The Video Game Industry Is a Microcosm of Decay
I’ve attempted to write this article on several occasions over the last year. Every draft began by outlining whatever recent incident had encouraged me to write it, only for work or some other project to get in the way and stall my progress. When I resumed writing, I’d try and reacquaint myself with the text only to become confused right at the lede — by the time a few days had passed between me writing about specific games industry layoffs, enough new layoffs had occurred to displace whatever had previously followed them.
(And this is already happening again. I started writing this on the 7th of May; it’s now the 8th and, since then, Lightforge Games has downsized to a “skeleton crew” and let go of around 25 workers. In a week, the layoffs I’m covering today will have probably doubled or tripled across the rest of the industry.)
Confusion turned into a kind of deep, dull horror — the kind that follows any awareness towards the state of a system that only gets worse, such that any attempt to sketch out its deterioration is immediately outdated. And yet, paradoxically, nothing has actually changed. It becomes clear that the system will proceed business as usual until the system eats itself, and moreover, all who occupy it. Except the executives, whose autocannibalism seems more like regular cannibalism, and who always seem to uproot everything but themselves. They’re undeniably stupid, but they’re also so actively, wantonly cruel that the two qualities become interchangeable. Both states, for them, have become as autonomic as breathing.
The latest company behind this ceaseless parade of destruction is Microsoft — again. Say goodbye to beloved studios like Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks, both of which are gone forever. Did you like 2017’s Prey? The Evil Within duology? Ghostwire Tokyo? The recent critically acclaimed and award-winning Hi-Fi Rush? All of the institutional talent, knowledge, and expertise behind those things has been obliterated; all of the opportunities that allowed such games to exist have been closed; at its core, all of the workers responsible for them have been kicked into the street, rewarded for their dutiful creation of beloved and medium-defining art with a boot to the ass and whatever meagre, insulting severance fills the perfunctory, magnanimous requirement of “caring.”
Uprooted without even a basic warning, they’ll have to scramble for whatever jobs are available to support themselves and their families. They will likely end up in a worse position, doing work you’ll never hear about again for reprehensibly low wages. Many of these 200+ human beings will be forced to leave the industry entirely; many of them will be unable to exercise their actual talents for years, if ever, and even fewer of them will ever get the opportunity to work together again. Some of them will surely lapse into poverty.
Imagine this happening to an individual person. Now imagine that it’s happening to the 9500+ workers in the video game industry who have been laid off since the beginning of this year, or over the course of four months. Now realize that, in 2023, the total number of layoffs — over the course of twelve months — was around 10,000. Add them to your mental total. Then realize that you can anticipate 2023’s total count of displaced human lives to be exceeded by the end of May; there are still seven months until 2024 is over. More than dire, the final total can be nothing short of apocalyptic.
These numbers are important to recognize, but are nonetheless incomprehensibly terrible, so it helps to return our focus to Microsoft, which acquired Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin by acquiring Zenimax Media — which had acquired Tango and Arkane (both Lyon and Austin) in 2010 — in 2021. Somewhere in this byzantine procession, both companies did their best to dart between producing actual art and trying desperately to avoid total internal sabotage from a rotating suite of executives who create short-term value by making idiotic decisions that lead to long-term consequences.
Arkane Austin has been smeared by the release of 2023’s Redfall: A nonsensical followup to the incredible Prey and a great example of a game that nobody but a useless Zenimax suit, filled with delusions of Games As Evolving Product grandeur, wanted to make. Microsoft would’ve merely inherited this blunder, which they exacerbated by rushing it out the door. The institutional talent of Arkane Austin could’ve told you that Redfall was a bad idea, just as Arkane Austin could’ve told you that naming Prey after a cult classic video game, one it made no effort to reboot, was only going to give it a bad smell. Redfall is an obvious product of smart people being ignored by executives with more power than sense.
Between fielding terrible ideas from two corporate overlords — Zenimax and Microsoft — it’s a miracle that Arkane Austin was able to produce one of the medium’s greatest immersive sims in Prey. One wonders, as they often must, what they would’ve made if everyone had just gotten out of their fucking way.
But what about Prey? What about Tango’s work? “Are these games profitable?” is the misguided question that inevitably follows a fit of game studio liquidation; it is a path of reasoning that no longer provides useful data, if it ever did. Tango Gameworks released Hi-Fi RUSH in 2023 and, according to Microsoft VP Aaron Greenberg, it “was a break out [sic] hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations.” In the dialect of normal people, that sounds like Microsoft is saying that Tango Gameworks made a profitable product that satisfied their corporate overlords. Their entire studio has nonetheless been sent to the grinder. What if Microsoft had said it failed financially? Could you trust them to make that call, let alone base a decision off it? What satisfies them?
“What could they have done differently?” is a ridiculous response to which the only reasonable answer is “nothing.” It’s like asking a man who was hit on the sidewalk by a car swerving off the road if he, the victim, could have been a little more safe by not going outside that day. No permissible action prevents a subsidiary, and imperatively its workers, from falling victim to this.
Microsoft also said they’d be continuing to support Arkane Austin in their efforts to fix a mess they held almost no accountability over in the first place. This was also a lie. So we can say with certainty, first and foremost, that Microsoft is run by liars (gasp!) who cannot be held to their word. What else are they lying about? Who gets the chopping block next?
Microsoft’s video game business is profitable, seeing increases in revenue of 17% in the span of a few months. If they feel the amount of money they earn is nonetheless inadequate, executives should feel the brunt of it, not their workers. They can take massive cuts on their (rising) earnings and still live in perfect comfort. Were it insolvent, well, whose fault is that? The mass of acquisitions over the last several years, sucking up tens of billions of dollars out of a plain desire to Own Everything, can only be compared to a culture of multiplying cancer cells. Why buy Activision Blizzard if you can’t afford what you’ve already bought?
Really think for a second: We live in a world where people are whispering that id Software, the brand name behind fucking DOOM, could meet the same fate as Tango or Arkane. Maybe you think that’s unlikely. By any sensible perception, it would be. But when we’ve established that executives behave irrationally in the idiotic pursuit of short-term gains, decisions that would never happen based on their total and self-evident stupidity can no longer be disqualified from reality on the same terms. And if id fucking Software isn’t safe, who is? How many are able to claim the same immunity as holding the name behind a creation only second to titles like Super Mario Bros. and Tetris? Who could possibly survive in an industry where the continued existence of such a company is even remotely held in question?
Capitalism runs off a variety of axiomatic principles. A common one, just beyond it being “the only system that works,” is that capitalism is tough but fair. The game is difficult to win, but the rules are followed. Play your own end of the game correctly, and you stand to succeed. Work hard, make money, produce “value,” and your job is at least secure. We are taught this unconsciously from a very early age, and though it frequently morphs into the unquestioning adage that life isn’t fair, the system our lives occupy is rarely held party to it. The fundamental belief is that capitalism, with all its constituent parts, offers a game that can be won.
This principle, like every operating assumption of capitalism, has never been true. But it has never felt less true. All scruples, however illusory, have openly dissolved. Your work, your life, and your legacy will be liquidated for spare quarters based on whims you hold zero control over. The game is bullshit; rigged, cheated, built to be gamed once and then rewritten into a loop of failure and suffering by the winner. Under capitalism, there is no longer — and for the average person, never was — any game that can be won.
You can’t talk about the video game industry without talking about the world, since the failures of any industry are a product of the ongoing failure of everything, from the suppression of free speech during the midst of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians to the genocide itself, fueled and protected by a ruling class that serves its own interests in apartheid and mass murder. The people who built the system have blood on their hands that makes the CEOs look heavenly.
We live in a framework where the desires of the majority are ignored and otherwise funneled into a kind of binarism that produces the illusion of choice while preserving the status quo. All things eventually terminate in the Having Conversations Industrial Complex, and Corporate America is no different. It can only reflect the culture it occupies — the decay of everything writ small.
In the executives of the video game industry, only reflections are found: callous, cruel, moronic suits occupying consolidated corridors of power, who value art less than profit and life itself even less than art. They have molded a culture industry that stifles creative desires and encourages the production of shallow distractions fueled by crunch, abuse, and anonymity. They reap the benefits of work they haven’t produced while mistreating the workers who sustain their existence in the first place.
At the core of this, and most visible (because while you can try and hide what’s going on inside your walls, you can’t hide what’s being expelled from them) are the cascadingly massive layoffs. Video games are more profitable than ever, and yet there’s somehow no money to go around; smaller companies wither without funding that should be readily available as unpaid solo development increasingly becomes the only possible way to “make it” as an indie success story. Shitty publishers exploit these stories over and over, grifting and exploiting in whatever cracks the larger companies can’t reach. The consequence is an inhospitable, unappealing desert patrolled by vultures.
When we acknowledge that massive layoffs — more frequently than ever disintegrating entire companies— can happen irrespective of the amount of value generated by the affected workers and the product of their labor, it casts doubt on the entire premise of the system. It becomes clearer that nobody “makes it” and nobody “wins.” Succeed and die anyway. You’ll suffer the same fate for simply carrying out the whims of your managers, who know less about making money than you and will never listen to a contrary opinion; you’ll suffer the same fate for financially “failing” once in an environment that could sustain dozens of such failures without ever buckling, as proven by the rote stupidity of said managers; there is no preconfiguration that results in victory over an insulted and unendurable existence.
We do not need executives. We need shareholders even less. Few things have encouraged the former to act with ridiculous and short-sighted impunity more than the latter. No creative industry should suffer the horrors of becoming publicly traded, but this is exactly what’s happened. Much of the current crisis has been instigated in an attempt to please a subliterate group that cheers whenever a graph goes up, the product of which is your own disposal.
In a world where video games generate more value than ever, video game workers have never been valued less in the medium’s entire history. A widespread lack (suppression) of unionization, increasingly horrifying managerial tactics, and the further consolidation of power into a select few morons has turned the industry into a mulching machine bereft of anything human. Workers are needed more than ever; jarringly, they have never lived with less worth or dignity.
An aside: I work in a small business that operates out of a larger business (and if gamers were a little nicer, which is a whole other conversation, I’d tell you more). When the employees are running the place, profits are reasonable and operations are consistently smooth. In these periods, our bosses are absent; they work downstairs, relatively isolated from their employees or the work they produce. These “supervisors” do no supervising, and I’ve gone more than a week without word of one coming upstairs and taking a single step into the establishment they’ve been ordained to manage.
This is bad, in the sense that their job is visibly useless. They know nothing about our business and make no effort to actually help us run it. But we‘re forced tothink within the system, and under that lens, the situation is good, since they would perform this job poorly. The business only operates successfully when they functionally cease to exist.
But sometimes they intervene, either out of an obligation to look busy or, I suppose, whenever they get the strange urge to actually do their jobs. When they do, shambling upstairs to touch on a “problem” or “concern” with some kind of bewildering solution, the business never escapes unscathed. Work schedules are rewritten by people who have no idea what the job entails, planned offerings are swapped for random alternatives that nobody wants to buy, and processes are generally upturned based on a perpetual misunderstanding of the rules they believe they’re enforcing.
Most jobs are like this. Were these supervisors removed from the equation and what little administrative role they fulfill restructured accordingly, the organization would benefit instantly. Most workers know that they’d collectively do a fine job shouldering the burden of running such an establishment; they already know what they’re doing and don’t need to waste their time perpetually chasing new methods of acquiring hypothetical profits. They produce the work that makes the profit, and would surely make even more profit if they could do what they wanted.
When the center of greed — the cancer — is removed, the existing profit is suddenly more than adequate to keep things running. Delusions of “infinite growth” are a disease that eats itself while turning human beings into speculative assets. Nobody needs to own what Microsoft owns — they’re as ruinous as the framework they occupy, and though said framework invariably implodes on itself, it only does so after taking everybody with it. Something must be done.
There are no games left to win under capitalism, and the video game industry is no exception. The only path forward, however quixotic, is to seize control of the rules. In the short-term, this means collective action: Unionization needs to spread like wildfire, and anything that stands in its way needs to be stampeded. Even this, the most basic form of retaliation, feels like such pie in the sky idealism that a state beyond it is still cloudy.
But sooner rather than later, the system itself needs to change. Standing your ground against such an overwhelming force of craven, uncaring avarice can only remain tenable for so long. It should no longer be possible for the scum who write off lives to avoid their own obsolescence.
Nobody needs a man like Phil Spencer, of which there too many. They should, at the very least, live with an understanding of their place in the world. And then, as a consequence of that understanding, they should be afraid. All of them.
