In my experience with the gaming industry, there has been one thing constant in every new organization: a firm and unwavering belief that the good days are long past and what remains is merely a withered husk of what used to be. For the past twenty years, we have been living in the end times, on the precipice of packing everything up and handing the reins to the overwhelming capitalist forces that are constantly trying to force out passionate work in favor of cheaper work. It is using that lens that I struggle deeply not to stand here and repeat the same thing word-for-word as those before me.
Eventually the generation doing the doomsaying will be correct. There seems ample evidence that it may be so this time.
The gaming industry has been in the midst of a slow collapse for years upon years driven by a constant need for more profit, more growth, more more, and we have bore witness to the new depths such the purveyors of this mentality can plumb every day. Suffice it to say, everything sucks, and I’m not going to pass judgment on anyone who can’t imagine it can suck much more.
A few years ago on the podcast The K-Hole, I spelled out this admittedly outlandish idea that we are due for a gaming crash sooner rather than later, it will just look different from what we are used to. Corporate greed had run amok and consolidation posed a clear and present danger to the independence of games as an artform, not just for what it is but what it represents. The townsfolk willingly being eaten by Godzilla speaks to the hunger of Godzilla, but it speaks even more of the ways in which the world has failed the townsfolk, I reasoned.
Since that podcast, I have been laid off from that job, joined a development studio, laid off from that job, joined a PR company, and been shunted from that job. I have gotten a chance to see how the industry is morphing into what I once described at breakneck speed from multiple different perspectives. It’s not pretty and what little hope I had for a genuine metamorphosis is eroding to nothing as time passes.
On the gaming development side, we have essentially ceded the broad strokes to robber barons who seek an annihilation of anything besides personal enrichment with the hidden cost of livelihoods tucked conveniently out of sight. We’ve allowed these small-time Rockefellers and JP Morgans go untethered for so long that they have actually come to believe in a world where this is simply, and ethically, how business must be done. When a publisher CEO, picture whichever one you like because you’re probably correct, marches out once again to tell you how he’s betting on the next big thing with his employee’s jobs as the chips, we all but ignore it. The runaway budgets, needless crunch, and capriciousness with people’s lives became so normalized that we shake our fists at the consequences of actions that we otherwise do nothing to stop.
The recent contraction — that’s the polite word you use to dispassionately describe laying off people in mass with little connective tissue besides industry — is one born of economic unease and uncertainty. We have accepted as a society that unlimited growth, however fucking stupid a concept that may be, is a realistic thing to expect from the monetization model of an artform and then fight like hell to keep from drowning while inhaling ocean water. The knock-on effect is that things become so focused on making this impossible structure work that games become risk-averse in the process, truly exemplifying a receding tide smashing all boats against the rocks.
Games writing too has fallen under the same noxious umbrella. What was once an attempt to hold companies accountable has no path to existence without other indiscernible companies funding them with their own wants and needs. I fought long and hard against the idea that journalism — even something as toothless and ultimately trivial as gaming journalism — belongs to corporate interests and has obligations beyond assessing the medium for what it is.
The reward for this, funnily enough, is scorn from the industry you cover, the audience you serve, and the people signing the checks. Ah, well.
If this writing feels bitter, well, it is. It’s bitterness born from watching the industry from several perspectives slowly sinking like a rotted boat disappearing under the ocean’s surface. But, despite seeing all this coming from a mile away, I’m filled with an odd and not entirely unwelcome touch of…hope, as it were?
At some point, even if it is solely through callous self-benefit, the holders of the purse strings will realize they massively underestimated the number of talented individuals they need to actually make video games at the scale they want. At the moment, developers big and small are going through a transitionary period and will soon realize that the people they cut as dead weight are actually necessary to give birth to those games that bring in the revenue. A completely unnecessary course correction, sure, but one all the same.
A little while ago, I met the developers behind Venba, an indie game about cooking with your mother which cleaned up at the Independent Games Festival awards. After the show, I got a few gushing words in about the game and try to square away the shared awkwardness and shyness we both had surrounding any kind of congratulations. The exchange was brief, but it reminded me that the industry can only do so much to stamp out the people who make video games. They can let them go in the name of quarterly profits, sure, and that’s another short-sighted mistake from nouveau riche known for making short-sighted mistakes. But they’ll never stamp out the reason these people make games in the first place.
Just, for the love of God, we don’t have to make it so hard for the people who love video games to continue to make them.
As for games writing, who knows. There’s no overwhelming demand that keeps people like me employed and fed for musing on the finer points of Dragon’s Dogma II’s fast travel systems. There is no shortage of membership-based services to do so, though. I’m slightly less optimistic about what future there is in games journalism having been through its ringer more than once. It could either bounce back or succumb to the blood-sucking vampires that want to use AI to write everything without understanding how AI works.
The only thing I can say is, it isn’t very easy to get rid of me, either. And maybe that’s enough for now.
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