Gaming Workers

[F]law School Episode 3: Not Just a Game

How the modern video game industry pressures developers

Pantho Sayed

September 28, 2024

Summary:

In this episode of [F]law School, hosts Jessenia Class and Reya Singh speak with Harvard Law student Pantho Sayed about his article, titled “Not Just a Game,” on the challenges within the video game industry. Sayed focuses on the intense pressure developers face due to the corporatization of game production. An avid gamer and writer, Sayed explains how “crunch,” or extended periods of overwork, has become a systemic issue, as large publishers prioritize profits and deadlines over the well-being of game developers. The conversation explores the disconnect between gamers’ expectations and the realities of game production, as well as how the industry’s power dynamics impact workers’ mental health and game quality. Sayed also discusses potential solutions for both workers and gamers, highlighting the importance of ethical consumption in pressuring the industry to change.

Guest Bio:

Pantho Sayed is a student at Harvard Law School (Class of 2025) interested in government and technology legal work. He is also a graduate of Fordham University. Pantho remains a lifelong video game player, graphic novel enthusiast, and overall geek.

Editors: 

Special thanks to Mirei Saneyoshi, Safowana Islam, and Gauri Sood for production and editing assistance.

[F]law Resources: 

Additional Resources: 

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Episode Transcript

 (This transcript was created by an automated process and contains errors.)

Reya Hey, welcome to Flaw School, a podcast that explores the flaws in our legal system. We’re today’s hosts. I’m Reya Singh. 

Jessenia And I’m Jessenia Class. Every two weeks, we interview law students to uncover the role of corporate actors in producing many of our most urgent social problems, and the troubling tale of corporate actors bending, shaping, capturing, and breaking the law in their favor. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the pressure placed on game developers by the corporatization of the modern video game industry. 

Reya Today we’re joined by Pantho Sayed, a current law student. Welcome to Flaw School. Class is in session. We’d love to start out by asking you a couple questions about yourself, and what inspired you to write this topic. Pantho. 

Pantho Thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I’m really excited to be here. So I got inspired to write about the video gaming industry primarily because, well, I play a lot of video games. I’ve been a big fan of games since I was very young and, you know, all sorts of video games. And in terms of writing about it, the corporatization, I guess I became interested just because it’s been in the news. You know, if you follow gaming news like I do, just, you know, the issues that developers face, you know, the fact that there are big companies, who, run a lot of who make a lot of these games and especially, you know, what made this issue more salient was the fact that the gaming industry is so massive now. I mean, it’s multi-billion. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. Companies like Nintendo. EA, Activision, which you might have heard of, those are all worth billions of dollars and hire thousands of employees. And so this really is, an industry that’s something to be feared for sure. 

Jessenia Yeah. And you really feel that when you jump into the beginning of your article. So you start out the piece by introducing us to the hype around the release of a new game. After four years of rumors, memes, anticipation, the game is finally released and it’s a dud. And according to your research, this happens all the time. These kinds of games, Triple-A games are getting more and more expensive for people to make, but are falling flat with gamers again and again. What’s going on here? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s a really puzzling conundrum that I think, again, is being a more emphasized in the news over and over with games like Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League, Cyberpunk  2077 Redfall. Not to say that every game is like this. Of course. There are great, you know, The Legend of Zelda games, God of War, etc.. But but the what I understand is the cause of sort of these duds, right? Or the flops, as folks in the, in the business like to call them, are rarely because of developers. And I don’t want you to take that the wrong way. Developers are great, you know, and by developers I mean all the folks who create a video game, be that the coders and the programmers, the artists who come up with the characters, the folks who design levels and the writers, but their overworked such that the quality of these massive Triple-A games think, Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. really suffers. And we call that crunch. And so crunch is a big problem in the industry. 

Jessenia So I when reading the article I was really interested in what crunch look like. It seems like developers are being squeezed from both sides. As you write quote, large publishing companies and venture capitalists quote motivated to increase shareholder profits, contract with studios to release games on specific deadlines and with apparent revenue increase in features. On the one hand, while studios accept these conditions without work or buy in, how do we get to a system like this where crunch is just so common and developers are being put in the situation? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s really a great question. And I think first I should describe what crunch is, because I think it’s a term that we’ve all heard in our own lives. And it’s something that I didn’t have much idea about until I talked with, folks, primarily Doctor Rachel Kowert, who’s a, research psychologist, and especially on the psychology of video games. And she explained to me that we have two kinds of crunch, situational crunch, which is something we all face. There are moments in our lives where we’re just very busy. You have to suck it up and get to work, right? But what many developers in the industry face is systemic crunch, which is where you work an extra amount of hours for an exceeding amount of time. And that’s not just once in a while. That’s for a very prolonged amount of time, to the point where you can even face burnout. You know, clinical burnout, where you can’t function as well in your day to day life. And so your first question before that was, how do we get here? And I think the long and short answer of it is just the culture of the gaming industry. You know, the very simplified version is, you know, games really took off in like the 1970s and sort of this counterculture space. You know, it was like dude in his garage, right? You know, just hammering out, hammering on the keys, making a product for the world to enjoy. And so we still have this image, of course, with like indie games, which I discuss in our my article. But, you know, Fortnite is not made by one guy in his garage, right? It’s a massive team, you know, with mass, with a ton of resources, many people involved. And like I mentioned before, billions of dollars, you know, complex financing, major companies. But the culture is still it’s almost like you’re just a bunch of folks, you know, hammering away at the keys to really make this passion project. And so there’s an, sort of cultural incentive to really work as hard as you can because you love games and you want to make something great. That’s a very sort of simplified answer. 

Reya It sounds like there is a ton of stakeholders in the video game development industry. Not only are there the ones we might typically think of like the devs themselves, but the publishers, marketing agencies, and of course the gaming community. But by your description, it seems that these stakeholder interests are being pushed to the side in favor of attempts to maximize shareholder value. How do these come into conflict? And why are these big box game companies deciding that it’s okay to sacrifice the quality of their games and the player’s experiences in service of the shareholders? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s definitely a great question. And, you know, I think what’s interesting about that is that’s the feeling that many I think lay gamers, you know, myself included before this research, really thought was going on.  These big companies were just screwing over us gamers, right?, jjust to make terrible games? The reality is that I think the industry is a lot more nuanced than, than that. That was very, apparent from, what I learned with folks that I spoke with both inside and outside of the industry. And so then, first of all, I should caveat that the gaming industry is really massively varied. You know, you’ll have giant companies like EA, like I mentioned before, or Ubisoft or Nintendo, but you still have indie games where it’s just a handful of folks, you know, making a game. But for the most part, the industry sort of functions with, I’ll say, three key players. First, you have the, publishers. Right. So those could be like Ubisoft or EA, or Activision, other, you know, giant brands. And they’ll typically, you know, they’re the ones who market the games, right?, bring them audiences. But they also often own a lot of the prominent intellectual properties. So like Warner Brothers Games is a good example. They own like Batman, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, things like that. And they’ll contract with the sort of second element, which are the studios. The studios hire the third element, all the developers and the folks who work for them, and the studio management, basically lead the games to production. Right? Just make the game, give it to the publisher. Now, the studios will contract with the publishers to make games. The publishers are the primary source of funding and reputation. So if I’m a studio that wants to make, let’s say, Lord of the Rings game, I have to contract with Warner Brothers games because they have the IP and they’re going to give me the funding necessary to do that. And so, what that means is, as the studio, I’m beholden to whatever the publisher demands in the contract if I want to make the Lord of the Rings game. And so that could mean, various deadlines for funding milestones, and that could be requirements for what they want in the game. Is it multiplayer? How much should there be, how many levels? Things like that. And so, to go to your question of sort of the big box companies, you know, sacrificing quality in games. The company, as we think of that really depends on are we talking about the publisher or the studio, because the studio heads, you know, might be with their developers wanting to make a great game, not wanting to work overwork people to the bone, but the publisher who might be incentivized and profit, you know, not just I’m using Warner Brothers games as an example, but like, maybe all they want is profit. Maybe they don’t care about Lord of the rings games. Not that I know that for sure, right?,  But you know their incentives might not align with the studios, and so they’ll put on the deadlines that they want. You know, maybe they need to need to coincide with the Amazon series. Right. Like the first day the Amazon series comes out, we also want our game released. And so the studio’s out of luck. They have to meet that deadline or, you know, the publisher will just pull the contract. So I hope that all made sense. 

Reya It definitely did. But it’s honestly pretty sad to hear that an industry that seems, I guess, more simple, like the gaming industry. It’s so interesting to see just the imbalance of power. And to me, this strikes, at a bigger problem. When I hear you describe the industry, I keep thinking about who has the power in a given situation and how that’s being used to legitimize inequality between the devs and larger corporate actors like studios and brands, which leads to more crunch. How do you think the power differentials are legitimized in the gaming industry, and what narratives are you seeing to support the current system? 

Pantho Yeah. I think, that’s you’re really on the, on the money there. I think there is a lot of power differentials. You know, like I mentioned before, publishers have the IP and they have the funding, right? So they can really dictate, you know, what kind of game gets made with their product, with their price. You know, because everybody wants to play a Spider-Man game. Everybody wants to play like a SpongeBob game. And again, games are expensive. You have a lot of the, a lot of elements that go into them. You have voice actors, you have, you know, level designers, you have, production assistants, you have marketing people. The list goes on and on. And I think in terms of narratives, I think that’s a really sort of important aspect to all of this. And some of that might be kind of, I think, unique to the gaming industry in a lot of ways. Is that and what folks explained to me, as was gaming, is sort of like a cool kids club. Like, who doesn’t want to work on video games? Thank you. Like, yeah, I make games for a living. That sounds awesome, right? And, you know, a lot of young folks really want to do that, especially if you have some sort of like, you know, computer science artistic background. You might want to go into games. You know, there are even like game design schools and like college programs that I’ve met with folks who who are enrolled in those. So it really is becoming more and more popular. Then the flip side is that if everybody wants to make games and they get certified and take classes and such to do that, then if you’re the employer, whether that be the studio, I guess primarily the studio, right. You can hire anybody you want to make the games because, you know, let’s say I, as Pantho, want to work for Ubisoft, right? They make Assassin’s Creed and a whole bunch of other, famous titles and be like, I love Assassin’s Creed, which is true, I do. And, they and I want to do that, but I don’t want like to suffer crunch, right? Like I just want my 40 hour workweek. That’s it. Well, Ubisoft can turn around, be like, yeah, Pantho might not want to, but Reya, you might really not mind that. You might like Assassin’s Creed more than I do. And you be you like, it’s so much more that you’re going to want to work harder for it. And so why would Ubisoft hire me and not you? Because they know you’ll do the same amount of work. And so it’s very difficult to produce change when you have folks who are so motivated to the point that they’ll work as hard as they want to because they know if they don’t, they’ll hire somebody else. And that same dynamic is reflected with studios and publishers, right? Like studios might be great. And like, “we don’t crunch our developers. We don’t try to meet insane deadlines. We want to have high quality product, you know, even if it means you might take a little bit of a pay cut,” the publisher will be like, “okay, that’s great. So you won’t work on our Lord of the Rings game that because somebody else will, somebody else wants the credit to make those high profile games because again, it boosts the studio’s prestige and, you know, it gives them a lot of money. And so studios and developers in that sense are in the same bind, because it’s so cool to work on these things that every anybody will give their right arm to do it. And again, that just leads these, you know, norms of crunch and, you know, really intense labor and, you know, perhaps quality sacrifice in games because, you know, that’s the narrative. It’s so cool to do it. 

Jessenia So it sounds to me that all of this focus on growth is comes with a lot of problems, and game companies are trying to capitalize on the hype and pursue unsustainable growth with huge production costs. And you seem to characterize it throughout the piece as more or less negative in the sense that it’s harming workers and it’s harming the gaming industry, which is definitely concerning, but a lot of other people might think that growth is incredibly important and critical to this process. It breeds innovation which would create better graphics, better gameplay, and hopefully quicker and more high content. And what would you say to those people who hear your concerns about growth impacting labor, but still think overall it’s worth it at the end of the day to get the best version of Assassin’s Creed? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s definitely. I think I hear your point very well. And I don’t want to say again that all games are bad. We’ve had a lot of really great games, in recent years, you know, both at, like the small indie level, you know, with just a couple folks also at the big Triple-A level, like I mentioned, like The Legend of Zelda games are masterpieces, right? And they’re made by Nintendo, the biggest gaming company, like, ever. And so, yeah, I hear your point for sure. Well, I think there are two sort of ways I’ll respond to you. The first is in terms, you know, are game’s better and arguably maybe not. I think couple, there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is, you know, the nature of what we call a game has changed. You know, I don’t know if you’ve heard the term live service, but that’s what games are trending towards. It used to be that you buy a box at the store, had the disc, you plug it in your Xbox and you play the game and you’re done. But now with something like Fortnite, right? You just keep playing it nonstop and to add new content all the time, sequentially. And so we’re getting more and more content. But if that’s better, it’s hard to say. And, you know, an attorney actually, in video game law, Brandon Huffman explained it to me like this. I should say not related to his capacity as an attorney. But, you know, a game like Fortnite has so much you can do, maybe not one player might not like all of that. Like, I might not like all the different elements of it. I might like 1 or 2 things. And so I’ll just play it for that reason. But you, just any you might like the other thing that I don’t like. And so from the Fortnite creators perspective, Epic Games, well, I want to keep those two things in there because it draws more people in. And let’s add a third thing is that a fourth thinks it draws so many people in over time, and so they don’t need you or I to keep playing all the time, just every so often to make purchases. That way they’ll keep making revenue. So the end product might not necessarily be quote unquote better, but it draws in the maximum amount of players at any given time. So that increases, the bottom line. The other way I’d respond to your criticism is that, yeah, growth is good for sure, but what’s the cost? I mean, these aren’t paperclips we’re talking about. That’s that’s one how one developer explained it to me. These are human beings, right?, who make the games that we play and care about, you know, even like a big game. Like I said, Fortnite, it has people who care about it. This is their passion, you know, that went into this. They made the characters, they made the world. They made the items. And that’s their creation. And just to say that, oh, well, the game’s better. So too bad, right? I mean, like I said, they suffer a systemic crunch. They suffer a clinical burnout, you know, unrelated, I think sort of to the crunch element. But in terms of the folks who do like the community engagement, trust and safety, like, you know, making sure like chat rooms and stuff are okay. Those people get harassed so much they suffer PTSD even, right? And so these are real serious health harms that developers face. And I think just to ignore them and say, oh well, growth is good. We have bigger companies, bigger games. I would really caution to be like, well, who’s it affecting? Right. 

Jessenia Thank you for raising those. Those are really serious concerns. It sounds like the pressure is really mounting for game developers and other people in this field. What are people in the industry doing to fight back? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s not actually the question of of course, you know, this isn’t just something that I came up with. Folks in the industry are well aware of these these issues. And I think there are a couple of avenues. One is just leave it in those big companies, those big Triple-A companies and making their own studios, indie game studios. Right. And those I think I don’t want to characterize all indie games as like the magic antidote to Triple-A because, you know, it’s hard to start your own business. It’s hard to release a game out into the world, and it might do great. It might not. You know, indie devs I spoke with mentioned things like that. You know, it can be tricky. Even if you don’t have those deadlines, you know, you have to pay the bills. And there can be abuse too. And like, bigger indie studios as well. Which I, which I’ve read about. But that being said, that’s an alternative. If you don’t want to work under Ubisoft’s, you know, Iron Fist, right, in terms of deadlines, then, you know, make your own and really make the kind of game you want to make. The other thing, that’s coming come up bit is unionization, like in other industries. Right. You know, if developers got together and be like we’re saying, we don’t want to work this hard, you might expect, okay, well, there might be some change in the industry, but there are a couple of, I think, roadblocks to unionization. One is, like I mentioned, the nature of the industry where you have publishers contract with studios and then studios employ the developers to make the games. The developers in a studio might all unionize. Granted, that might be a problem because the studio might have ten people, so it’s tricky to unionize something like that versus that, you know, Epic Games, which might have hundreds. But even if you did unionize at a big studio or a bigish studio, then you have the problem of the publisher’s contract because the developers aren’t employed by the studio, the by the. Excuse me. Developers aren’t employed by the publisher, they’re employed by the studio. So the publisher’s contract requires crunch. Unionization doesn’t deal with that because the studios are like, we hear you, but we can’t do anything about that because of our contract. I think the other, issue to unionization is the fact that there are so many, many studios, right? Hundreds and thousands of them out there of all sizes. So within one studio, apart from the biggest companies that like Nintendo or whatnot, unionization might not have much impact. One solution that might be sort of a way around that is sort of a what attorney Huffman, who I mentioned earlier, described as a, horizontal unionization. So think like this, Screen Actors Guild, right? SAG or, the Communication workers union. Across an industry all those folks, the actors or the writers will unionize, and then they make demands on the industry. So I know, like animators, for example, have something like that, within film, and I believe in other areas, too. And so that might be a possibility in the future. But unionization so far has some hurdles. 

Reya For our listeners out there who are avid gamers, this all can sound super overwhelming. They want quality games, but at the same time, hearing about the incredible amounts of crunch, burnout, and layoffs in the industry, gamers might feel a little bit icky and uneasy hyping up the next release. What can gamers and fans do to try and pressure this industry to change? And how can they make their voices heard? 

Pantho Yeah, that’s definitely something I’ve thought about. You know, during this whole project. You know, somebody who really, you know, loves games as well. I think they’re I think the biggest thing is just being a lot more mindful about, you know, what we play and you know, what we’re choosing to buy because it’s so easy to just, I think, jump on buying the next Madden game or Assassin’s Creed. And granted, every time one of those comes out, there’s so much online like social media discourse about, oh, this game sucks. They didn’t make anything new from the last game, right? Madden you know, 2024 is the same as 2023. They just changed a couple players. What’s the bit. You know they just keep complaining. But then folks are still buying it right. So why should I listen to you on Twitter if you just keep buying their games. Right. And so I think thinking about the fact that, look, we don’t if we want to play games, you don’t have to look at the biggest releases. There’s a whole world of indie games out there, you know, made by folks who are, you know, just a couple, people, right? A few heads in a shop. And you might really like this, right? There’s artistic, you know, innovative. And, you know, you’re you’re supporting small businesses in that sense. The other thing you could think about is just the online discourse, which isn’t something I wrote about in my paper too much, but it came up in a lot of our discussions, like I mentioned, the sort of trust and safety community engagement folks suffer some of the worst harassment from developers. And I think a lot of ways, you know, maybe gamers have a right to be upset if something like cyberpunk 2077, which is infamous for how terrible it was at launch, it was broken, right? There’s no, way to dance around that. It was not a complete game. You know, somebody dropped the ball, but and all the hate that went towards developers on projects like that was, you know, probably not warranted because they suffered immense deadlines from their publisher, who is like they said, the dev said it’s not finished. Publishers like too bad publish it anyway. And so a lot of times our ire as players is really misdirected and it hurts people really badly. So I think, you know, it’s really important just what we say and who we say it to, I think matters no less than, you know, what we buy and what we actually play. 

Reya Pantho, thank you so much for that, leaving us on a good and hopeful note. Despite the craziness of the gaming industry, I think your passion for this topic is so obvious and I think you have inspired gamers, developers, and everyone involved to create that change and step up. But I have unfortunate news, which is that we have reached our limit. That is all the time we have for today. Pantho, thank you so much for joining us on [F]law School. We’re happy to talk about the video game industry with you any day. 

Pantho Thank you so much for having me. This was great. 

Jessenia also wanted to say thank you for a wonderful conversation. I feel like I went into this not knowing too much. Now I’ve come away with so much more knowledge, and now I can share this information with my brother who is an avid gamer. So I’ll extend his thanks to you as well. 

Reya I could not agree more with Jessenia. I remember reading the article and thinking to myself, oh my gosh, I have no idea what the gaming industry is, like, how would I ever be able to comprehend this? And from reading your article and also listening to you talk about it, I feel so knowledgeable. So thank you. And I will also extend this to all of the gamers I know. Because it’s very, very important. But thank you Jessenia for being a wonderful co-host. I could not have done this without you. 

Jessenia Same to you and to our listeners out there. If you’re interested in reading Pantho’s full article or learning more about the flaws in our legal system, check out the The Flaw magazine at theflaw.org. 

Reya If you enjoyed this episode, first make sure to check out the show notes. There will be some awesome links and references there, and make sure to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out flawschool.org for more content. Thank you all for listening. Looking forward to talking to you in the future. Class is dismissed.

Pantho Sayed

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