Examining Instability in the Video Game Industry

called Press Reset. Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, And you might remember I think it was over this summer Bloomberg Business Week featured a cover story that was all about the video game industry, the dark underbelly of a business built on fund and that was also reported by our own Bloomberg News technology writer Jason Tryer. He

too is author of this new book, Press Reset. He's also author of the best selling book Blood, Sweat and Pixels, And he joins us on the phone, good to have you here. You're up in Westchester, So tell us about this book because this is a little bit different from your first book. Hi, Cal, thanks so much for having Yeah,

this is a little bit different. Um So with my first book, I kind of broke down the question of why are games so hard to make and I kind of answered that through a bunch of case studies exploring different games and telling their stories. With this book, I wanted to tell more of a human story, tell the story of people in the video game industry and the hardships that they sometimes go through, and what that means for them, what it does to them, um, what kind

of how it feels, how they recover afterwards. And through that I explored the question of why is this games industry which is making so much money, it made a hundred eighty billion dollars last year, Why is it so unstable for its workers? Why are workers whether they have such a hard time keeping their jobs in this industry. You write it's about heartbreak and tragedy, it's also about recovery.

I mean, there are several instances in the book where you talk about you know, people who have worked together, as you say, pulled all nighters, you know, working on games, you know, hitting deadlines and so and so forth, only to come in and just find out that they don't have a job and they're not going to see these people anymore. Yeah. And it's not only that their games failed or that the company is in business trouble. Sometimes

it's a successful game. As in the case of Irrational Games, which is one of the companies that the cover in the book, they made a game called BioShock, which is very popular, critically acclaimed. About a year after their most recent game, BioShock Infinite, everybody came in to find that the studio was shutting down. And yeah, it can be

really brutal. One of the worst parts I think, and I talk about this quite a book, quite a bit in Press Reset, is that, um, you are kind of stuck wherever you are, and you might have to move thousands of miles away to get a new job. In a Rationals case, they were in Boston and there are not a lot of other video game companies in Boston, so a lot of the people who wanted to stay and keep working in games have to move across the country, up with their whole families. And it can be really

just burn people out. It's it feels unsustainable to me. I feel like it's a company that goes bankrupt, right and then all of a sudden, everybody's in there, the vultures like, I want the desks, I want this. But I mean, you talk about when a company goes down one of these video game company goes down, then all of a sudden, recruiters fly and right to kind of take the workers. So they are in demand, but as you said, they often have to be uprooted and move

their families, maybe across the country. Yeah, it's funny. I saw a stat just the other day that was essentially it was a list of job posting for the video game industry, and there were like a couple of hundred jobs here and there for junior level people, and then it was like thousands of senior level Apple like applicated job listings for senior level positions. And the reason that is is because the game's industry has this dearth of people who have five ten years of experience because so

many of them burned out. So yes, these recruiters are seizing in and hoping against some of that talent, some of that experience. But a lot of those people might not want to move. I mean, in a rational case, a lot of the people who were in Boston. Um, maybe if they're in their twenties, they can move across the country and get these jobs they're kind of free.

But if they're in their thirties, they have families, don't want to pull their kids out of school, so a lot of them just left the industry entirely went to to other tech companies in the area, UM finance company, banks, stuff like that, and that we are seeing uh way

too much in this industry. Well, we all got a tease of your book thanks to Business Week magazine where there was an excerpt in there, and that's where the Bloody Socks chapter, which is specifically about Kurt Chilling of the Red Sox UM just give us a little little tease, and and folks can go to Bloomberg dot com or on the Bloomberg or buy your book to read the whole story, because I feel like that chapter alone could be a Netflix series or a movie because it's just fascinating,

very successful baseball player, but it didn't turn out so well when it comes to video games ultimately. Yeah, yeah, man, thank you for the kind words. And yeah, so Kurt Chilling, formerly of the Red Sox UM these days best known as kind of uh provocateur, right wing provocateur um. But yeah, he career that he was going to start this game studio and he very much like came from the baseball life, was very much like I'm going to treat all my

employees like all starts. I'm going to buy them the best of the best, get them on these perks and the best health benefits, which on its on the on the face of things, is pretty great by that. But he wound up running the company completely out of money. They wound up taking a giant low and that was guaranteed by the state of Rhode Island for seventy five million dollars in exchanged for moving to Rhode Island and getting a bunch of jobs. They're in Providence. Um, and

wound up burning through that in a year. Uh. Suddenly, one day everybody gets into words. They think they have been made in the shade that they're here at this company where they are treated like the best of the best. They get into work one day and they are not paid. Their paychecks have not process because it turns up the

company ran completely out of money. Um. None of them got severance, none of them got those final paychecks that were all robbed essentially of weeks of work, and all were stuck in Rhode Island where there are no other game companies. It's a similar story, so Jason, Chapter nine, Human Costs, Human Solutions, and you and you write. Ask any veteran video game developer their least favorite thing about the industry, and you'll probably get a different version of

the same answer. It treats people poorly. It choose them up and then spits them back out, leaving nothing but grizzle and bones behind. So why do they do it? Because people go back, right? Or do they go back to the industry? I mean they do write they like it. Well,

it's pretty much a young persons industry. And um, there's a great there's a great quote in the book from a guy named Zack Mumbox who has been a long time at e A, and at one point later in his career, he said, I was looking around in the office and when I had started in two thousand, I was in my twenties and everyone else was in their twenties. Now I'm looking around my thirties and everyone else is in their twenties, and I'm like, where is everyone who

came up with me? And the answer is that the video industry, while it's certainly fun, I mean it's fun to work on games, and it can be really interesting and challenging and creatively satisfying. Um, all these these terrible factors, including the volatility that I cover in press reset um, just lead to a whole lot of burnout. UM. And I'm not sure how many of those people are going back. I think a lot of people just feel like games does not treat them. Games of the games industry does

not treat them. Like. Is there any model that just seems to work above and beyond other models or is this just yeah, like, what are the companies that maybe have done it right? Yeah? Well, there are a couple of things, and I explore in the chapter you mentioned, I explore some of the potential answers to these questions and solutions to these problems that I bring up here. Um. One is the big one is unionization, which has not

happened in the North American video game industry at all. UM. And you look at, uh, the video games kind of sister industry in Hollywood, and one of the reasons that people are able to maintain careers in in that field just because they're unionized and so they have protections in place, and they might pounce around from gig to gigs, but they know they'll get paid for every overtime hour, and they know they're going to get a certain minimum salary

and they know they're going to get benefits and health care. UM. So that's a big thing. And I think that could offer some protections and give workers would be the table in the video game industry UM to a level that they haven't seen before. The other thing and this is it. It's wild timing. You were talking about zoom before and how a year ago we had no idea what it is. UM. I actually think that remote work is one of the big solutions to the to the video game industry's woes.

And I said that because, like I mentioned earlier, UM, the worst part about being caught in a layoffers to be a shutdown is knowing that you might have to move thousands of miles away, you might have to support your family. That's ultimately drives a lot of people out of gaming. And a solution to that might be if hey, okay, I just got laid off, but I can just log into my computer and my home office and potentially get

a job anywhere without having to move. That I think would keep a lot of people who left the industry from running out because they wanted to worry about moving to a new city every time they had to switch shops, so coming a game changer. Give me an idea too. You said it tends to be a lot of younger individuals. I remember doing a story on a video game company

years ago out on the on the West coast. Uh. In conjunction with it, give a Stanford that either had a program you know, that was just specifically geared to UM teaching people to kind of how to be in the video ame industry. What do they get paid typically? Yeah, I mean it varies drastically. Like if you're on if you're in San Francisco, I you're an engineer, you could be making over six figures. It could be making a

hundred fifty or something like that. But then again you look around and she's footing Google and you could be making double then double that. So it's it's uh, it's all relative, right, Um. Yeah, I mean it can really drastically differ depending on your discipline, depending on your years of experience, depending on whether you're at a big company

or smart company. Um. But in general, the people on the bottom of the poneum pole, the q A, which is quality assurance, the testers in the video game industry. They're the people who were paid to find how the bugs and games. Um, they're making around usually close to a minimum wage, maybe not exactly that, but um twenty dollars an hour or something like eighteen twenty dollars an hour, um.

And then you can kind of get bumped up over that as you become if you're if you're a junior designer, maybe you're making I don't know, forty fifty thousand a year, and then you kind of go up from there. It is, by no means a well paying industry. It's not. It's not banking or tech or anything like that unless you are at the very top, unless you're well. You do have a chapter called Workaholics, and you talked about some of the different individuals that you talked to. I mean

a lot of industries, there's a lot of workaholics. I've been in the media industry for a long time and you work a lot. It's just the way it goes. What's different though, about being a workaholic in the video game industry. Yeah, I think it's a very different. I've been in media for yeah, you know it, and yeah I've been there. I've been there for sure. Um, I

think there's there's there's a lot of differences. But one of the key ones for me at least is that when I'm working late on a story um or when I'm working late to cover in a band or something like that, I may do it for a week. I might do put in an extra weekend here and there. Um engagementvelopment. It's often so prolonged and sustained that it could be months and months of just like not seeing your family working six days a week, working twelve hours

a day. And that's often what we see. And those are some of the stories that I've covered over the course of of writing about the video game industry is that it's doesn't seem to end. And I think I don't think you'll find many people out there who would object to like a couple of weeks of overtime here and there. It's just when it goes on and on for months on end. Um, even if you have a deadline in sight. It can just see how I can really just eat away at your personal life and your

mental health. Hey, just got about fifty seconds left here. What surprised you in doing this book? Yeah, the thing that surprised me most is just hearing the same story over and over again. Hey, Jason, I'm I'm burning out of the video and I'm leaving the video of new industry. I'm going someplace that treats me better or like, yeah,

I went through a layoffs. Every single game developer you talk to, it's it's harder to find someone who hasn't been through a layoff, and it has defend someone who has. And that's to mean it's really sad, and it's just I think one of the reasons that I wanted to publish this book is to kind of bring put a spotlight on this stuff and and bring it to more people's attention. And yeah, I hope people people, I hope it resonates with people. Well, it's a great read and

really fun to talk with you about it. Jason, thank you so much. Good luck with it. Jason Schryer, he's Bloomberg News technology reporter. As we said, his new book is Press, Reset, Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry and again also author of the bestseller Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and you can check out more at Bloomberg dot com also at business Week dot com.