We need to change the way we talk about videogame studios. But even more than that, we need to change the way we talk about them when they close.
In the past year, according to PC Gamer, 10 major game studios have closed, each employing anywhere from a dozen employees to hundreds. From Capcom Vancouver, the developers of the Dead Rising series, to Visceral, an EA subsidiary responsible for the Dead Space games and working on a highly anticipated Star Wars open-world game, studios keep shuttering.
The latest, and perhaps most notable, collapse is Telltale Games. The award-winning adventure game studio known for its legion of story-driven adventure games—the acclaimed The Walking Dead among them—terminated 275 employees recently. While the San Rafael, CA company kept on a skeleton crew, it but sent the vast majority of its staff walking, reportedly with no warning and no severance.
When a studio closes, there are generally two kinds of responses. From within the professional videogame community, there's an outcry for the workers who have lost their jobs, sympathizing with their position, helping them find other jobs to apply for so they can land on their feet. That exists among the fanbase as well, to an extent, but in the gamer community sympathy and service it's overwhelmed by another voice. This other voice is loud and shrill and always noticeable; it asks, and not kindly, what about our games?
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To find this voice, all you have to do is look at the replies on Twitter to Telltale's reports of its partial closure, or the various Telltale staffers who in the wake of the layoffs have been talking about the studio's possible cancellation of the final season of The Walking Dead. I don't want to link to these responses–they exhaust me–but you can find them. Their tone even makes its way into press reports that cover Telltale's promise to find some way to finish The Walking Dead, a promise that ignores the long history of worker abuse and studio mismanagement that led to Telltale's partial closure in the first place.
Games are made by people. And if we care about games, at all, we need to care about the people who make them. In fact, I think we need to care about the people a lot more than we care about the games.
Studio closures are the result of a whole host of factors. Often, as in Telltale's case, it's clear-cut mismanagement. Sometimes it's economic factors that might be outside of anyone's control. Most of the time, it's a complicated mix of economics, questionable decisions, and the messy boom-and-bust nature of working in the videogame industry.
Whatever the reason, though, the results are the same. People lose their jobs. Often, they go without severance or backpay. Often, they lose their jobs after stints of high-stress, near-constant work–what the industry calls "crunch," used as a tactic to finish games more quickly–leaving them both burnt out and out of work. These people are then unemployed, struggling in some of the most expensive cities in the world, all for the "privilege" of making videogames people might like.
It doesn't have to be this way. Labor laws could protect these workers, prevent them from the worst abuses of an industry that regularly closes studios after even successful projects are completed. A well-organized collective of developers could push studios to change. There are a lot of barriers to making that happen, some more surmountable than others. But right now, one of the most glaring is us–the commentators and fans who play and love these games, and who too often prioritize the products over the people who make them.
Our voices are too often used not to defend the people who make games but the games themselves, clamoring loudly for our desire to see the fates of characters like The Walking Dead's Clementine, but quietly–if at all–for the people who brought those characters to life. It's understandable, to an extent. We care about these games. They've touched us, entertained us, changed us. It's natural to be protective of that.
But none of that happens without the people who make games. So when they're abused, and fired, and forced to go without having their needs met, it should bother us. And, frankly, it should bother us even if their games don't matter to us. Because they're people.
And here, right here, is one of the dark secrets of the videogame industry. The people who run things, the publishers and CEOs and market analysts that drive decisions? They're terrified of their audiences. They know how reliant they are on the people who play games, who build loyalties to characters and studios and platforms. When we speak, they listen.
Often, this is used to enable the worst tendencies of the videogame industry, as small but vocal portions of the gaming audience cry out with casual disregard for other people. But it doesn't have to be that way. Those of us who care can start shouting something else: that those who make our games deserve better. They deserve laws that will protect them and jobs that will treat them well. Those of us who buy videogames may not be able to change that alone. But it will help.