/Thread: May 9, 2019
STAY AWHILE, AND LISTEN… /THREAD
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TODAY’S DENSELY DAILY DOSAGE
NetherRealms’ Crunch Should be a Mortal Kombat Finishing Move
Gamesindustry.biz published a report detailing working conditions at Mortal Kombat developer NetherRealms. Highlights, if you can call them that: some employees reported 100+ hour work weeks, a culture that implicitly mandates long hours, policies that render contractors expendable, and an environment that excluded women.
If you’re not keeping track, NetherRealms is just one of a handful of AAA developers that have come under fire for similar practices over the last year. It’d be great if this shit would stop so I can stop writing about it and, more importantly, people can work in an industry they love and still enjoy a healthy lifestyle.
Riot Games: It’s a Walkout
More than 150 Riot employees staged a walkout this week to protest the company filing a motion to send a sexual harassment lawsuit to arbitration. Riot’s argument was that since the two employees that brought the suit signed arbitration agreements in their employment contract, their case couldn’t be taken directly to court. The company has since announced they’ll remove arbitration requirements going forward but the decision won’t retroactively apply to the existing suits against them.
While the lawsuit motion appears to have engendered the walkout, participants also shared frustration over a lack of progress on the company’s efforts to address the numerous issues that came to light last year in an earlier article at Kotaku.
Star Citizen: The Saga Continues
Forbes released a profile this week detailing the current state of Star Citizen. The article paints a picture of a studio struggling to realize even the outline of founder Chris Roberts’ vision of a massive, cinematic online experience. While the story covers a lot of ground, one question springs to mind: Where’s the money? Roberts has raised $288 million to date and as of this writing has yet to release anything close to what he originally pitched in 2012.
Quantic Dream In GWU’s Sights
The pro-unionization group Game Workers Unite announced a partnership with the French union Solidaires Informatique to provide support and protection to anyone who comes forward to report sexual harassment and assault at French studio Quantic Dream. While news of a culture of harassment at Quantic broke last year (French) and led to one employee winning a lawsuit against the company, the language in GWU’s statement hints that individuals at the company haven’t changed their behavior as a result.
Game for Peace: Oceania has Always Been at War with Eastasia
Tencent, who developed the mobile version of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, took the game off the market in China and replaced it with Game for Peace, a game that looks suspiciously like PUBG Mobile and allows players to carry over their PUBG progression to the new game. According to Tencent, Game for Peace “pays tribute to the blue sky warriors that guard [China]’s airspace.”
The move earned Tencent the opportunity to monetize Game for Peace; the Chinese government blocked the company from doing so with PUBG Mobile. With 70 million daily active users, that translates to a projected $1.2 billion in revenue. Blue sky warriors indeed.
BY THE NUMBERS
- Supercell invested 3.4 million euros in Luau Games
- EA revenue dropped 22% YoY in Q4
WEEKLY WEIGH IN
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I picked the wrong week to quit sniffin’ glue.
The past year has taught us a lot about what it means to work in games. An industry that brings joy to millions — and generates more revenue than any other form of media — has a dark underbelly that many of us know far too much about. I’m not going to rant or share my personal stories here, mostly because if you’re reading this you probably work in games, too, and you already have your own. What I do want to talk about is a related problem: things aren’t getting better.
It’s been nearly 15 years since Erin Hoffman’s ea_spouse article put a human face on working conditions in the game industry. Since then, despite some quiet periods, the latest round of investigative journalism shows us that we haven’t figured out how to improve our situation.
But why? Maybe it’s naive to think that as an industry ages (and makes more money) it matures, if only because public scrutiny forces it to. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I think it boils down to a few key problems:
- Passion industries have no incentive to treat people right. When there’s an inexhaustible supply of people who want to work in an industry, it’s very easy to replace someone who won’t put up with your shit. This leads to a situation where you aren’t really forced to improve the way you operate.
Compare something like games to a far more boring industry like printer manufacturing. There are far fewer people who wake up every day wishing they could just find a way to write printer drivers all day. That means employers need to create an environment that’s at least tolerable enough to keep talented people from jumping ship. That means better production practices, better HR policies, better wages, and leadership that actively makes sure those things exist and improve over time. - Confusing financial success with personal value is a huge problem. Not just in games; we have spent the last 40 years regarding anyone who makes money as a super genius who’s generally infallible. This leads to a situation where you give bad people who were successful early a free pass to ride that reality distortion field much longer than they deserve to. In a small industry, it’s easy for this mindset to cause a ton of damage over and over, especially when a new crop of leaders tries to emulate the bad behavior.
- Older gamers are used to secrecy. If you’re over 30, you probably didn’t volunteer the fact you were gamer when you were younger lest you get shuffled out of the relative safety of middle of the bell curve obscurity. Most of my early conversations with prospective friends in high school had a certain pattern about them. I’d start by talking about something everyone agreed was cool, then maybe mention Madden, then slowly, carefully bring up the fact I liked EverQuest. It felt like being an early Christian under Nero: say the wrong thing to the wrong person and you’re ostracized forever. While not everyone had this experience, my anecdotal research on the subject confirms I wasn’t alone here.
That mystery cult feeling has power, and it doesn’t just evaporate. It leads to an environment where people will turn a blind eye to really bad behavior because they don’t want to risk exclusion from a group of people that they don’t have to hide themselves from.
Now add some sociopaths to this group and see what happens.
OK, this got dark. Sorry. I will end this on a positive note, however.
There are reasons to have optimism about where we’re going, even if things look rough now. For one, journalists at Kotaku, gamesindustry.biz, Polygon, and others aren’t letting this go. People are being held accountable, even if it’s not in the boardroom. Regardless of where you stand on unionization, the fact the notion is picking up steam will give people who are suffering in silence an outlet to bring their issues to light and hopefully force change.
Maybe if we can’t make this better internally, customers will demand it from us. One commenter on a recent Kotaku article wrote, “I’d rather have unions and games take twice as long to make tbh.” The comment thread was… refreshingly civil. You didn’t see that 10 years ago.
As gamers grow older on average and enter later stages of their careers, we may benefit from their empathy.
BETTER KNOW AN INDIE
Have you ever wanted a JRPG with PvP? Look no further than Juncture Media’s AVARIAvs, a turn-based combat game that distills the JRPG genre down to its most exciting element. It released Thursday on Steam for $19.99. No chocobo sightings just yet.
LOOKING FOR MORE
Check out these new job openings, courtesy of our friends at gamedevstudios.com:
- Novaquark (Montreal, Canada): UI Programmer
- Sony Santa Monica Studio (Santa Monica): All disciplines
- Nintendo (Seattle): Game Engineer
PRO-TIPS
George Fan, creator of Plants vs. Zombies, went to the archives to show off some early design notes for his award-winning game. Check out his twitter thread here.
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