Recently, Microsoft announced a sweeping layoff, affecting 1,900 employees in the gaming division, including new acquisition employees from Activision-Blizzard. At that point into 2024 already (twenty-five days) the games industry had seen nearly 6,000 people laid off, which is…just a soul-crushing number. In the move, both Mike Ybarra and Allen Adham quit their roles as well, leaving Blizzard basically leaderless at the executive level, replaced by Johanna Faires from the Call of Duty team.

The big cuts at the Blizzard level are the complete gutting of the customer service and game master teams on WoW, which is going to an outsourced model completely according to tweets about the layoffs, and the complete gutting of the Unnamed Survival Game project team, which has been euphemistically stated as a “reallocation of resources” while people inside claim the entire team has been cut and there’s not really anything to reallocate. Artists, design staff, and other game team members were also cut in the sweeping move. All of that is obviously going to have knock-on effects we’ll be talking about in various ways over the next several years of games pushed out, but I think that’s the wrong way to evaluate this issue. Today, I want to talk about the industry and the way that our society and economic systems incentivize this kind of behavior and why it will, likely, get worse this year and in the coming years.

The Human Cost Of Media

An unspoken, rarely-discussed issue of our media culture in general is how many faceless people are instrumental to making the things you love. TV shows, movies, music, and games all have staff in the hundreds or even thousands of people, from the celebrity-level designers, developers, producers, directors, actors and stars, through to the engineers, mixing operators, riggers, stagehands, and junior artists – and countless other roles between – that do a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work that make these things function. The Disney touch, the Blizzard touch, these are not companies, but the sum product of an under-credited and underpaid staff that does tireless and thankless work to make the experiences we all enjoy function. One of the greatest scams of our modern system is that companies get the credit for the work these people do in building the art we get to enjoy and discuss. We rarely get to know the person who wrote the quest dialogue we enjoyed in that one part of WoW, or what writers contributed to the best zingers from that movie we quote from time to time, and there are rooms full of people who do the real work on those things. When I visited Blizzard in 2018, the first place I went to was the quest design department on WoW, and it was a large room with about 20 people and a handful of whiteboards, and while I knew a few of the names who had spoken on panels at Blizzcon (and the person who brought me, a quest producer at the time), a lot of people I didn’t know. I got to talk to a few of them for a minute, and it was an interesting experience to see all these people I never knew whose work shaped my experience in WoW, to finally see the people whose work was pivotal to that. It was easy to disregard as names in a credit scroll the game never makes you watch, but here they were, real people putting forward the effort needed to make the thing.

I think it is purposefully obfuscated by the companies who bankroll these projects, that the work is not theirs but instead the sum of a massive team of people who spend entire careers grinding away in obscurity, being vital functional elements of the media we all enjoy but never getting even an ounce of the recognition they deserve and about 10% of the pay they should for the amount of money generated by these projects. It is to the benefit of these media conglomerates that we associate the projects they put their name on with them instead of with the people who actually made them, that we look at layoffs and think that at least the company that facilitated the work will still get to make it – and the thing is, fundamentally, they don’t make it – the people who got laid off make it and those people work under awful conditions and hardships to deliver it to us. No one in the leadership levels of these organizations does anything of value to this process short of simply providing the money – and as layoffs demonstrate, they can simply turn off the faucet at any time they damn well please and keep it for themselves once the work is done. The labor movements in Hollywood over the last year demonstrate how skewed the game is – that it takes months of negotiations and hardball to simply get the executives engaged at all, and that they will gladly shoot themselves in the foot before they give another cent to anyone actually involved in making the things we enjoy. Warner Bros Discovery has made a ton of headlines for shitcanning finished projects to take a tax writeoff over releasing them because the suits think it makes them more money! Blizzard’s now-cancelled Odyssey, the survival game, was six years deep into development, millions spent, and in a week where a new survival-hybrid game had taken headlines and record sales, they still cancelled it and walked away, punishing not the decision makers behind the game but instead the team that developed it, that put years of hard work into it, including refugees from other Blizzard teams like the Overwatch 2 team that saw their hard work pissed away because of shifting business priorities. Companies do not care about you or I, the worker, and they will harm thousands of people’s livelihoods before ever admitting to a single fuckup, and that is especially true in gaming…

The Gristmill of Game Development

Game development as a career path is completely fraught with difficulty. You develop specialized skills that often have little or no applicability outside of games, you spend years working as a junior on projects just trying to get that experience and resume built, or worse, you come in through the QA and testing roles which are notoriously exploitative and often insecure or contract gigs, and you get a big break – you finally make it onto main staff on a team you like and a project you enjoy. The studio fails to hit projected revenue targets for the quarter and suddenly, boom – there’s a news story before anyone inside the company is told – 500 affected, it says – and everyone sits in nervous and fearful silence lighting up company Slack channels and emails watching and waiting. Meetings are erratically booked, emails are sent, security are roaming the halls, and you see people leaving, maybe in tears, maybe angry, no one getting to even take their stuff themselves because of the risk of confidential materials leaking. Goodbye messages hit Slack, the tension at a high, and you’re watching to see what happens. You get the fated email, brought to the meeting room that ends up being a staging area to escort people out. Your dream job is shattered, it’s done, and the years of work, the effort you put in, the good things you made, all rendered meaningless in an instant. It wasn’t enough for the machine because they expected to hit 4.7% more profit and only made 4.6% after the C-suite got 50% merit increases in pay, and somehow, that is being laid on your head. You apply to every studio with an opening for your skillset, and the one that takes you is in a different city and state, they expect you to be there in-person, and they don’t pay for relocation. But, this is your path, so you pack up your things, say goodbye to the places and people that have defined your recent life, and move, and the cycle repeats.

This sounds like a dramatic telling of a mundane event, and sure, kind of, but this is a reality for thousands of people in the game industry. Video games, perhaps more than any major industry, has a very bad attitude towards workers and a wide spread of knowledge centers. Sure, a ton of game production happens in southern California, but then it also happens in northern California, Washington, Austin, Maryland, and a loose spread of other cities and global locations. Odds are good that chasing the next opportunity after a layoff requires a relocation – I’ve followed the stories of game devs who’ve moved in arcs like from Texas to California to Sweden in pursuit of their career goals and ambitions but also just to keep a job. Game development as a field is relentlessly competitive, incredibly specialized, and often gets to treat employees like shit because it’s a “dream job.” Blizzard, in fact, was notorious for this throughout their history – once the Blizzard name was established, the company made a point of paying below industry average because “it’s Blizzard” and you’d get to work on genre-defining, record-setting titles – and even as their star fell, Blizzard remained this way and still, largely, does this same thing. As the global video game market has grown, the labor practices have only gotten worse. AAA development is often besieged by “crunch time” where development staff spend dozens of hours of overtime per week in the office grinding through the last tasks in order for their title to ship on its given release date, and since these employees are often paid a fixed salary to begin with, overtime pay is not given, so the hours are surrendered for free. Sure, studios will say, it’s “optional” but in truth, just keeping a role in the industry often means being willing to have your life intruded upon with insane demands of crunch hours just for the sake of the release date on a years-long project. Crunch has had a moment in the spotlight over the last few years where it has started to be reduced as a practice, especially as games that extensively crunched to meet street date like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 launched in, well…suboptimal condition even with the same stress and harm inflicted upon the crunching employees, but it remains a common-enough part of AAA development – as the finish line nears, everything draws into focus and the suits need immediate progress, so away you go.

People often discount the harm done to game developers because it is a dream job, a fulfilling career, but it also takes a toll mentally and even physically. Crunch can destroy any semblance of healthy habits and routine, strain relationships, and puts a lot of work stress onto the team. The career uncertainty and constant relocations often needed to stay engaged in the industry has its own very real impact on the wellbeing and livelihood of developers. All that’s worth it to make something well-loved though, right? Well…

Capital-G Gamers Are The Worst

In modern times, to be fair, this is most media consumers in general, but game developers tend to get it the worst at the hands of fans on social media when the fans dislike a thing they made. Look at the mentions on any post of any developer on any social media platform and there is someone complaining about some game thing, whether it is known if a given developer worked on the thing the random gamer is mad about or not. Meanwhile, the “esteemed” voices of the gaming content creator sphere, your Asmongolds and the like, all talk about how your opinion doesn’t matter, and a bunch of sniveling, echo-chamber weirdos all nod in agreement. To be totally fair, even as I write this, I am not exempt from it – I’ve said things in irritation about the process of game development and dunked on the work of people in the industry, and it is something that I attempt to curtail pretty aggressively, but that doesn’t absolve me of the times I’ve done it.

There is a growing category of over-analysis as well, one that takes a misattributed quote or misremembered statement and runs it to the illogical and silly conclusion at the end of that journey. A video from NeverKnowsBest about the treatment of Bethesda’s Emil Pagliarulo, writer behind Starfield, lays out how a baseless assumption about how a single line in a speech that Pagliarulo made at a conference about not using design documents led to a broad misunderstanding that Bethesda has no documented plan of any sort behind their games, which is patently not true (the industry as a whole has moved away from single-source-of-truth design documents and towards project wikis and knowledge bases that lay out the same plans in a more flexible and living state). This misunderstanding led to a generation of copycat posts, weird obsessives, and debate pedants who rag on Pagliarulo to a point where he had to acknowledge the ways in which it affected his online presence. It really shouldn’t get to that level, but on a regular basis, it does. Sometimes it masks actual bad actions (far too many people will dunk on J Allen Brack forever for the “you think you do but you don’t” line while far fewer will take him to task for having been even marginally involved in covering up the sexual harassment issues at Blizzard by being a shield to Alex Afrasiabi) and puts focus on more trivial matters instead.

Sure, on a level, I get it – and it’s fine to be critical of media you love, to want more, to feel as though something didn’t live up to your expectations. I don’t think that extends into open and direct harassment of these people and I think we, as a whole community and hobby, can do better at drawing the line between professional and personal. In a lot of cases, the process behind what makes it into a video game and the people involved is so opaque and inconsistent that it doesn’t even make sense to single out individual contributors for what is, in many cases in mainstream games, a team decision and effort. That doesn’t mean we cannot be critical of the end product (and I find it vexing that some developers do the “you’ve never made a game and so you can’t speak on the issue!” thing), but we ought to be pushing that feedback at the product and company, not the team and individual. And some gamers take the chance in things like these layoffs to say shit like, “that’s just how the business works, sucks to suck,” and I have some critique of that…

The Business of Games (and Our Whole Economic Model) is Fucked

Most big game studios that get headlines for layoffs are, categorically, large companies that are usually publicly held. They have the pressure of investors who spend real money on shares of the company and expect a return. The very basic idea is that these companies will project how they expect to do in terms of profit and revenue and will often take measures to ensure they meet these goals no matter what. Sometimes, you can’t meet them, and then comes cost-cutting and slashing to make profit margins. Because of how the system we live in works, companies often take rosy and overly aggressive targets public, espousing the idea that they could, perhaps, grow infinitely – that they could maintain some measure of growth for an indefinite time period. In gaming, this is theorized as reaching new markets, bringing in new players, and increasing spend from existing players. The business rationale behind season passes is getting existing players to spend more, the rationale behind free-to-play games or modes is to bring players in the front door and convert them to payers, and the push towards live service games is to keep those players engaged and on the hook so they will, maybe eventually, spend more. When you see a long-lived game redebut on Steam after not being on the platform, that’s a push into a new market – and game companies use these tactics constantly to attempt to crowbar as much cash out of you and I as possible.

The problem inherent to our current economic model and this idea of infinite corporate growth is that it simply isn’t true. Every product has some sort of saturation point where, realistically, it’s not getting any bigger, and there is a similar saturation point for where players also won’t pay more for a thing they already have. Look at WoW as an example, they’ve moved steadily into milking whales through cosmetic purchases and extra digital tchochkes, but at the same time, the game needs existing players to stay, so the subscription price has remained locked steady at $15 since launch, even as inflation has meant that the relative cost of that subscription has gotten cheaper. Instead, Blizzard tries to releverage us existing players by making prepaid subscriptions a perceived better deal with extra digital goodies, to entice players to spend money on various cosmetics, and to appeal to whales by keeping paid character services high, marking them down in sales, and fragmenting their product stack by introducing more and higher-tier versions of the expansion purchase to entice more money and a higher average selling price per unit. The game hasn’t really had a sizeable growth in new players by most public metrics, instead churning old players out and bringing in just enough new ones to keep things floating on the level. A big part of my cynicism in WoW is down to the fact that Blizzard only pulled the “listening to players” card when it became clear that the existing path wasn’t going to work anymore. Is that a good outcome for players? Sure – but on the business side, the logic is clear.

In all of these, the issue is that the driving force behind these problems are all the people least affected by these layoffs and the most culpable for them. The analysts who projected that infinite growth and then obviously got it wrong get to keep being wrong, the CEOs, middle-managers, and pencil-pushers who contribute nothing to the game other than thinking about how to make money off of it get to stay, but the least-paid and most-crucial team members get the shaft instead. Blizzard rushed Overwatch 2 into production and it flopped critically, facing player backlash and a vastly reduced level of cultural cache, but at least those developers got to work on the survival game…until that entire team was axed in the layoffs. Those developers didn’t push the company to release the game early, to cut the singleplayer story mode we were promised and hyped on at Blizzcon 2019, or push the game onto Steam to become an object of ridicule – they were pushed into a situation where they had to implement or help with those bad ideas had by the very same people who still get to have their jobs. Fucking sucks, am I right?

In the immediate wake of the layoff news, a certain type of asshole was on social media talking about how this is predictable in mergers, that redundancies are always eliminated and hey, that sucks but you should have done better, but that is such an idiotic view to have. Game development, to a point few industries do, benefits from parallelism in work, from having multiple prop artists, concept artists, programmers working on different aspects of the engine and implementation, and designers plotting the course for the game. Blizzard themselves made this case in the past few years by acquiring a studio unto themselves just for the sake of making WoW content faster, and hey, guess what – it worked! Dragonflight has been on a steady clip of content releases explicitly because they had more headcount and more people making things in parallel, and that has had a knock-on effect to player perception and worked to bring back disaffected players, at least in part. It’s also stupid because the argument assumes that at the macro level, Microsoft has too many people in the gaming division to keep a game team employed, but that team was a composite of multiple different refugees from other projects and could just as easily have been spun into different teams, canceling the game they were making while keeping them employed to work on other projects. Whats more, the logic isn’t even consistent because WoW’s team lost basically the entire customer service and game master infrastructure, and no one in Microsoft is replacing them because the grand idea is to outsource it. To be clear, outsourcing isn’t consistently bad but it also isn’t a great move to take a team with highly-specific knowledge of a complex game with a lot of moving parts that turns 20 years old (publicly) this year and just get rid of them.

Corporate mergers do spawn redundancies to a point, but that point is usually front-office staff, C-suite people, etc – you can have two customer service teams or two different project teams with disciplinary overlap, but there’s rarely a need for like, two payroll teams or two full IT staffs. In game development, that redundancy is never really in development staff, because there’s nearly always something else you can put those people to work on within that same discipline they already work in. Even Blizzard’s “house-style” art team is a handful of people per discipline, because you need those different takes and perspectives and everyone can bring something to the table. That’s pretty far from a redundancy, in my eyes.

But the people making the decisions about who stays and who goes are, quite typically, the same people who are actually redundant in their job roles. And given that, they are always likely to self-advocate, to push for their own preservation over anyone else, even if, objectively, it is less fiscally prudent and less in-line with attaining the actual financial goals of such an action. Mike Ybarra’s exit from Blizzard alongside the layoffs is still the subject of a lot of scuttlebutt, but objectively, he’s fine and the company was able to pull an existing executive in to take his role in less than a week. His exit package is said to be nice and he won’t know a moment’s discomfort, while the employees under his watch that were let go will suffer for the decision, one he likely had input and guidance on. Even for the people above his paygrade who would have been responsible for approvals and such have more solidarity with the executive than they do with the frontline worker, and given the lack of knowledge of what those employees even do, the approvers at higher levels are typically just going to nod and rubberstamp the decision. That solidarity (some might even call it class solidarity…), is why we discuss some options to try and make this better.

The Way Forward

The push towards unionization in gaming, building solidarity among those doing the work, is vital for as long as we remain in the deathgrip of capitalism. For us as fans or those aspiring towards careers in the industry, it is all the more crucial that we support empowering employees through the accumulation of their bargaining power and ability to act as a unit in response to job actions like this.

Here’s the tricky part, in my eyes – action needs to be collectivized to be impactful and meaningful on this scale. If you or I unsubscribe from WoW on our own in response, it says little and amounts to statistical noise. We become churn, a simple fact of having a long-lived live service game, not attributable to any business decision or part of any greater message. If a couple of developers resign in protest, they have levers to say why, but the machine chugs on, the game still gets made, and there’s not much more to it. For us to have a meaningful impact – for the developers to send a clear and consistent message – there has to be organization.

Unions agitate for change in workplaces in this very way, by using the available levers of power to them to send a clear, coordinated message. A contract renegotiation brings the parties to the table to express what they want and need and to help build a symbiotic relationship, and if the company is unwilling to meet in the middle with the union, then further negotiations can go on all the way to a strike. Why strikes? Well, without veering too hard into discussing the ins and outs of organized labor (Labor Notes is an excellent publication if you want to know more!), strikes work to send a clear message by halting the machine. One worker or a handful of workers refusing to work is a speedbump, but thousands of workers in solidarity walking off together is a near-impenetrable wall. That’s also why, you may have noticed, that in highly-public scenarios, we as the audience may sometimes be asked to do slightly more – to not buy a thing, not play a thing, or not discuss a product. Building real solidarity for a better tomorrow means that some decent number of us need to be willing to respond to public calls-to-action, even when it means some discomfort or loss of enjoyment for us. If you want game developers to have a more-secure future, a better world to live in and the creative outputs that would allow for – there is a lot to gain by being willing to stand on principle and with the developers and their professional organizations, if and when we are called.

Within the industry, there are a lot of other interesting moves being taken as well. A rise in independent development has seen new and interesting games for us to play. Several studios retain their own independence and prioritize the work being done over shareholders and the moneymen atop the food chain. Developers are increasingly moving in directions that are relatively new in game development, but old-hat in labor – Dead Cells developer Motion Twin is a worker-cooperative, with its employees as members of the co-op with equal pay and responsibility for decision-making within the business. Industry changes like easy hobbyist access to game engines and open-source development tools have made game development far more accessible and helped far more people get in the door – but the door opens wide into a yawning chasm that often leads to disappointment like these layoffs.

You might say, in the end, “why should I help?” and I guess on some level that is a valid question. Why does it matter to us as the end-user, the player, what happens to developers? To me, the answer is simple – by ensuring a degree of safety and comfort in a profession, we unlock new possibilities for the games we can play and the experiences we can share. As long as studio management and overbearing publishers and bean-counters get to dictate the vision, games are worse. If you ever wonder why every free-to-play game is some gatcha hellscape, why every game has a “live service” model bolted on to it in ways that don’t fit, why we are overburdened with season passes and FOMO, why every game is always-online potentially multiplayer with some bastardized version of talent trees, RPG mechanics, and loot drops – it’s because the business heads dictate that these things be added, because they make money. And, to be fair, it’s not like every game with these is bad either! I’m (probably) on-record here as actually kind of liking Fortnite – it’s not my main game or something I play super-often, but I enjoy it in spite of the fact that it is kind of a money-gobbling pit of frequent season passes with very clear delineation in-game of paid and free players. Genshin Impact is a pretty good game, even if the main mechanics tend to feed you towards the gatcha pulls! But more often, we have things like the most recent Suicide Squad game, which pushes a live service model, specialization, and loot drops in a way that is counter-intuitive and sort of against the whole theme of the game in the first place.

The real kicker is that until something huge changes, this will keep happening. In the time I spent drafting this very post, thousands more people have lost their jobs in the games industry – but not because games are in a downturn, no. The demand is there and games are making more money than ever – it just isn’t enough for those at the top.

If we want games to stand as a worthy profession and media worth enjoying, we have to be willing to stand up for the people who make it. That may, at times, require us to make hard decisions and deny ourselves some small amount of joy, if we want to stand on principle. In my opinion, it is worth it to ensure that game development is a satisfying career field for those who choose to take that step, instead of a field of misery with uncertain odds and constant fear.