Everything Everywhere Once A Week (1/20/2023)

It’s been about a month since the last newsletter, which is my fault, as I’ve been traveling for the holidays/work and been generally busy. Combined with a lack of news for January, I kind of let the newsletter slide a bit. It’s understandable if you deleted your Patreon subscription, but the next few months should have quite a bit more content than usual, so I’d be pretty appreciative if you would like to come back. Regardless, there’s still a lack of news, so I wanted to cover one topic in-depth this week.

What’s With All The Layoffs?

In the past six months, there have been layoffs at IGN, Gamespot, Giant Bomb, Game Informer
Unity, G4TV, Microsoft (343, The Coalition, general software and engineering), Riot, Vox
Vice, TechRadar Gaming, Android Central, Windows Central, iMore
Motherboard, Upcomer, Hangar 13, Alphabet

Oh, right, and Fanbyte.

And this is far from an exhaustive list. At some point, the incidents become a pattern, the pattern becomes data, and that data becomes something to analyze with suspicion. What on Earth is happening in the gaming industry, both in journalism and development, that mandates or in any way justifies this level of people losing their jobs? Is there even anything that comes close?

I think to start discussing this, we need to ask ourselves if layoffs themselves are ever justified. In principle, sure. There are times where a company has massively overgrown, or the pay differential between the top of the company and the bottom is not so large that cutting the top’s pay would save jobs, etc. Sometimes a company is staring down the barrel of insolvency unless jobs are cut and, under the capitalistic system we’ve decided will be our preferred yoke, layoffs are the only option to tanking the entire company. It sucks, and isn’t morally correct, but it makes sense. Weirdly, there’s a Yakuza 4 quest about exactly this.

Now that we have established in what cases layoffs are justified, let’s start talking about the rest of this garbage truck on fire that’s been happening the last six months and why it’s not at all justified.

“The Games Industry is Booming”

Any mainstream news story about the video game industry starts by talking about how the industry itself is making lots of money. “Gaming is bigger than movies,” they might say. “It’s not just Pac-Man Fever anymore, gaming is a billion dollar industry!” a news presenter will proclaim with a sense of awe above the bafflement bubbling just underneath.

A booming gaming industry, at least in theory, should lift all gaming-related boats. More money in means more money going to the people that create games and then create analysis, reviews, etc. about those games. In terms of growth, the industry is getting bigger, with more people involved in making a game than ever before, which means games cost more than ever before to make. So when you’re looking at a sheet of numbers and costs, salaries come right off the page to slap you in the face and are an easy target for layoffs. Tuck this idea into the back of your head, because I’m going to come back to it later.

On the game journalism side, content creators are constantly at the mercy of external factors. The game industry may be booming, but what happens if the content people are looking for does not leave itself open for constant coverage? A game like Elden Ring will have a burst of attention and then probably slowly ebb off as the game fails to put out new content whether by intention or otherwise. Which leaves dozens of outlets competing for coverage on games like Destiny 2, Apex Legends, Warzone, etc. with guides and suggestions and very little completely unique writing or analysis.

And even if you do that, dedicate your outlet to only hitting the known beats, you have to hope that Google smiles on you. Most of the world does not go to a website directly and scroll through until they find something interesting. They Google “best Raiden build genshin” and if your website is not one of the first three on the Google list, you may as well be seven pages down for all it matters. Google’s search engine algorithms are not visible to the people who need that information the most and the little information that is given is oftentimes inscrutable.

So on the occasion that you’re doing good work buttressed by useful Google numbers and placement, you in theory should be totally safe from layoffs, right?

Unfortunately, none of these factors matter in the long run. Sure, success can be a decent shield against losing some, half, or your entire staff in one day, but it’s far from a guarantee. The dirty little secret of game industry layoffs is that most of the outlets that suffer them are making money and are successful. They just have people in charge that view success as an incidental consequence of constant growth. They are also wholly beholden to the single most dangerous word in the business world.

Recession

If you ever want to strike fear into the heart of corporate America, or corporate anywhere really, you just have to mention the inevitability of an oncoming recession. The word can mean different things to different people — it is, in some sense, a financial babadook — but the core issue at the end of the day is that it means less money than a company and its top brass are currently making. They want to stave that off at all costs. Layoffs are, if you’re a suit sitting in a tower crossing names off a list, a way to pretend you’re doing something preventative without actually doing anything that might cost you money.

It’s equivalent to seeing the iceberg in the distance and dumping glasses of water off the deck of the Titanic as a means of preventing the boat from sinking. Like, yeah, you got rid of some water, but--

So a lot of these layoffs, especially right now, are coming from the perspective of trying to remain financially unburdened by cutting jobs of people and roles they determine to be unnecessary to the core business. In essence, they are predicting that at some point money flow might be slower in the future, and they are building their money forts right now using what used to help pay for someone’s rent or their medication or food.

And at this point it’s probably important to mention that we’re going on what these companies are saying about these layoffs and assuming that it’s true while simultaneously assuming they are lying. We can take them at face value that layoffs are preventive measures while also realizing that they are not necessary measures. I can, and do, assume this is also executives testing to see how well they can run a company by stretching resources — people — into other roles. Basically, layoffs are a way of making more money with less money by screwing your labor force and I am convinced that this is a major factor in the layoffs at gaming outlets over the last six months.

A Question of Labor

Remember when I asked you to tuck the bit about salaries being easy cuts away until later? Let’s bring that back out, because the culture of layoffs in both game development and games writing is leading to a brain drain of institutional knowledge driven by greed and I’m going to explain why.

Recently, the state of California made it mandatory for companies to post salary ranges for incoming jobs, which introduced ranges that spanned $150,000 between maximums and minimums or thereabouts. The reason those ranges were so wide was because there has to be room for salary growth in a role, which implies that seniority and time spent doing a job will pay you more over time. The longer you’re doing a thing, the more they have to pay you to keep doing that thing.

So once again put yourself in the mental space of that executive who does not know any of these people, does not know what they do, doesn’t know their hardships or their contributions, but does see how much money they make on an Excel spreadsheet in your uptown office. Also, if you have morals, imagine you don’t have those momentarily. Obviously you’re going to start trying to save money — and your multiple boats — by cutting people with higher salaries.

As those people with higher salaries go, their knowledge goes with them, especially if they’re so burned out and jaded by the experience of being kicked off a ladder by a suit that they never want to work in the same industry again. And then their positions get filled with the next people in the firing range and then newer, younger, entry-level people come in to caulk the gaps for pennies on the dollar.

There will never be a shortage of idealistic developers or games writers straight out of college willing to do the work despite mistreatment and little money. The people who know what they’re worth after years of being told they’re worthless are the first on the chopping block in this manufactured culture of layoffs that corporations actively perpetuate. There will never be a shortage of executives that think a plurality of paid employees is too many when a smaller number could do. And that’s before even getting into the ghoulish AI-written magic tricks those same executives seem to be salivating over.

It’s a great time to be someone whose lifestyle is solely derived from the quest for more money and a terrible time to create anything funded by those people.

So What Can Be Done?

Layoffs aren’t going away. In fact, I imagine things will get worse, as everyone got very bullish about their own abilities to grow during the pandemic and are now making the people who didn’t make those decisions pay for it with their jobs.

I think an obvious answer is that unionization is entirely too slow in the games industry, though the seeds have been planted and seem to be sprouting in studios here and there. They might not wholly stop layoffs, but they can provide more warning than finding out your badge doesn’t work one day or being let go while asleep in another country. Under most union dynamics, the employer has to justify their layoffs to the union or face a struggle they usually don’t want to face. They also empirically net better severance packages and extended health insurance benefits post-termination.

(As an aside, Polygon and Nicole Carpenter wrote up an excellent guide to unionization in the gaming industry which you can find here.)

Beyond that, we have to stop fearing economic factors as a bogeyman to scare us away from doing work. You know what causes a recession? 200,000 tech workers and writers suddenly being unemployed and all looking for the same 1000 jobs only to sit in fear for the next year that the axe will come down on them again. That doesn’t stimulate the economy, it stimulates yacht manufacturers.

But there’s also a societal mentality we have to combat: the idea that doing 12-15 jobs in your lifetime is a normal thing. No, that sucks. It sucks to constantly worry about whether your boss is going to strike your name off the list because you work from home instead of the office. It sucks to need to work outside your normal hours because you have to set up your brand for a potential next gig if things don’t go your way this time around. The gaming industry has been abused to the point where this is just considered part of it and, man, it really does not have to be.

Much of what we take as normal just does not have to be.

Other Things This Week:

• Materia Possessions is new next week with John, Natalie, and Mike Williams! We’ll talk about Fire Emblem Engage among other things.
• There was also a Materia Possessions last week if you missed it!
• A Game of the Year list is still coming, but it became so gargantuan I had to strip it down to brass tacks. Also, a game got moved up from my original rankings.