The beginning of the year is always a time to take stock of things and this year is no different. Regrettably, the only thing I can really bring myself to take stock of is the inhumane toll the games and tech industry is taking on its workers. Already this industry has shed more than 5900 jobs since the new year with no signs of the bloodletting anytime soon. By comparison, more than 6000 developers were let go over the course of the entirety of 2023. For anyone who had resolved 2024 might be better for the games industry, it’s unfortunately trending towards being the worst year for it yet.
There’s a memory that has stuck with me for the better part of twenty years now. Me and my best friend were coming out of school for the day, when I took out a games magazine that I’d received in the mail recently. While we waited for our parents to pick us up, we flipped through the pages wide-eyed at previews and ads for upcoming games. Among the ads was one about a company needing game testers. My friend and I being the excitable tykes we were—who’d convene at his house every Friday (and eventually Saturday) night to play the latest games he’d gotten—we resolved that that’d be our future job. To hell with working in an office or even dreaming of being on the moon, we wanted to do what made us happiest and play games for a living. Though we now understand the reality of the job these days, and how criminally unappreciated QA workers are, I still sometimes tell the guy he should try and get work in the field as a tester and make our dreams a reality. No one knows how to better exploit games and find the cracks in their programming like he does and the joy he derives from it has never wavered. It feels like I should probably stop pushing for a future in games though.
This industry does nothing but bleed its workforce dry and cast them aside. It’s an industry that allows the abuse that put Activision-Blizzard on the map a few years ago and then buys that for billions of dollars, only to then lay off thousands of hard-working people who were promised better. It’s an industry that still can’t even value every position of a team enough to credit them fully upon the release of a game. It’s an industry where so-called progressive bastions that liken their workers to family insist that they upend their lives, move someplace where the cost of living is catastrophically high, and mandate that you should work in an office amidst a pandemic that is no closer to being resolved and still kills regularly. And it’s an industry that will steal you away from your family and friends and deprive you of sleep to rush a poorly made game out the door, or outright scare you into believing that anything short of sacrifices like these will see you replaced by someone whose “passion” outweighs yours. It’s simply an industry where the people who make it up don’t matter to the people who make the decisions. I don’t want that for anyone already victim to the industry, let alone my closest friend.
That’s the reality we’ve all been faced with, especially in the last harrowing few years. Microsoft’s recent layoffs don’t feel like the moves of a corporation trying to save itself, which is the tact every company takes despite posting record profits and valuations. These layoffs are threats to the livelihood of anyone who would dare dream of a job making games; a surefire sign that the dream my friend and I shared as kids is dead. And what a goddamn fucking shame that is, because who should be deprived of their dreams by the cruelty that money and influence breeds in the twisted hearts of monsters that call themselves people like you and I?
All developers want to do is make the characters they’ve dreamed of, or work on the ones that compelled them to dream of making them in the first place. They want to conjure the spaces they thought could only live in their head. They want to make the badass armor or weapon they first sketched in the margins of some notebook. They want to express the things they felt they could only keep inside of themselves until some game they played some rainy afternoon cracked their perception of what the world could be wide open. They want to share it with everyone to make sure no one feels alone like they once did. They want to breathe a little bit of wonder back into the world. That, or they simply want to make and play games because it can be such a joyful thing to be a part of and share. And if we aren’t here to make things better and spread joy in some way, shape, or form, then what the hell are we all doing here?
Make no mistake, even if I was and am oblivious to them, I know institutional issues plagued the industry that I romanticized as a child, but at least there felt like there was an industry to love. Reading the news day in and day out paints a bleak picture of what remains of it, and once again, the year has only begun. Who’s to say what shape it’s in by 2025? AI are already taking voice actors’ jobs, so how long before some idiots think they don’t need people to make games anymore? The consolidation of studios will likely continue to cannibalize the industry, all but assuring the survival of the unsustainable practices that have landed us in this very predicament. And you know what isn’t assured? That any of the talent being callously axed will ever find a place in this industry again. After all, why would you return to an industry whose volatility is so normalized, yearly layoffs are treated as routine? I’ve held onto the memory of wanting to be a tester because I can’t well look at this games industry I’m tangentially part of and see it inspiring anyone like it did me, let alone think it will stand the test of time. And coming off of a landmark year for games like 2023, the loss that it has and will continue to experience is going to profoundly hurt it and us for a long time.
Undoubtedly, the pendulum will swing back and the violence of weekly, nay daily, layoffs will quiet. Studios will spin up exciting new projects again and creatives will be able to find work doing what they ought to do, which is dream big. Even now, many developers continue to toil on promising games despite the collapse happening all around us. But I can’t help but mourn the crushed hopes that future incarnation of our industry will be built upon and wonder whether we’ll have learned our lesson or be bound to see it happen again and again. For now, I’ll hold onto that memory and hope that someday a kid not unlike me is able to dream of being part of a games industry that won’t grind them to bits.
Moises Taveras is the assistant games editor for Paste Magazine. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.