The big deal is what SS:KTJL and other production-expensive AAA games represent. The video game industry today is bigger than ever before and shows no signs of slowing down. It is expected to reach a global valuation of over $280 billion. Consumer spending in the US alone totaled over $57 billion last year. The gaming audience also continues to grow, with nearly 3.5 billion users worldwide in 2023.

What’s more, video games are gaining more mainstream cultural prominence, with “transmedia” adaptations like The Super Mario Bros. movie and The Last of Us TV series. Many of the best-selling video games of all time are household names – think Pokemon, Minecraft, and Wii Sports. All of these franchises and others have earned billions of dollars in sales. 

The video game industry today is bigger than ever before and shows no signs of slowing down.

Yet it often feels that in recent years, large-scale gaming flops are less and less surprising. With each lauded new Legend of Zelda, there is a Redfall, released by an innovative studio but plagued with technical issues and was essentially unfinished. 

Cyberpunk 2077 was similarly condemned on release in 2020 as bug-ridden and almost unplayable: Sony even unprecedently removed the title from the PlayStation store. (The game’s in much better shape now.) The hype behind Cyberpunk 2077 – its creator, CD Projekt Red, had made one of the most praised games of all time – certainly didn’t help. 

What’s going on here? Why are AAA games getting more and more expensive to make (and buy), yet receive increasingly disappointed fan responses? 

Meet Your Makers: The Plight of the Developer

A deeper explanation may be found with the developers, aka “devs.” In very generalized terms, devs are people who make the games we play. They include the programmers making base code, designers generating each level, artists conceptualizing characters and worlds, and writers crafting story. 

Of course, many other folks play an important role in getting a game from code to console, including voice actors, production managers, audio engineers, and quality assurance testers. Studio executives, media relations, and publishing agents can be no less essential to effectively getting games to a target audience. Yet, without the devs actually creating games, the industry certainly would not have the massive growth, success, and creative output that it enjoys today.

Unfortunately, despite their invaluable contributions, developers in many video game companies face excruciating working conditions. A major issue devs face is “crunch,” or long periods of intense, unpaid overtime work in order to meet tight production deadlines. Crunch exacerbates, and in many ways encapsulates, developers’ persistent problems of low pay, long working hours, and a culture of burnout. 

Most recently, developers have suffered from a massive round of layoffs, further exacerbating their situation. These layoffs – some of the largest yet – are in no small part related to corporate restructuring and companies’ attempts to maximize profitability. And the gaming industry remains plagued with issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, alongside longstanding diversity problems.

Why do devs have to regularly crunch? And how does that relate to recent AAA flops? It turns out that the structure and culture of the gaming industry – particularly the AAA scene – fuels both of these issues. 

Large publishing companies, motivated to increase shareholder profits, contract with studios to release games on specific deadlines and with apparent revenue-increasing features (e.g., microtransactions and season passes). Studios, seeking to build their reputations and also make money, have to accept publishers’ conditions. Devs are ultimately left to meet these production requirements in one way shape or form – which often means intense crunch before deadlines. 

Yet the industry is so varied that generalizations can be difficult to make. In fact, there may be insights if we look away from the AAA industry. There are no shortage of smaller, yet no less creative, independent (better known as “indie”) games and studios – in fact, they might be charting a path forward to an alternative, healthier kind of game development. 

Devs are ultimately left to meet these production requirements in one way shape or form – which often means intense crunch before deadlines.

Choose Your Character: What Kind of Industry is Gaming?

To learn more, I spoke with Professor Johanna Weststar, who has studied labor in the video game industry for over a decade. She told me that, in a nutshell, the industry today is very well-organized financially, but is not so organized culturally. It’s important to remember that the industry is still relatively new, having only really emerged in the 1970s. After all, video games started with passionate devs in their garages, starting their own small studios. Perhaps because of this, “[t]here is something about the industry that has always resisted formalization in some ways, at least in terms of its cultural mentality.”

The largest, multi-billion dollar companies in the gaming industry today include massive conglomerates, publicly traded corporations, hedge funds, and venture capital – the kinds of entities also prominent in the wider tech industry. Attorney Brandon Huffman, who regularly deals with clients in the gaming industry, explained that games today are often financed through publishing deals, distribution and exclusivity deals, and, more recently, venture capital funding. 

However, while financing game production has become more sophisticated, employment structures have not likewise matured. In that sense, explained Prof. Weststar, video games behave more like other creative industries, such as movies or TV.

“[t]here is something about the industry that has always resisted formalization in some ways, at least in terms of its cultural mentality.”

Dianna Lora, who has experience in digital distribution, licensing, and game production management, emphasized this internal tension: “This is the conversation that the industry is having right now.” Many games in recent years, from indies like Ori and the Blind Forest to AAA blockbusters like God of War: Ragnarok, are artistic masterpieces in their own right. The Game Awards could even be considered the industry’s Oscars-equivalent.

Yet gaming also veers towards resembling the greater tech industry. As Dianna told me, game companies rush to invest in the hottest new tech things (e.g., Metaverses, NFTs). However, this drive “doesn’t really balance out in the 3rd or 4th quarters,” with companies often facing overblown budgets. Instead of “taking the hit like a normal company would,” gaming companies correct by cutting costs – including by laying off developers. 

The Chosen Ones: Getting (and Keeping) Jobs in Gaming

The project- and portfolio-based nature of game development massively affects developers’ employment situations, not too unlike other artistic industries. Many studios, for instance, hire developers only for the length of specific projects. Large game companies like Ubisoft might shift developers between their multiple studios. Devs, meanwhile, advance their careers by showcasing their skills via building a portfolio of completed projects they’ve worked on. 

I spoke with one (now semi-retired) developer, Chris Soares, who stuck with Cat Daddy Games (a studio under the publisher 2K Games) for about twelve years. Heads of smaller studios, however, told me that their team composition ebbs and flows depending on each project – though the studios do try to retain some devs as long as possible. 

What all this means, according to Prof. Weststar, is that “the way the industry is designed works against some of those things that we might think are natural employment protection . . . this isn’t a place where people get a job when they’re young and they work their way out through an internal career ladder and get security.”

Studios have leverage in choosing which developers to hire: As Dr. Rachel Kowert, research director at TakeThis and an expert on video game psychology, puts it, video games are a “cool kids club.” And devs can’t be too picky when they need credit on successful projects from accomplished studios to bolster their portfolio. 

“There are lots of young keen folks who would just give their right arm to work in games . . . as long as that’s the case, then studios don’t have to be too fussy about people coming and going,” said Prof. Weststar. 

The Power of Publishers: Constant Growth and Crunch Culture

While employment structures might resemble creative industries, gaming is closer to tech in another way: growth. To Dianna Lora, large game companies seek constant and unsustainable growth, leading to games with production costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As production budgets increase, so too do the expectations associated with game performance. 

As multiple developers told me, games can change quite heavily during the development cycle: new gameplay mechanics might be introduced, the art direction may evolve, and so on. But studios still have to meet deadlines. They may have made release date promises to fans, or want to capitalize on a major buying season like Christmas. 

Enter large publishers. They may contract with studios to help fund game development, perhaps for a valuable IP that the publisher owns (like SpongeBob or Disney). With the funding comes strict production milestones. And when tight deadlines are added to evolving and unforeseen game direction, we get devs putting in crunch time to meet those milestones. 

Take it from Prof. Weststar: 

“The vast majority of people who make games are connected with this much more corporatized environment that involves publishers, venture capitalists, external funding agencies in various dimensions that then either directly contract a game, or the studio approaches the publisher for money and . . . help with marketing and assurances and things like that in exchange.”

“And then what the publisher does is it sets out very strict milestones throughout the course of the project, again to try to make sure it gets done when it needs to get done. So in theory, it’s not a bad thing, right? It’s not a bad thing to be like ‘check in every month and show us what you’ve done, OK?’ But then that also creates these mini crunch moments before each milestone.”

“[W]hat the publisher does is it sets out very strict milestones throughout the course of the project, again to try to make sure it gets done when it needs to get done . . . . But then that also creates these mini crunch moments before each milestone.”

Yet neither developers nor the studios they work for may have other options besides working under prestigious publishers’ schedules. According to Chris Soares, a digital artist with 30 years of game development experience, this is particularly salient when publishers or studios own popular brands and IPs (e.g., Star Wars or Marvel). 

Chris told me how, years ago, a studio he was with was working on a Spiderman movie tie-in game. The publisher insisted the game be released the same date as the movie (for promotional purposes). So the devs had to crunch to make that deadline – to the point where the studio offered laundry services at the office so devs wouldn’t have to do it at home! 

To further illustrate this, let’s take a dev who wants to work on the next Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game, but wants certain pay, working hours, and other conditions. There’s “a line out the door” of folks who want to work on GTA. So Rockstar Games (GTA’s creator) can show the first dev the door and easily find someone else who’ll do the work with fewer strings attached. 

Studios themselves are in a similar boat: if one wants to work on the next Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter game, then Warner Bros. (who owns those brands) can set whatever vision, milestones, and other terms it desires in the contract. If the studio pushes back, Warner Bros. can easily find another, less-resistant studio to make the game.

Recently, the advent of “live service” games appears to further fuel crunch. While games used to be confined to whatever was in the box or CD, nowadays games receive frequent downloadable content updates well after their initial release. Publishers and studios unsurprisingly appear attracted to increasing a game’s longevity (and thus potential revenue). This is not fully unprecedented: Chris Soares had a similar experience working on mobile games like WWE Supercard.

One might think that with a less fixed release date, publishers and/or studios may impose less stringent production milestones. But Prof. Weststar told me the opposite appears true: devs are working on the same games for longer, with no less working hours and with fewer different projects to include in their portfolio.

Being Paper Clips: The Ramifications of Crunch

Developers have to crunch to meet milestones, with no way around it if they want to be on a popular project. But crunch is not just “part of work” or “a fact of life.” Dr. Kowert explained to me that while almost all jobs have “situational crunch” – i.e., periods of time where you simply happen to work more – the gaming industry frequently deals with “systemic crunch.” 

Systemic crunch can be defined as “working an extra amount of hours for an exceeding amount of time.” Is that so bad? Let Dr. Kowert tell us:

“[T]hat leads, well, first of all, to worse products because people are overworked, but also the symptoms associated with burnout. Now, a lot of times, people talk about burnout. It’s just like, ‘oh, you’re tired,” but burnout is really kind of all-encompassing, really a drain on all of your resources and impedes your ability to just kind of function in your day-to-day life.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Kowert noted that mental health remains largely stigmatized in the gaming world, making it extremely hard for devs to talk about these harms. 

“burnout is really kind of all-encompassing, really a drain on all of your resources and impedes your ability to just kind of function in your day-to-day life.”

Not only that, but with the forces described above, developers often feel replaceable – treated by studios and publishers as no more than “paper clips,” in Dianna Lora’s words. Dr. Kowert saw this with the most recent round of dev layoffs, which brings its own set of mental health challenges. Remaining developers can even feel survivor’s guilt over not being laid-off.

According to Prof. Weststar and different developers, a common justification for crunch is that it’s in everyone’s best interest to ship a completed game on time. Publishers want revenue, developers want reputation and portfolio boosts, and studios desire both. So if the ship sinks, everyone drowns. 

This justification, though, means that studios without strict contractual requirements may still have crunch as a norm. In Chris Soares’ experience, Cat Daddy Games rarely ever had mandatory crunch, but there was some social pressure to work overtime: they wouldn’t “write you up” if “you left before 7 PM,” but there was more of a “you’re letting the team down” tone and attitude” (especially if you left work early right before an important deadline). 

Video games as a passion industry also furthers an expectation of crunch. Dr. Kowert noted that both playing and making games ties very closely to people’s personal identities. People love games, and so that feeling provides some “pressure to work to the point of burnout.” Some developers may have a feeling that, like artists of times past, they must “suffer for their art,” to again use Dianna Lora’s words. And remember, devs feel like they have to comply with these expectations, or they’ll be easily replaced by another young, excited dev who wants to make “cool” games.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that there are other explanations for crunch. Multiple devs I spoke with chalked up crunch experiences to poor management. Good management might better anticipate deadlines and where additional resources may be needed.

Devs feel like they have to comply with these expectations, or they’ll be easily replaced by another young, excited dev who wants to make “cool” games.

There’s another dimension beyond these psychological and social factors. According to Prof. Weststar, there is “no disincentive to having people work overtime. In most jurisdictions, video game developers are classified as exempt from overtime law.” So, it seems like a no-brainer for companies to use crunch as free overtime. 

An Alternate Path: The World of Indies

Much of what I’ve discussed – corporate publishing pressures, project-based advancement, and an available “reserve army of labor” combining to place developers in crunch conditions – is true in the AAA space. But the gaming industry is very diverse; studios and publishers come in all shapes and sizes. 

In fact, small game studios and publishers have their own renown in the gaming world: they’re called indies. And they might model a different game production and employee management style that’s perhaps healthier than the AAA approach.

Like films, indie games are independently produced, and sometimes independently published too. And many consider them either on par with or better than AAA games. Indies are actually gaining more and more traction among gaming audiences.

One reason could be that it’s easier to make games today than it ever has been. Several indie developers told me they started their own game companies with just their prior software engineering experience or by simply picking up Unity, a platform “engine” providing base code and assets with which to design games. Epic Games’ Unreal is another accessible engine, which Dianna Lora says enables folks to create the games they want to see in the world.

Daniel Scalise is the founder and main developer of Scalisco Games, a 2-person operation with his partner, Johnson Do (creative director and art designer). Daniel left his software engineering job with Amazon to make his own games. As an indie dev, he wears a lot of hats: he decides game concepts, social media promotions, which musicians to hire, and eventual release dates. 

Daniel does have deadlines: for instance, he needed a playable demo of his upcoming game, A Corgi’s Cozy Hike, ready for the 2024 PAX East convention and Steam Next Fest. And he learned the importance of releasing games in a timely manner to maintain an audience and avoid sinking unnecessary costs. But those are about all the pressures Daniel faces. (So long as he can pay the bills!) 

Scalisco currently self-publishes its games – Daniel has so far distrusted publishers who have approached him, not wanting to cede creative or financial control over his games. This flexibility has allowed Daniel to incorporate community feedback as he chooses, and hopefully (when the studio grows) incorporate any employee viewpoints. His choice to donate 10% of his games’ earnings to animal shelters is unencumbered by any overbearing shareholder profit motive.

Though Josh Krassenstein, founder and head of Static City Games, has different experiences, he expressed similar sentiments. Static City’s team has ranged from about five “core members” to now about twelve devs working on World of Grimm (WoG), Static City’s fourth and current project. Most of WoG’s devs are artists, designing virtual trading card artwork and other features. They’re actually all remote, and are scattered all over the world.

Like Daniel, Josh is the main game designer, but wears many hats “on the business side of things,” including managing accounting, marketing, and social media. And there are some deadlines: before PAX East this year, Josh informed artists that he needed their work by March 1st to get it showcased at the convention. He personally has some moments of intense work, such as building the game tutorial right before PAX.

But Static City “do[es] not believe in crunch.” Artists are paid on commission, and often in advance – Josh simply asks them to send in their work as soon as it is done, and he trusts they will do so and do it very well. Even the PAX deadline was “soft”: apart from not having their art on display, artists faced no other repercussions.

Josh feels that not working under a big publisher setting funding milestones gives Static City this freedom and flexibility. He’s able to encourage creative freedom and embrace anachronistic art styles in WoG. With little restraints, he usually says “yes” to artists’ ideas and expands, rather than confines, their visions. Josh implements a similar philosophy working with indie devs in Static City’s publishing operations.

Lastly, I spoke with David Fugère-Lamarre. He was previously a software engineer, and after working as a console game programmer and getting a master’s degree, he co-founded the indie game studio iLLOGIKA (completely privately-owned). Around 2008, when Apple’s App Store became available “for any average developer,” David was able to try out Unity and start building mobile and then later computer games.

iLLOGIKA has grown to now have 63 employees. Its staff include a production director, tech director, art director, creative director, administrative director, and human resources director – all with multiple employees under them working on multiple projects. As CEO, David’s main role is to oversee all of the different “silos,” discuss and negotiate with clients, and assist wherever needed with production: nowadays, he does little programming for work. 

Surely a company of this size has some crunch? According to David, actually not. iLLOGIKA’s revenue comes from co-developing games and doing work-for-hire projects for other companies and publishers, but the studio also has its own projects. While different clients do have different “non-negotiables” (e.g., game quality, budget scope, or production timeline), iLLOGIKA accommodates client demands as reasonably as possible.

If that means iLLOGIKA eats some costs to ramp up new devs to meet a deadline, so be it. But in David’s experience, crunch is not worth it: it leads to a worse quality product that generally needs to be redone anyway. To ensure the company stays afloat, and that devs always have something to do, the studio keeps a mix of short-term client projects and long-term in-house studio projects active.

Daniel, Josh, and David all have different perspectives, from studios of varying sizes and experiences. Yet they all experience a game development environment where they feel free to make the games they like under timelines that work for them. Could AAA companies learn a thing or two from them?

Greater Together? The Challenges with Collective Action

In recent years, the gaming industry has seen a growing movement towards unionization. Many of the early unionization successes, according to Prof. Weststar, have primarily been with quality assurance (QA) workers. 

But she told me that QA testers are more marginalized and aren’t usually considered “developers.” They are typically hourly workers with more standardized working conditions, versus devs who work on a contractual, salaried basis.

Another systemic obstacle to unionization in the industry is the isolation of dev teams – even within the same company. In Chris Soares’ experience, each development team within a studio (and each studio under a larger company) operates like its own little “fiefdom,” working pretty much only on its own project. Even though other devs are nominally under the same roof, there may be little scope for interaction if they are not on the same project team.

What’s more, different kinds of developers may have different experiences. For instance, programmers can shift from video games to other tech spaces, and vice versa. But artists may be more “locked in” to the video game industry, or can only port over to industries like film animation (which can have similar issues).

At small studios – like the indies I spoke with – there are so few employees that unionizing makes little sense. Yet even in the indie realm, David Fugère-Lamarre explained how at iLLOGIKA, artists, programmers, and other production teams are all in their own “silos” – though there are efforts through social activities and cross-team meetings to foster a collective studio identity.

The unionization picture is further complicated with team leads, project heads, and studio directors. Do they identify more with devs or with management? In smaller studios, senior management might be more in the “trenches.” But even at large companies, team leads are often heavily embedded with and identify with devs. According to Prof. Weststar, this “alignment between middle management and the workers” may hinder the “us versus them” sense required to some extent for unionizing. 

Now let’s say a studio is unionized. Even then, as Prof. Weststar noted, the union might not necessarily be able to negotiate with the publisher, who actually sets the contractual terms and conditions that directly impact developers’ work.

As the professor puts it, “this is a fundamental breakdown actually in how our current labor law system works, because the worker legally cannot get access to bargain with people who are actually holding the purse strings on a lot of the things that happen.”

“this is a fundamental breakdown actually in how our current labor law system works, because the worker legally cannot get access to bargain with people who are actually holding the purse strings on a lot of the things that happen.”

But all unionizing hope is not lost. While devs might be isolated in their studios, they can connect more broadly at conventions, over the Internet, and on social media. Dr. Kowert affirmed the massive mental health benefits of developers connecting in this way. And while unions at most studios may not be “vertical”(i.e., company by company), a large developers’ union could arise “horizontally” across the industry, similar to SAG-AFTRA and the WGA in the film/TV industry. 

Where Do We Go From Here? 

Let’s return to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League – a game this year that, by all accounts, flopped. Why would Rocksteady even release a game like that? And Cyberpunk 2077 from a few years back – how did such an anticipated game fare so poorly on release?

Brandon Huffman thinks that generally speaking, players and publishers might have some disconnect. While every gamer might not appreciate every feature in a game, there are enough players who do, such that from the company’s cost-benefit perspective, including a given feature is financially worth it. 

There is also a much greater demand for more frequent content today than in the past. As the gaming industry seeks constant growth, higher and higher expectations are created. As Dianna Lora says, “You can’t have a game that’s a 7 anymore.” Even SS:KTJL is chugging along with continued live-service updates, despite all the backlash.

Yet as David Fugère-Lamarre and others noted, crunch clearly only makes worse games. Cyberpunk 2077 was undoubtedly released under immense timeline constraints and crunch. And many fans realized this. Yet some still chose to harshly attack the devs, but not necessarily the executives.

I’m not here to demonize games. Like Dr. Kowert said, games resonate deeply with many people’s identities, including my own. Speaking as a gamer, we should not be oblivious to the systemic problems and industry-wide incentives we fuel with our purchases and our fandom. 

We don’t have to blindly consume every single AAA product. There is a whole world of indies out there with alternate game experiences and development paths. And rage at particular game mechanics or narrative choices will not drive real, resonating change in the industry.

Above all else, let’s not forget that behind each character or level is a human person just like us. If we can care so deeply about the games we play, can’t we also care a little about the folks who create them?