Factually! with Adam Conover - Toil and Turmoil in the Video Game Industry with Jason Schreier

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

If you love video games, working in game development sounds like a dream job — especially since the industry now grosses more than movies and sports combined. But the reality is a lot less��� fun than you might think. This week journalist Jason Schreier joins Adam to discuss his latest book Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. In it, Jason sheds new light on the strenuous, sometimes-abusive work environments behind some of the world's most popular and beloved games. Purchase Jason's book Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I enjoy playing video games. Was that clear from my voice and face and general personality? I enjoy playing them. I loved them as a kid. I play them now. I happen to think that they are one of the most interesting new art forms we have as a species. There are incredible things being done in video games, new interactions that we have between us, the experiencer, and the artists who made the game. If you're not playing video games, I happen to think you're missing out on one of the most interesting cultural products that we have going right now. The products of the video game industry continue to impress and delight. And by the way, they are massive. The video game industry in 2020 grossed around $180 billion. For perspective, that's larger than the film industry and the sports industry in North America combined. We think of

both film and sports as being a much more mass market than video games, yet video games are making so much more money. By any measure, this is one of the most important cultural products we have in this day and age. It's no wonder that for many people, especially the generations who grew up playing video games, working in the video game industry sounds like a dream job. Wow, could anything be better? What do you do? Just play games all day? It must be fun. Well, the reality of working in the video game industry is much more of a waking nightmare. See, as far as white collar office work goes, video game studios are about as grueling and oppressive of a work environment as it gets. For instance, there's a practice called Crunch, under which people working

at some of the largest video game studios in the world on some of the biggest games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or Cyberpunk have to work 80 hour weeks or more for months on end in order to push a project out the door, resulting in burnout, bad health outcomes, and the destruction of these people's relationships with their families and children. Even after a game is released, updates and DLC might require

workers to continue putting in egregious hours with no end in sight. And even though the video game industry makes so much money, the financing for even successful studios is incredibly precarious. There have been cases in which a studio, these are the people who make the game, immediately after releasing a game that sold well, that was a success, the studio will go out of business and lay everyone off because they simply can't keep bringing enough money in the door to keep people employed. That is how messed up the economics of this industry are. Oh, and by the way, the industry as a workplace is also rife with sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Riot Games, which makes the incredibly popular game League of Legends, is well known for allowing a sexist workplace culture to thrive. And one of its executives was pushed out last year after blaming George Floyd for his own death on Facebook. So

not a great workplace in general there. And one of the reasons that this massive industry has gotten away with being so shitty for so long is that for many years, much of the gaming press didn't actually cover it. Instead, they'd cover things like what new games are out, you know, strategies for how to be better at them, or they do consumer-focused reporting,

like, you know, whether gamers were getting their money's worth from the game, that sort of thing. And there's a place for all that coverage. I love that coverage. I've read it for years. But in recent years, we've seen more and more real journalism about what is going on behind the scenes in the video game industry. Well, today on the show, I am so proud to say that we have a reporter who is at the

forefront of that movement, who takes a more in-depth and critical view of the gaming industry that he and I both love so much. His name is Jason Schreier, and he is one of the most respected voices in games journalism. He wrote for many years at the site Kotaku, and he is currently a reporter for Bloomberg News and the author of the new book, Press Reset, Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. Please welcome Jason Schreier. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Adam. It is a pleasure. So you are a video game reporter, journalist. Tell me a little bit about what you do, first of all, because I think you kind of have a unique job in the world of games, media or media in general.

There aren't a lot of people who do what you do. Yeah, it's been fun. It's like whenever I introduce myself to people, I say I'm a journalist and they're like, oh, do you like what do you do? What do you cover? And I'm like the weird, wild world of video games. And I either get like one of two reactions, either like, oh my God, that is so cool. Or this look that is like, what? Who are you? Like, aren't those for kids? But yeah, no, I've been doing this for a long time. I've been, I spent a long time, I spent a couple of years freelancing, working for sites like Wired and then got a job at Kotaku, which is the gaming site that used to be part of Gawker Media and

now is part of Geo Media. And I was there for about eight years, a little over eight years. And now I work for Bloomberg News, where I cover the video game industry. And nowadays, I'm covering kind of like the business-y sides of things and the cultural sides of things. And yeah, there's a lot to write about games are are big these days as you know you you are also a big video game fan i am i am that's why i'm very excited to have you here uh but you know i think just to put an even finer point on this when even someone like myself who reads a lot of games media thinks about video game journalism we think about like okay here a new monster just came out

in Monster Hunter Rise, and here's how to kill him, like that sort of writing. Or like, here's a new game that's gonna come out, it looks really good, the trailer just dropped, here's what fans are reacting, things like that.

You though, not to besmirch that kind of writing, because that's great, and that's what I enjoy reading that stuff as a video game fan, but you do, I would would say more on the ground reporting about labor issues in video games about uh you know trying to get a sense of what's going on internally at different game studios that sort of thing correct yeah something I've been trying to do um over the past however many years um is kind of shed some insight

on what happens behind the scenes and tell some of the stories that game companies don't necessarily want told. Talk to people, give people kind of a voice, give people a platform to tell their stories from within game companies, because they're actually, and maybe not everybody knows this, but the games industry, despite being incredibly humongous and lucrative, has this darker side to it. And it faces a lot of issues. It deals with a lot of problems that I don't think that game companies like EA and Activision are eager to talk about. about over the years are like sexual misconduct at game companies or something that's called crunch, which is an epidemic in the video game world that is essentially excessive unpaid overtime that lasts for weeks or months or sometimes even years on end.

And yeah, one of the thing that I've been kind of focusing on most recently is the volatility in the video game industry and how kind of fickle it is and how tough it is to stay employed in games, which is actually what I just wrote a book about that is about to be published called Press Reset, Reign and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, which is about like the kind of turbulence that comes with having a career in video games and how you probably won't stay at the same company for more than a couple years before a mass layoff hits or studio shutdown hits and suddenly you are finding yourself moving somewhere else moving across the world 3 000 miles to find your new job and all of this stuff kind of in aggregate has created a lot of problems for

the games industry that i um like to talk about and make sure that more people are talking about and trying to, I try to get the conversation started as much as possible about a lot of this stuff. Yeah. I mean, your last book was fantastic. It was called Blood, Sweat and Pixels. And it was about different studios, the stories behind the creations of different games from, you know, indie developers, like, you know, one person bands who made an entire game themselves to great big developers. But why, yeah, why write a second book? Was it to get, capture that angle of the volatility?

Yeah, well, so the first book, which, yes, I'm very glad you enjoyed your quote is on the cover. Still very proud of the great quote you gave. Now this sounds like i'm i have a conflict of interest uh i do have oh my gosh i do know but it wasn't well it's not like we paid you sent it to me and i enjoyed it yeah yeah no it's not like we paid you i should be very clear here it's not like we paid you for a quote or anything you i was just like hey adam i think you would enjoy this and you're like yeah i enjoyed it um i give i gave to a couple of books, and I don't feel like it's a conflict of interest.

But anyway, yeah, I enjoyed writing that. One of my kind of takeaways after that book was like, okay, I want to write something else. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I had a couple of false starts. And eventually I landed on this question of like, so everything I do, I like to think of reporting as like, every good story starts with a question, an interesting question of some sort. And with the first book with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, my question was, why are video games so hard to make? Why are games such a strange, elusive art form? And what is going on there? Why do people always talk about how difficult these things are to do? And I tried to answer that question through

stories of how games were made. For the second book, I wanted to ask the question, why is it so hard to maintain a career in the video game industry? And I wanted to answer that question again through stories on the ground, reporting firsthand, interviews with people. And so what I did this time was I said, okay, I'm going to look at a bunch of case studies. I'm going to look at a bunch of stories of game studios shutting down. And I wanted to do a whole mix of them. I wanted to do everything from like 38 Studios, which is this glorious, extravagant company that was run by the former baseball

player Kurt Schilling, who completely mismanaged it and threw out all their money that they took from the state of Rhode Island. So that's a whole big story. From that to Irrational Games, which are the makers of Bioshock, one of the most critically acclaimed games ever. And they shut down just a year after releasing Bioshock Infinite, which had like all these won awards and was critically acclaimed. So I wanted to figure out why are these studios shutting down, even whether they're making failures, whether they're making successes, what happens to people when their studios shut down? How do they react? What do they do afterwards, what do they do once they're in this kind of impossible situation, and how do they kind of rise up from that. And so I went around and I found a

bunch of different people who I found really interesting and tried to tell some of their stories in this book. And there's stories in there of people who like go through a studio shutdown and then go on to create an indie mega hit and they're doing really well for themselves. And then there's stories about people who, after a studio shutdown, say, you know what, this video game industry is not working for me. I'm going to go somewhere else where they actually treat workers with respect and pay us better and give us stability and don't make us crunch. And so there are people who do that as well. And yeah, what I found over the course of reporting this book is that like, it's really an epidemic problem. And the kind of

conclusion that you hear from all of these game developers is something needs to change. And then what I did at the end of the book was I started exploring some ways in which some solutions to these problems, some ways in which the video game industry can change and kind of tackle these demons and try to figure out, hey, there's all this money here. Maybe we can support our workers. Maybe we can face this these crises and not let this brain drain keep happening and not keep losing people to burnout and stuff. So, yeah, it's been it's been quite an experience. The book is kind of, it's a little bit dismal, I would say, but it's not like totally bleak. There's a lot of optimism in the book, I think. Even though it sounds like it's about studio shutdowns, but there's a lot of like,

I think what people will, people will read this book and I think come away from it thinking, okay, things can get better. There is like, there are paths forward. There are paths out of this. It's just that things happen to be a little dark right now. Well, let's, let's talk about, let's talk about it. I mean, first of all, even if your, your work is dismal, I wouldn't use that word, but it, you know, you're pulling back the curtain on something that we normally don't get to see, Right. Because so much of, again, any writing about video games is about, hey, here are the new features. Here are the new maps. Here's the new etc.

And, you know, in the entertainment industry generally, not just video games, but in my piece of the entertainment industry, like there's a there's also a dearth of journalism. Generally, most of the most of the press is about those. Hey, what new movie came out? Not, hey, here's what happened behind the scenes of this movie. Like plenty of reviews about why the last Star Wars movie was bad. Right. But where was the story story going? What the fuck happened with that Star Wars movie? Like what the hell happened to Disney that made them go from the great success they were having to, you know, like, you know, what were the pressures? What were the institutional mistakes? What were the all these sorts of things? And so that's what that's what makes it fascinating to read your work. like a malaise over this massive industry. Like I think, you know, we don't often appreciate the video game industry is massive, larger than the movie industry, at least by some measures. I don't know off the top of my head,

but I've seen plenty of statistics over my life about how much money the industry makes, enjoyed by untold millions of people around the world. You know, these games make enormous amounts of money, yet the finances of the industry, both for the companies and the workers, are completely tenuous. Like, what if, you know, a big movie came out,

it was a big blockbuster, you know, the new Avengers movie comes out, and then a year later, Marvel Studios shuts down because they don't have any money. And they say, we actually became unprofitable. We are shutting down the whole studio. And what if everybody who worked on the movie retired from the industry at the age of 28

because they couldn't stand to work in the industry anymore? And they all had horror stories saying, oh my God, working on Avengers, it almost killed me. I didn't see my kids for five years. That would be weird. Yet that is the state of, that's the status quo in the video game industry. And I want to talk about some of the specifics of those stories, but do you have any sense of why that is? Like, what is it about the video game industry that

causes it to be that way? Yeah. The newness of it? Last I checked, $180 billion in revenue is the big stat in the video game industry, which is nuts. Yeah, it's a great question, and I think the newness of it is one big answer. As you said, the games industry really, really the modern video game industry that we know it today started in the 1980s,

so it's about 40 years old, which is very young compared to Hollywood or really anything else. It's definitely the youngest. Yeah. Considering how much money it brings in. It's an extremely young industry. And it's still kind of like compared to compared to film, we're in like the 50s. Yeah. In terms of video games. Yeah. And I think that like as a result of that, I mean, there are a number of things. First of all, if you look at like how things have changed the 90s, when it was literally people living in these frat house environments

making games, things have evolved in some good ways and become more professionalized and progressive in a lot of ways. But the big thing that hasn't happened yet is there are no unions in the video game industry, at least in North America. There's some in Europe where there are more union-friendly countries, there are some. But in the US, Canada, the North American video game industry, there are no unions. And that makes a huge difference between this world and Hollywood, where everybody's unionized and there are a lot of protections in place for workers. There are a lot of other big differences, one of which being that in hollywood um most of it most of that world most of your world is in los angeles so if you lose your job as a writer or

if you're bouncing from between jobs as a writer um in film in tv you can pretty easily well not easily but but you don't have to move anywhere if you want to find new jobs you just stay in hollywood maybe you you have an office in s Santa Monica. Maybe your next office is in Burbank, whatever. But you're always in the same place. That's in fact how most people work. You go from job to job. I mean, I was in this writer's room. I was in that writer's room. I didn't work for three months. Then I got a new gig and then I got lucky and sold something. But I was in Burbank. I was in Santa Monica. But the whole time I lived in L.A. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Exactly. And in games, it's very different because in games, even though there are a few hubs where like there's a cluster of game companies here, LA is one of them.

Seattle is another. It's very spread out. There are game companies all over the place and there's no like one central area where you go and you know, okay, if I am pursuing my career in video games, this is where I'm going. okay, if I am pursuing my career in video games, this is where I'm going. And something that I explore in the book, and it's actually wild timing, because I explored that, okay, one possible solution here is if we can't solve the problem of volatility,

and maybe we can, maybe we can't, I don't know. There are a lot of questions there. But let's say, hypothetically, we cannot solve the problem. We cannot solve the problem of a company potentially running out of money and having to shut down. What we could solve potentially is a problem of forcing those workers to then have to move 3,000 miles every time they want a new gig by creating more of a remote-friendly environment in the video game industry. Because in the past, people have been very, very anti-remote work. It was always like, you have to be in the office, have to be in the office. Then just as I was finishing this book, we started hearing about something called COVID-19.

And suddenly for the last year, everyone's been working remotely. So it's fascinating to see. And so this is something I got. I actually had a chance to put in some stuff in the book about the future of remote work and what that'll look like. Because I think that alone could change so much for the video game industry. If I'm in Boston working at Irrational Games and suddenly I get called into an all-hands meeting and I find out that Irrational is shutting down, but there are no other game

studios in Boston. So I can either uproot my family and pull my kids out of school and move to LA or San Francisco or whatever, or I can quit the video game industry and go find something else to do. Now there could potentially be a third option, which is I find a job in Santa Monica, but I work remotely, so I don't actually have to uproot my life. And that alone, something that simple could really change everything for the video game industry and make it so much more accommodating to so many people. So yeah, we'll see. It's interesting times. But that just solves one problem that

people have, which is the, you know, losing a gig and then having to move. The problem though, is much bigger that like top to bottom working conditions are very, very difficult. So let's just, let's talk about it this way. I have a, i have a family member and my extended family who's uh you know says hey i think i want to go into video games and you know i i was telling talking to him about it and being a little bit of a student of the industry having read your book i recommended him your last book to read um but i also knew enough to tell him you know he's like oh my god that's my dream job and I'm like okay well careful because that's how we all perceive it that's what people think

his relatives are like oh that's unrealistic you could never be so lucky as to get a job in video games that's like a lottery ticket and I'm like well hold on a second I think we all have a misunderstanding culturally of what this is it's actually be careful what you wish for. So tell me a little bit about like,

what is it like for, you know, the average person working on, you know, a big, big game, like say a cyberpunk, which just came out or,

or say maybe a, you know, a large blizzard or any EA game and, you know, trip the world of AAA. What does that look like for the average, you know, a large Blizzard or any EA game and, you know, the world of AAA. What does that look like for the average, you know, person working on it? Yeah. I mean, it really, so first of all, I can kind of give a general description, but I should add the caveat here that it really varies depending on the company. Some companies are like, have a culture of crunch where they're

all in like all the time. And it it's like you get dirty looks if you leave the office at 7 p.m and then other companies are try to do the opposite and try to create an atmosphere where like they have producers going around and telling people to go home um so it really depends and there are a lot of different like cd project red the company behind cyberpunk as you brought up um is really known for its crunch culture and people have to work a lot of hours there. Whereas EA is actually, despite their kind of broader reputation in the gaming sphere, they actually are known for, at least within certain divisions of EA, they're known for trying to really create healthy atmosphere for people. But I think even the most healthy game

companies, you're always going to have to face crunch and you're always going to have to deal with a lot of these issues that I've been talking about. Can you define crunch for us? Yeah. Crunch is the games industry colloquial term for excessive overtime. And it's just like a period of, it's not just like an occasional night or weekend here. It's a period of, okay, for the next eight weeks, we are all working every Saturday or for the next five months leading up to E3, we are all working every Tuesday night and every Thursday night or something like that. I can take a bunch of different forms. Sometimes it's actually created kind of, it's never, sometimes it's not mandated. It's not like someone says, hey, we're working late

tonight. It's more like you're expected to be there and available. And like you, you, like I said, you get dirty looks if you leave and everybody else is there. So it's like, oh man, I don't want to be the first to leave the office. And it can take a lot of different forms, but it is very common. And it's not something that,

I think because of the nature of making games, because games are so difficult to make for so many different reasons, you eventually get to a point where you're like, man, we only have two months left to finish this game. And we have a lot of work to do. So we really need to give it our all. And as it happens, because so many people just like your, was it a relative or your friend of a friend who wants to get into the relative who wants to get into games? So many people see

it as a dream job that they're like, it's like this, that capitalistic way of taking advantage of someone's desires to like turn what they love into a living where like you are, you almost, you want to put in, let's say you're 25. You just got your first job in the games industry. You want to put everything you can into this game because it's awesome. And you're like, hey, I'm making video games for a living. I want to stay at the office till 10 p.m. Yeah. This is my self-actualization. This is what I was put on earth to do this. I love this. Exactly. Yeah. And you'd better believe that people in management at these companies in the C-suite of these big publicly traded companies are very cognizant of that and very much rely on that sort of mentality to get games out the door. much rely on that sort of like mentality to, to get games out the door. Um, and I think that like,

that's one of the reasons that the video game industry skews so young is because people in their twenties, like might live for that. But then once you get into your thirties, you're like, Hey, I want to have a family. I want to take control of my life. I don't want to spend all day at work every day. Um, then you're kind of like, maybe games is not for me anymore. And you just get kind of churned out by this. Like I said, there are some companies that are actively working to change this stuff. There's some people that are actively working to change this stuff. But it's very, very difficult because of the nature of these things. And because it can be so, so much fun to just like pour yourself into your work and to be surrounded by people who are like putting in their all and just like,

yeah, like going, like burning the candle on both ends and everybody, everybody like it, it becomes part of like, you feel like you're on a team and you're all in this together. You're in the trenches is how a lot of game developers describe it. So yeah,

it's a lot of what you're describing too, is like a good feeling and can be a good thing on a project. Putting a lot of work into a project is a great thing. Again, my own industry, on my own television set, you know, we do long hours. You know, I stay up late and work on scripts. I appreciate it when other people do the same thing. And, you know, say on a TV set, you know, we often will work 12, 14 hour days for, you know, a week or two. But the difference is we are doing that for a defined period of time.

And we also have a union that's setting rules around those things that says, OK, you know, every six hours you must provide a meal after people go home. You know, OK, they can work 12 hours, but then after that, they need a certain amount of time at home before they can come back. They need to be paid differently if they're being asked to work on a Saturday. There's all of these things around that that have built up around, you know, collective bargaining, the people who work on the set saying, okay, what do we and don't we find acceptable? So it's all like an agreement. But what you're describing goes pretty far beyond that. Like, I mean, there's, you know, sure, we got to work on a Saturday. I think a lot of people have had that experience. But when you're talking about everybody is being required to work 80 hour weeks for weeks or months on end with no end in sight, no particular end, you know, no particular we're going to stop at this date. end in sight. No particular, you know, no particular we're going to stop at this date. And that's just like the culture of it. And you'll be, you know, sort of socially or perhaps financially punished if you don't do it. It ends up being like bad for people's health even,

is my understanding. Yeah. Am I right about that? Yeah. I don't think you'll find many people who would complain about like a week or two of overtime of like putting in like everything you can at the very end of a project or something like that. The problem is that yes, a like you said, it can be weeks, it can be months on end. Sometimes there is that kind of like end date and distance, it could be like, okay, we're shipping in November, we're releasing the game in November. So we know we have, we have this hard stop of October 30th or whatever it is. Although sometimes a game will then get delayed and the crunch will just continue even longer, which can also be really brutal. But the other part of this equation is that a lot of people in the games industry are on salary and they're not getting paid for every hour they work. They might get a bonus at the end of the project. They might get some paid time off at the end of the project to kind of make up for things. But often it is not nearly enough to make up to like compensate them for the number of hours that they are, that they are working. Um, and they don't even get like, so it's funny, there's been a lot of talk recently about overtime in the banking industry. I've seen

a bunch of articles about like people at Goldman Sachs complaining about their hours and how they're all working crazy, crazy schedules. But those people also get paid ridiculous amounts of money. We're talking like, like 200,000, like entry level, you're making these huge bonuses, you're making these huge salaries. And that kind of like, maybe if you break it down into an hourly rate, it's not very impressive, but you're still getting kind of paid. And trust me, I'm not defending that world because it's crazy and horrible for people's mental health. But, but imagine that kind of paid. And trust me, I'm not defending that world because it's crazy and horrible for people's mental health. But imagine that kind of schedule with like normal salaries, like salaries where you're not making Goldman Sachs money. Like you're lucky to break six figures if you have a bunch of experience in the industry. Most people are not making that kind of

money unless they're the C-suite executives bringing in 30, $40 million a year, which is all another thing that we could get into. But yeah, it's, it's, it's the type of culture that is like, people are just, it just really chews through people. It burns people out. And sometimes they don't even realize it. Sometimes they enjoy it. Like, like you just described, it's like that there's something, and I've done this too. It's exhilarating to like pull an all-nighter working on something you really care about. You're really into it. You're like, man, what a rush to do this. But do that for enough time and suddenly you wake up and you're like, oh my God, I'm so burnt out right now. this after they've been in the games industry for four or five years or longer, they're just kind of like, man, like I'm really burnt out. So yeah, it can really, it can really just add up. And the, the, the thing that makes me mad about it when I think about it is that like, okay, you know, I've been in a position as a manager of a creative project where I'm like, hey guys, we got a late network note or

I fucked up, somebody fucked up, we're going to have to put in a little extra work here. Or we think it's for the good of the show, we're going to make a change and we're all going to have to stay up a little late working on this script. And everyone says, okay, and we do it. But there's a difference between that and the company planning to use this kind of overtime in order to complete the project like they're saying oh my god guys we're late getting this game done we really got to work hard now versus people going like all right we need to launch on this date and well if we just crunch everybody really hard we We can make it, you know, or like, you know, it's the thing of the,

the bosses in the C-suite, like you say, accepting an unrealistic deadline and pushing all of the, the burden of that onto their workers who are going to have to make up the difference. And then that works once and the game's a big hit and they make a lot of money and they're like, well,

why don't we just do that every time? Like, Oh, oopsies't we just do that every time? Like, uh-oh, oopsies, got a crunch again. Like, is there that dynamic? Because that's what it looks like to me from the outside. Oh, yeah, 100%. Some companies are just well-known for, like, building their schedule around crunch. And so when people are building schedules

in the video game industry, it's always based on just complete estimates and guesses. And one of the reasons that you'll see, and I'm sure you've noticed this, that pretty much every single game, not just during COVID, but all throughout gaming history, every single game gets delayed at least once. And that is because most schedules and most release date estimates are just complete guesses. But even with that in mind, there's a lot of just guaranteed enforced crunch built into schedules. It's like, okay, we know we're hitting this point a month before the end of the project, two months before the end of the project. We know it's crunch time.

At some companies, it's like even longer. And then what can also happen is sometimes it's not even insidious. Sometimes it's like with totally unintentional crunch. And so here's an example. Let's say I'm an artist and I just started at my favorite game studio. And I'm like, oh man, I'm so excited to work on my favorite game. And someone says, okay, you have to create this level. You have to draw this environment, whatever. How long do you think it'll take you? And I'm like, it'll take me a week. And then

I realized that actually to do it in a week, I'm gonna have to work really long hours. And I'm like, um, it'll take me a week. And then I realized that actually to do it in a week, I'm gonna have to work really long hours. And so I do that because I want to prove myself and I finished it in a week. Then my boss thinks, oh, I, Jason can do this thing in a week, even though I was like crunching and pushing myself to do it in a week. Suddenly I'm expected to be able to deliver that exact thing in a week next time it's required. And so it can really be this self-perpetuating cycle where people just really are pushing themselves to the limit. And it's really important. I think the only way to really combat that

is for managers to really be looking around and producers really to be looking around and saying, hey, you need to go home. You need to stop working at 7 p.m. no matter what. You need to leave this office right now. And that can sometimes really be. You need to stop working at 7 p.m. no matter what. You need to like leave this office right now. And that can sometimes really be the only way to stop people who are really passionate and into their work from doing that sort of thing.

But some of it's coming from the top, right? Like the manager, some of those managers are not going to be able to look around and do that because they have their goals they have to hit too. And, you know, I've seen, I'm sorry to compare it to my industry so much, right? No, it's great. I think it's fascinating.

It's really affected how I think about this. Like I, you know, was in a position where I was running a project that was, you know, I didn't determine the delivery date or the amount of money or the scope of the project, right? That was agreed to by people above me. And they agreed to a delivery date or the amount of money or the scope of the project, right? That was agreed to by people above me. And they agreed to a delivery date and a scope and an amount of money for the project that I only realized afterwards was unreasonable.

You know, they said, we can get it to you this date and it'll cost this much and it'll be this many episodes and they'll be this long and they'll look like this. And then when we got all of those, you know, and they said, OK, Adam, will you will you make this happen? Yes, I will. And then once we looked at all the numbers, we're like, oh, holy shit. This is like borderline impossible. Right. And so all of the shit rolled downhill onto not just me, but everybody who worked under me. And they all had to work very long hours. It was extremely difficult for for everybody. all had to work very long hours. It was extremely difficult for everybody. And I looked around, I said, this is not ethical, right? Like, I will never put people in this position again, because I'm fucking furious at, you know, the position that these people are in. But that

decision wasn't mine, right? I was not in that position at that point in my career to say, no, wait, we can't do this, because it was being done by people above who didn't even know what they were doing to the people below them because they were negligent enough to not pay attention to like what they were putting their workers through it seems like there's a lot of people in the video game industry there's a lot of companies who do or are compelled to take that bargain does that track for you yeah definitely i mean it's the type of thing where like not everybody is in a position to be able to turn down like to have no not everybody has any leverage in and or in a negotiation like that if you're an independent game studio head and someone presents you with like an unrealistic schedule an unrealistic budget but it's the only

offer you have and your other option is shutting down your studio then you might be totally screwed same thing happens with the big publishers where sometimes if you're a studio head and you're negotiating for resources with a bunch of other studio heads, sometimes it's the only way to deal with the internal politicking and get what you want is to make those compromises with the devil.

And yeah, much easier said than done. And I think that ultimately what it comes down to is what we talked about before, which is unions. And unions exist because you can't trust your managers to always do what's best. And sometimes your managers might be great people, but ultimately at the end of the day, their job is not to protect the workers. Their job is to do their job. It's to answer to people above them and people above them and so on and so on. And I think like having those union mandated protections in place, protect the type of situation that you're talking about and, and can at least ensure that like, if someone is working an 18 hour day,

that they're paid properly for it or that they are, will get restitution down the road for it. And I think that, that is the part of the equation that is just glaringly missing from the video game world. Yeah, I mean, you've got all this pressure from the top of the industry, from the finance people, the publisher, whatever, saying, we need the game out on this date. It's got to be out by Christmas. It's got to be, you got to be able to play for 200 hours.

The commercials need to look like this. That's part of our business plan. And they're going to ask for shit that's unrealistic. And you because that's how capitalism works, right? Capitalism always wants more cheaper. It'll always demand more cheaper. And you need a counterbalance saying, no, no, just no, it's not possible. We need to build into this business plan, the humanity of the people making the thing so that they have basic standards for, you know, to live of pay and also of work conditions. And that's what a union is for. The union is there to say, hey, guess what? It's not worth it to build a railroad if people need to die of black lung at the age of 25 at the bottom of a mine shaft. We're going to say no to that and enforce better conditions, even if you make less money. And there's something maybe

similar that I believe that is why the entertainment industry that I work in doesn't look like the video game industry today, why people are working under better conditions. It seems like the video game industry needs the same thing. Yeah, 100 again i i should say like there might be people who work in gaming right now and are listening to this and are like wait a minute my job is perfectly fine because this is not like an overall the games industry is so big that you can't like say sweeping things that apply to every single game studio and there's some game studios where people are super perfectly happy um might have some some gripes about certain parts of it but in general are not totally mistreated.

But overall, I would say standard, like the bar is low for like what is considered good and ethical treatment in the video game industry. What you said reminds me of an anecdote from my new book, Press Reset, which is I talked to this guy named Zach Mumbach, who was at EA at a studio called Visceral Games, best known for the Dead Space series. And they shut down in 2017. And so this part of the book tells that story and tells the story of his life. And he's fascinating because he and I had quite a few conversations and he told me that he was like, he spent many years of his life working at EA. He was there for like 18 years. And for a long time, he believed in like this workaholism where he was like hey this is a dream job um just like kobe bryant i have to be in the office every day practicing my craft or else

i'm going to be replaced um i need to be there i need to be putting in the hours i need to be put giving this my all um and eventually he came to this revelation that is like wait a minute i'm coming in every day right next to me is the executive office where the ceo of va andrew wilson who makes 30 million dollars or 20 million dollars a year whatever it is comes in every day every day he leaves at 5 p.m we're all still there the game developers are all still here the executives are like are like heading out to go hang out with their families at dinner time they're making tens of millions of dollars they're making like like private jet money we're all making like if we're lucky we're making six figures if we're lucky we're making tens of millions of dollars they're making like like private jet money we're

all making like if we're lucky we're making six figures if we're lucky we're making like 100 120 000 we're like wait a minute what the hell is going on here and i think that fundamentally is really i mean capitalism as a whole has this issue but like uh the games come the games industry especially is known for ceos and c-suite executives that are just obscenely paid. And oftentimes when people look at the games industry and say, hey, there's so much revenue here, where is it going? The answer really is to the people at the very top. I believe the CEOs of EA and Activision, Andrew Wilson and Bobby Kotick, were on a list recently, I think it was the last year or two years ago, of the most overpaid CEOs. Across capitalism.

Across all industry. Across the entire US. Across every industry. Bobby Kotick has been bringing in about $40 million a year. You see these headlines of C-suite executives at Activision EA getting paid these bonuses of like $10, $15 million to come in. They oftentimes leave after a couple of years. It's really the amount of money that is getting thrown around at the upper echelons of gaming is just unbelievable.

And then at the same time, if you're at the very bottom of the totem pole, if you're in QA, for example, which is quality assurance, which is the part of the game company where they're testing games, so they're playing games and trying to break them and find all the bugs. Those people often get paid close to minimum wage. Maybe if they're lucky, they'll make 20 bucks an hour. And they're looking over and sometimes they're like living in these expensive cities like LA. They're like, man, I can barely afford to pay rent. And the guy next door is going home at 5 p.m. every day and making $30 million a year.

Like, what the hell is going on here? And so, yeah, I mean, I think that, like, I don't know if there's a way, aside from regulation and more seated at the table and more of a voice and at least a little more leverage when it comes to dealing with those overpaid executives. Yeah, and that way is called a union. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I just don't. And there's been resistance to it. This is something I explore in the book as well. There's been some resistance to it.

But I think the tide as well. There's been some resistance to it, but I think the tide is turning. The last stat I saw was more than 50% of game developers said that they felt like unionization was inevitable and was going to happen in games. So I think the question is when and what will it look like and how will it happen more so than will it ever happen? Yeah, and that's a tide that's maybe turning across the country as well in terms of the labor movement. But cool, we got to we gotta take a really short break when we get back i want to ask you about some specific stories from the book and from your reporting uh especially about some of the the biggest games in the world have some shocking stories behind them so we'll be right back with more jason schreier I don't know anything We're back with Jason Schreier. So let's talk about some specific cases.

One I'd like to start with, and I'm not sure if this is in the book, but I know it's a case that you've reported on, is Cyberpunk 20, I forget what it is, 20 whatever it is. 2077. 2077, I was77 2077 2099 why 77 that's so weird i know it's the original property that it's based on um but okay cyberpunk 2077 was this for folks who didn't follow this this is one of the most anticipated games of the last decade

easily they've been working on this game for a decade by cd project red which is one of the last decade easily they've been working on this game for a decade by cd project red which is one of the biggest developers in the world had some of the biggest hits in the past um and this was a feverishly anticipated game uh when the game came out though it wasn't done yet like like the like the game despite them working on it for a decade despite them crunching people for an extremely long period of time the game just like came out like unfinished like we're talking people just being like posting shocked screenshots and videos of like what the fuck is happening the company had to apologize it was pulled off of the playstation store and so i'm looking at this going like all right this is this big mismatch again, between expectation and what's possible somehow. And yet this is a company that was able to like

determine its own destiny in many ways, it looks like because of how big it was. So just, I know that you reported on it. What the hell happened and how does this show us like what is, you know, going wrong with the video game industry? Yeah, this is an interesting case study because I think like it was this confluence of factors where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I think that this is a game that suffered from a lot of problems that games that suffer from one of which being they were so ambitious and had so many ideas and many of those ideas once like try they tried to execute on them um came had problems um for example this is a company that is about about

400 people i believe cd project the company behind cyberpunk um and they tried to make a game that they hoped would take on rockstar's grand theftft Auto. Rockstar, last I checked, is about 2,500, maybe 2,000 people. So already it's like this group of kind of scrappy, it's hard to say scrappy when it's 400 people, but it's like a group that's like trying to punch way above their weight class. It was also a game where it was like they tried to do so much that was drastically different from their last game that it just was recipe for

disaster from the beginning their last game the witcher 3 which was beloved and um critically acclaimed and a massive commercial success it was um a third person like the camera is out of and like you can see your character on the screen um fantasy role-playing game set in like a big open world with lots of villages and like not a lot of verticality a lot of horizontal um atmosphere a lot of horizontal landscapes um and then they tried they after that they switched to a first person so the camera um what you see is through the character's eyes um the sci-fi shooter um in a big vertical world where suddenly you have to think about the interiors of buildings and city streets and cars. It's just completely different from the last thing they did.

So the beginning of this development, they announced it in 2012, but it didn't really start. The game didn't really start until closer to 2016 after they had finished The Witcher because they had a very small team working on it. But like a lot of those people got pulled on to help them finish The Witcher, as is common in game studios, where it's like often many game studios, many big game studios try to do two projects at once. But it's always impossible because whatever project is like on fire and needs to get out the door just needs all hands on deck.

And so they need everybody to grab a hose and come in. So it wasn't really until like towards the end of 2016 when they were like, okay, this is what we want Cyberpunk to look like. From the beginning, there were just unrealistic deadlines. They just had all this ambition and things did not come together the way they should have when they announced the game and they showed off the game in 2018, which was when it really blew people out of the water. And it was like, oh my my god this massive demo of this game that looks incredible um they had not done a whole lot it was a demo that was mostly scripted and kind of faked for e3 um which is a big gaming trade show so it's common for demos to be kind of scripted uh for

e3 but like this was a company that like really't done a ton. The demo was very long, so they just spent a lot of time on it that couldn't go towards the actual game. Needless to say, when they announced the following year that this game was coming out in, I think they said April of 2020 was their first release date, everyone just laughed at the company because it's just like, no way we're coming out in April. And soon enough, they delayed the game to September and then again to November and then again to December. And that alone, that like string of like three delays in a row kind of shows you that there was some turbulence happening behind the scenes. But as they were doing this, as they kept working on this game, there was a sense from a lot

of people on the team from what I've gathered that, hey, this is not realistic. Like we need more time. We need more time. And then there was a kind of pushback from managers and from directors who kind of had this mentality of like, we worked on The Witcher 3. It followed a same sort of path where things were kind of very broken until the last minute

and then it all came together. We did The Witcher 3. It'll work out. Things will work out this time. Believe in yourself. Believe in our magic, our studio magic. This is like a common thing it's funny the the line between disaster and massive success in the video game industry is often so so thin it's like it's really incredible like how many games i've heard so many stories from game developers who are like yeah we

thought this game was just going to be a disaster. And then it all somehow came together. In Cyberpunk's case, it did not somehow come together. And it kind of showed the kind of hubris that comes with this mentality of like, it'll work out. It'll work out. We made The Witcher. We made The Witcher. It'll work out. And yeah, I mean, fundamentally, that's the problem is they just needed more time for whatever reason, whether it was financial or whether it was investor pressure, because CD Projekt is a publicly traded company. So even though they are

independent in the sense that they control their own destiny, they're not because really the shareholders control their destiny, which is oftentimes if you're wondering about a problem in the video game industry, it comes down to publicly traded company being beholden to its shareholders, executives having their fiduciary duty to shareholders and having to make decisions based on that, based on fiscal quarters instead of based on what's good for the game. But yeah, for whatever reason, CD Projekt decided we have to get this out in 2020. And maybe they were contractually obligated. I don't know for sure. But that ultimately just really, really hurt them. And now we'll see if they can recover. I kind of am optimistic that they'll be able to regain people's faith and come

out with a version of the game that is better and fixed in a lot of ways. But yeah, and then there were all sorts of other like smaller issues on the course of production, like technical problems and vision problems and directorial problems and personality conflicts and people coming to the company to work on this game and getting kind of driven out by the old guard of Witcher people and all sorts of other issues. So that's why I said it was a confluence of all these.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, I think, on this game. Like every ill that the video game industry has sort of concentrated into this one product. And I'm just imagining working on this game and you're crunching again, you're working insane overtime for months on end. And then the game comes out and the game isn't done. The fans are like, what the fuck happened? And you're still not done working on it because the game isn't done yet what if a movie came out and well this actually kind of happened with cats but what if a movie

came out this is the first example of that happening where the movie came out and the first cut of it was like whoa this is like not finished we need to keep we need to keep working on it that must be incredibly dispiriting i have to imagine working on it because this game was you know promoted as it's going to be the most immersive it's going to have the most like the city is going to be incredibly dense and it's going to be revolutionary in all these ways like i really believed until the game came out that this was going to be a big step forward in terms of storytelling and the density of the open world and all these things, because that was what I had been led to believe. And it turned out to be like at best, oh yeah, a pretty good open world sci-fi game. Is there like just a fundamental

mismatch between what the public has been led to expect and trained to expect and what is actually possible to make? Yeah. I mean, the standards have definitely risen so high that it's like every AAA, which is kind of industry lingo for big budget, every big budget game is expected to be everything. It's expected to be like an open world, playable for a hundred hours, have a skill tree, have like a realistic graphics, have amazing dialogue. It's just like you need this checklist to hit. And I think that's a real problem. I think that like the expectations that have just continued to rise are just impossible to keep up with. And it's something that I think a lot of companies are like looking around at and trying to figure out how to deal

with because it feels like we're headed towards something bad. Like it feels like maybe it's a bubble. Maybe it's just like a cliff that everybody's about to run off of. But it's just, it's the bar has been risen so high, especially graphically because everything is so much more expensive. Game prices, meanwhile, haven't changed. It's been $60 for a long time. It feels like we're heading towards $70 with this new generation, but that hasn't officially happened of games. And it's not just, there's a new trend called games as a service that's kind of newish to the video game industry,

where it's this idea that like, instead of just releasing game after game, you release one game and then you stick with it for ages. So Fortnite, for example, there's not going to be a Fortnite 2. Fortnite is just going to be continually updated for years and years. The problem with that trend is that every game as a service is now a new form of competition for any new game that comes out. When Activision releases the new Call of Duty, they're not just

competing with that Falls games, like the new Battlefield or whatever else. They're also competing with Fortnite and any other games that people are just continually playing. PUBG or Apex Legends or Overwatch or whatever else is like a consistent multiplayer game that people are sticking with. And so, yeah, we're definitely entering like a glut of games and this territory where it's like the expectations keep rising. And I don't know how much longer people will be able to keep up.

Game companies will be able to keep up. Game companies will be able to keep up. Well, and maybe just this trend of what video games have been in many ways for the last 10 or more years of the big open world game that you can play for 200 hours that is just so full of content, the Grand Theft Auto, the Skyrim type game is like specifically maybe a little bit unrealistic, especially because I play those games, but how many people who play them actually play them for 200 hours? I play them for 20 hours. I do the main mission.

I'm like, okay, I had a good time. I'm done. I'm not seeing all the rest of it. So all of this extra time is being spent on this piece that is not being played by, I mean, I would have to see data to see how many people are doing it, but it can't be a majority of people

are like doing 100% of these games versus something like Fortnite, right? Or an Apex Legends or a game like that, where you, oh yeah, I play that a little bit. I dip in and see what's new. I spend a couple extra bucks to buy a new skin for my character and then I'm moving on is like maybe a little bit more reasonable of a pattern. So the good news, by the way, for you and I, especially and for anyone out there

who like enjoys playing games, is that the barrier for entry for actually making a game is lower than it's ever been. And therefore, there's so much creativity out there in the indie space and in the kind of mid space between like below the the triple a world and there's so many cool games you can find if you just put a little bit of time into it and you don't just settle for like whatever is hot on playstation network that fall like the new biggest new thing that has all the marketing budget if you put the time in and you're like and you find games like baba is you which i know you enjoyed or like outer wilds or return of the oberdin or like any of these other just like amazing indie experiences you can really have such a good time and so many of them are just shorter than like the big 200 hour triple a

experiences um and yeah there's a lot of there's just like so many good games out there um that like people who i always recommend like when people are just are like more in tune with just like the big AAA game, the big EA game, the big Activision, big Call of Duty, whatever I always recommend that they try to put a little bit of time into just like finding something a little a little more off the beaten track

because it's worth it and there's so much good stuff out there. Yeah luckily we're still in a position where those smaller games can become hits and can be profitable for the people who made them and allow them to make more games and, and make a cultural impact. I'd love to hear, is there a story from your book that is like, ah, this is, this is it done right. This is a, this is a way forward. There's a lot of like optimism in there. Like I said before, I found some stories, some great people who just like went on

from studio shutdowns to do these amazing things. Like I met this woman named Gwen Frey who started the video game industry in like 2009, eventually moved to Irrational Games where she worked on Bioshock Infinite. And she was caught up in a layoff when the studio shut down in 2014. And so she went off with a group

of people and they started a company called The Molasses Flood in Boston where they made indie games. And then she said, you know what, even this indie studio is not indie enough for me. I'm going to go do my own thing. And she became a solo developer and she released this really cool game called Kine. That's kind of

this puzzle game where you play as like a walking musical instrument and you maneuver it's like a platforming puzzle game it's really cool it has some great tunes and she found enough success through that to be able to keep going on this solo indie path and she is happier than she's ever

been doing her own thing and it's been really cool to watch her career path and watch her career path and like watch her find success in that world. Um, and I think that like, even though I talked about burnout earlier, I think another viable path these days, if you get caught up in a layoff in a studio shutdown, if you decide you're going to leave the triple a world, the big budget world, um, another viable path is to go indie and it's really worked out for a lot of people. And they found like they're able to have, maybe they're not going to be the next notch, the creator of Minecraft

and like become a billionaire, but they can find like financially viable paths. And that is really cool. And the fact that like the internet and the rise of digital distribution has allowed for this kind of democratization of games. And you don't have to be like selling your game at Target or GameStop in order to make a successful game these days. You can just put it up on Steam or put it up on the Switch eShop or whatever. I think that's really cool and has been really rewarding to just watch happen. I hope you're right about that. I mean, I've played those games and I love those games.

And I've seen those success stories. You wrote about in your first book, the fellow who developed Stardew Valley as a completely solo project. Incredibly massive hit that made, I don't know how much it's grossed. It must be tons of money. And that was a bedroom project that he worked on all by himself for years and years and years. And then it finally came out. But I always wonder when I read those stories, well, what about the person who spends five years on their game in their bedroom and they release it on Steam, which is the big, you know, if folks don't know Steam, it's the big iTunes music store of games. Every game possible that you can play on a PC or many on Mac are on this.

And, you know, they, it, it becomes hard to find, right? Like plenty of people make a podcast, they upload their podcast. No one ever listens to the podcast. A very common story. How much is that happening with games? And is that a problem? Definitely? No, it's definitely a problem. There's a glut of games in the indie space as well. There's so many games competing for your time and money all the time. But I will say, so most people are not going to be Stardew Valley. The Stardew Valley story, I mean, he made millions and millions. Like, he sold 12 million copies last paycheck, 13 million copies. He made a lot of money. lot of money. Most people are not going to be Eric Barone and they're not going to have that story. But I think there is kind of a space between that and releasing your game and nobody's ever heard of it and nobody buys it. And if you have enough luck and if your game is good enough, I think there is like a viable way to like, maybe you're not going to make millions and

millions of dollars, but maybe you'll make enough to be able to do your next game. And there are a lot of games, there are a lot of indie games that I cover in this book even, where like, maybe they're not giant smash hits, but they are making enough to be able to like, support the careers of a few people. And that's really all that matters if you're like, looking to pursue your own career path. Like, maybe it would be nice to sell millions of copies, but like, at the end of the day, a lot of people are happy as long as they're making enough money that they can just keep doing what they love. Um, yes, that said, there is a very, very big caution that like there is this oversaturation and people call it the indie apocalypse. We've

all been talking about this for a few years now in the indie world, um, because there are just so many games and it's so hard to break out. You really have to be lucky. You really have to be right time, right place, right success story. Here's another example from the book is that the Molasses Flood, the company I was just talking about that Gwen Frey helped start, they have this game that did not do well when it launched, but wound up having this tale where over time and just build on momentum and allow them to keep going.

And in fact, they were in the right place at the right time because they released a version on the Switch in 2017 just as the Switch had come out. Nobody foresaw how successful the Nintendo Switch would be. And that fall, 2017, a lot of people had it and a lot of people were looking for new things

to buy because there wasn't a lot to play on the Switch eShop just yet. And so this game, The Flame and the Flood, happened to be on there and happened to lot to play on the Switch eShop just yet. And so this game, The Flame and the Flood, happened to be on there and happened to sell like another 200,000 copies or whatever it was just because it happened to be on the Switch at the perfect time where everybody wanted games on the Switch. So yeah, if you're lucky, if you work hard enough, if you have a game that is good or good enough, there is a viable career path. It's not easy. And it's definitely like, like I said, a lot of luck goes into it. But yeah, there is there is kind of that middle ground.

Yeah. And it seems that maybe there's a way to make a middle class income if you get that small but devoted fan base the same way a podcast like this one is able to, you know, we're not we're not burning down, you know, the world with our, you know, incredible download numbers, but we've got an incredibly awesome, passionate fan base that listens to the show, supports the show, and means the show is able to keep going as a profitable going concern. Is there that sort of possibility for a game developer as well? You get your 5,000, your 10,000 fans who love the game and you're able to keep going. Yeah, no, 100%. There's a guy I know

named Zach Barth and he has a company called Zachtronics and they made like a ton of games that are just incredibly niche. Games got like Magnum Opus and Infinifactory and a whole bunch more games. And they're very specific types of games. They're like games that appeal to math nerds and they're all about programming and doing these really specific things. And they're never going to make bazillions of dollars. They're never going to crack the mainstream.

But he has, and his company has, this team, this dedicated fan base that is just like might not be huge, might be maybe, I don't know, 20,000 people be huge, might be maybe, I don't know, 20,000 people, maybe less, maybe more, I don't know. But like they're supporting him and they allow him to continue making games,

which I think is really cool. And so, yes. One thing that I think is true now, especially after the past year, is that the video game playing audience is bigger than it's ever been. And we're seeing like console sales hit record highs and hours on all sorts of games are just breaking records. Uh, the new animal crossing last year just sold extremely like, like millions and millions of copies. And so, um,

especially cause of COVID, like a lot of people are second home looking for things to do wound up discovering video games, but really even before that, I think the population of people who are into games has grown a lot over the past couple of years. And that's also been really cool to see. And I think that also allows for more, even though there is that oversaturation, that glut of games, there's a lot more people, I think, willing to support those games, which is also cool.

Yeah. Just to sort of summarize all this, though, something that I think about a lot is why is the video game industry, as opposed to other industries, fucked up in so many ways, right? It's going through its own unionization wave right now. But it's not like when you go look at the white collar workers at Google's headquarters, they're after they release their product or they're releasing products unfinished that are big disasters or this crazy boom or bust thing that's happening in video games. Is there anything structurally about the video game industry that causes it to have these ills? Yeah. I mean, I think there are a few reasons. One that comes to mind immediately is actually the disciplines involved. So if you're a programmer and you're working in Silicon Valley, you are getting calls all the time. You have a bazillion different places. You are high in demand and low in supply. And there are a bazillion places you could work and you can command a fortune for your work if you're a good programmer and you're in Silicon Valley. And in fact, we've seen, I've seen game developers, often game programmers in the game development often move to tech companies to triple their salaries and like make these incredible bonuses and get all these incredible perks from the tech

companies. I think tech companies, because that world is so competitive and there's so many of them in one place, they kind of have to offer the best possible compensation and perks and all this other stuff in order to get the best talent. And you look at games, you look at other disciplines in games, and there's a lot more supply than there is demand. Artists, a lot more people want to become artists. A lot more people want to be writers than there are jobs for writers. And so it's just a basic capitalistic supply and demand thing. And because the demand is so much lower than the supply in those other disciplines, they can get away with a lot more. And yeah, so for that reason, I mean, you'll see salaries for programmers at game companies

look a lot higher than salaries for other disciplines. And again, it depends. There's certainly high-level designers or high-level artists, because once you have 10 years, 15 years of experience under your belt, you are more in demand in part because so many of those other senior people have burnt out. So there are a lot of like senior spots to be filled across the video game industry. So once you've like shipped a couple of games, you have a few games on your resume, you can pretty much find jobs. It's not hard to find a new job, but getting in in the first place, like there's so many people who want to do it and so few jobs that it's really just hard to crack in. And then once you crack in, game companies can get away with not giving you the types of perks that like a Facebook or Google

has to give people. There's also this degree to which it's like as an entertainment product, it is the biggest, most expensive entertainment product we try to make as a species. I mean, you wrote a book, right? I can read that book for, it'll take me eight hours to read the book. I can play an eight hour video game,

but it took you, Jason Schreier, one, you know, a year or two to write the book, right? Just your own efforts. But a video game that's a comparable length is going to take hundreds, if not thousands of people. Yeah. And the amount of money is immense. And so it's like this massive investment

that has to be made to reap hopefully big rewards. And so it really does lend itself towards a boom or bust economy. Exactly. Yeah, no, totally. And it's this type of thing. I mean, people look around and say, wow, how are this happening? This is unsustainable, this world where we're making such huge bets and they're so expensive. And so they have to sell X millions of copies in order to actually be viable. And oh my God, the pressure's on on and so you can see why that's sort of like the the risk is so high that it leads to a lot of these conditions and like uh the crunch

that we were talking about earlier i mean you're when you're when the pressure is that high it's like there's this expectation from the top down that like man everybody better put in these hours because we gotta sell millions of copies we gotta gotta make the best possible game and win game of the year. It starts to look like when I just pay $60 for one of these games, I'm like how is this only $60? I'm gonna play this for 100 hours and I'm paying

$60 for it? I should pay them more. There's like a mismatch there where it's like, how are they possibly making their money back on this? Okay. So you do though, seem to have some optimism about the trajectory of the, of the industry, especially as, I mean, as regards labor you do. Yeah, I do. And like I said, I mean, one of the chapters in Press Reset in the new book is just exploring solutions. And I tried to explore a few different things. And I found some optimism.

There are definitely some places to be optimistic, some people who are doing cool things and trying to find ways to change the video game industry. And like I said, I'm optimistic that most people seem to want to unionize, seem to want to fight for better working conditions. So I think that's going to happen at some point. I'm optimistic because this remote work trend, I think could catch on at companies. And I think that that'll make for healthier environments and more accessible environments for people.

And yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that makes me most optimistic is the fact that more and more people are talking about this. And over the course of my career covering the video game industry, 10 years ago, not a lot of people were talking about many of the issues that are so ubiquitous in this industry. There wasn't a ton of talk about crunch. There was some, and there had been conversations about crunch really in 2004. There was this big blog post called EA spouse. So it was like an anonymous whistleblower whose, whose husband worked for EA. And she was like,

I never see my husband. And she was talking about awful conditions and that led to a lot of changes. But, but like now in 2021, the conversations are so much more frequent and people are so much, people are on, on social media, on Twitter, game developers are just using their platforms to speak out about a lot of nonsense and we've seen a lot of kind of cultural reckonings that companies like riot and ubisoft when they came when it came to facing sexual misconduct and harassment and kind of toxic workplaces

and that's been heartening to see it's been heartening to see people kind of confronting that stuff head on. And yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic. There are also a lot of reasons to be pessimistic. So I just choose to go. I try to be a more optimistic person and I choose to like look at the positive things. But yeah, I think that like things can get better and will get better. Do you have any words of advice for my cousin who wants to enter the video game industry, but you know, without going broke or going nuts? Yeah, don't. Really? Yeah. It's just hard to recommend that anyone try to enter the video game industry these days, unless they really, I mean, it's sort of like media, right? Like it's so, I love my job and I love being a journalist, but like media is so volatile and like

hard to, to get into and hard to stay in and hard to deal with it. It's like, I just wouldn't recommend it to anyone. And I think that like, like ultimately, if you know that you can't imagine yourself doing anything but that, then you'll hear me say don't, and you'll just ignore me. So ultimately it's good advice because if you're really set on it, then you'll, you just won't listen to that advice. And if you're not, then you'll take the advice. So it's, it's win-win advice either way. Okay. Fair enough. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Just plug the book for us one more time, if you would. Yeah. So it's called Press Reset, Runaway Recovery in the Video Game Industry. I'm really proud of it. I'm really, I think it will resonate with a lot of people and I think it also

will inform and entertain people. Even though the stories are about kind of brutal stuff, I tried to write them in a way that is hopefully entertaining. They're all based on like direct interviews that I did with people. So it's all stuff that you will have not necessarily read before. And yeah, it comes out on May 11th. You can get it at any bookstore. Do me a favor and support your local bookstore because we need local indie bookstores need more support. So go and go and buy it from your local shop that has probably been struggling over the past year and needs your support.

But yeah, but you can get it anywhere. It's also an ebook. It's an audio book. It's getting translated to a bunch of different languages. So yeah, press reset. We're going to have it on our podcast bookstore at factuallypod.com slash books, which is through bookshop.org.

So it does kick back to your local bookstore. Although I do recommend even more getting it at your local bookstore if you have one that you love to support. Jason Schreier, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Adam. It's been a pleasure catching up as usual. Well, thank you once again to Jason

for coming on the show. If you want to check out his book, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just the show. If you want to check out his book, once again, you can get it at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just the show, but also your local bookstore because our shop is through bookshop.org. Thank you once again for listening. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I am recording this very interview on.

You can find me online at Adam Conover or adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week on Factually. that was a hate gun podcast