay the bills.

My experience is typical of a lot of developers who’ve been at it for a while. I have many industry peers in the same boat. We’re not the glamorous, charismatic faces of major franchises. We’re not making the rounds doing trade show interviews and serially cashing fat checks from the acquisitions of multiple companies. 

Instead, most folks making games – like everyone doing anything in any profession – go to work every day, put their heads down, and do their job.

Back in a June blog about healthcare, I mentioned the growing need for a strong, empowered labor organization in the game industry – a union with substantially more teeth than the IGDA. But it’s worth spending a little digital ink on exactly what such a labor organization should be fighting for if it ever got off the ground.

There are so many things a game industry union could do. Where should we start?

Offering Portable Group Health Insurance

Maintaining reliable cost-effective health insurance between jobs is a uniquely American problem. If you’re a game developer in Europe or many other parts of the world, odds are you’ve got a safety net that’s not tied to your employment.

Still, I’d put portable group health insurance at the top of the priority list for our theoretical game industry union. Any American between jobs or attempting to start their own business has experienced the sticker shock that comes with paying for a family’s health insurance entirely out of pocket. While the ACA has made healthcare more affordable for the self-employed, any health insurance worth having still takes a big bite out of a family budget.

A union with a large membership could negotiate directly with health insurance companies and offer a portable group plan, much like SAG-AFTRA does for actors and others in the movie industry. In the interim, before a group health care plan is fully in place, they could help negotiate better worker protections in case of a round of studio layoffs – for instance, pushing for transitional periods of continuing paid coverage for several months in addition to other forms of severance.

Advocacy in favor of Remote-Friendly Development

Remote work has its challenges. Many companies have begun a push for employees to return to the office, at least on a hybrid basis. However, if there’s any profession that can and should thrive with a remote-first approach, it’s the game industry.

The unstable nature of game jobs – beholden to the cycle of spinning up massive projects followed by massive layoffs – means workers who are onsite are gambling with the prospect of relocating every few years. The financial and emotional cost to families alike is high. New housing needs to be arranged; kids need to change schools; support networks of neighbors and friends need to be rebuilt.

While I’d never deny there are benefits to working in person with others, I do question the value proposition of an onsite-first approach in an industry that is so fundamentally and historically unstable. Remote workers are far less disrupted by a layoff than someone who packed up and moved across the country, only to be let go after a year.

Further, with so many game companies choosing to locate their studios in urban centers with a high cost of living, affordable housing is increasingly beyond the reach of new employees. 

A remote-friendly approach has many benefits for a company. They’re going to draw from a larger and more global talent pool. Remote work can be promoted as a key company benefit. Expensive relocation packages are no longer needed.

A game industry labor union could be both an advocate for remote work and a central communicator of educational resources for companies looking to improve their remote workflows. 

Anyone who worked through the pandemic and made the transition from onsite to hybrid or remote picked up some tricks and best practices to make it viable. An organization that helps pool that collective knowledge would provide enormous value to companies seeking to protect their culture and best practices in a remote-first world.

Advocacy Against Crunch Culture

My first real industry job was a contract as an assistant designer for MicroProse in the mid-1990s. I worked for around six months before the entire team was laid off. As a contractor, I received no benefits and no severance – the day they laid us off and escorted the entire team out of the building was the final day I got paid. 

I had agreed to contract for a salary, rather than hourly – in retrospect, given the situation on the project, a rookie mistake. The entire time I was there, I worked six days a week, twelve hours a day. On top of that was a ninety-minute commute on each end – a combination of a walk, a light rail ride, and a bus trip. 

For six days a week, I was home for a total of nine hours a day – enough time to sleep and eat and shower, but never enough time to decompress. Like so many others paying their dues in their first job, I was young and hungry, and I wanted to be in the game industry more than anything. So I did it. 

The last thing I’m trying to do is engage in any kind of crunch “war story” one-upmanship that feeds into a hero-worship mindset of putting in extra hours. Frankly, mine is a mild crunch story. I know a lot of folks in the industry who worked on projects where they regularly clocked hundred-hour weeks for over a year.

As the game industry has matured, I’ve seen crunch culture gradually fall out of favor. Situations that are severely exploitative are increasingly rare. Some of the shift is a generational sea change. Younger employees today are better advocates for themselves, and less tolerant of companies – even game companies – that want them to work to death for peanuts.

Nevertheless, ongoing vigilance and education are still required. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, some well-known big-name executives insist that regular application of lengthy, mandatory crunches is the only way to deliver high-quality games.

An empowered labor organization could provide a counterweight to executive pressure, helping advocate for junior employees who are afraid to speak up in the face of a company mandate to crunch. Further, as with serving as an educational resource for the best ways for a company to be remote-friendly, an industry union could help educate companies about the risks and costs of crunch and suggest better development practices that would help avoid it.

Advocacy For Profit Sharing

This will be the most controversial point, and it’s not something I see happening any time soon. It’s the “long play” – a path toward a brighter, sustainable future for the industry where development is more of true a partnership between studio executives and the teams that build great games.

In the wake of the SAG-AFTRA strike, executives are concerned that voice actors are coming for the game industry next. With few exceptions, voice actors working in games get a flat rate per session and no residuals.

The session rate model has long been a source of low-key discomfort for actors, whose performances can add vital character and improve the overall quality of a game. (Listen to the excellent voice work done by the cast in Baldur’s Gate 3, then imagine if less-talented folks had played Lae’zel or Astarion.)

Over the years, I’ve heard developers grumbling about actors advocating for residuals on games. The complaints mostly take the form of a “what about me?” gripe. Developers who poured their heart and soul for four years into a game typically don’t get residuals – why should an actor who spent four hours in a sound booth get them?

My response is simple: right, developers don’t get residuals, but why not? Maybe we should. Is that discussion worth having? Instead of viewing voice actors as greedily reaching for a bigger slice of the pie, developers should view them as allies kicking down the door for the rest of us.

Historically, profit-sharing deals in the movie and music business have suffered from creative accounting, so residuals are open to manipulation. But as part of the overall mix of a developer’s potential compensation package, residuals or direct profit-sharing are more concrete than ephemeral stock options or entirely subjective team bonuses.

Developers who resent voice actors advocating for residuals are aiming their anger at the wrong target. Those in control of the industry’s means of production have long been engaged in the classic anti-labor tactic of pitting employees against each other. 

I’m not going to post all the numbers here, but in the immediate wake of Epic’s layoff of 800 employees, I’d encourage everyone reading to do five minutes of research. 

Assuming a high average monthly burn rate – say 20,000 a head for salary and overhead plus benefits – paying 800 employees for a full year would cost the company around 200 million dollars. (To be fair, the severance package Epic gave to departing employees was substantial.) 

Now look up Epic’s profits and company valuation, year over year, for the last five years. Then, for an even more uncomfortable wake-up call, look up the growth in Tim Sweeney’s personal net worth over the same period.

In an industry where it’s rare to find anyone – from the entry-level designer all the way up to a studio’s CEO – who’s anything less than passionate, dedicated, and hard-working, our industry suffers from imbalances that are overdue for significant correction.

There’s lots more I could talk about. Questionably legal noncompete clauses, companies agreeing in secret not to “poach” from each other, abusive managers, and a lack of salary transparency are all common, destructive anti-employee practices I’ve witnessed in person over the years. 

But the movie industry’s old “studio system” did not change overnight – it took a lot of hard work, over several decades, for SAG-AFTRA to empower actors and other creatives. I’d be content to start with a few incremental steps toward a healthier, equitable game industry.

A strong and empowered labor organization offers the best way forward.

Comments – both positive and negative – are always welcome! New blogs appear on Tuesdays.