Jason Schreier spoke about the situation with layoffs in the gaming industry. In his opinion, today specialists do not feel protected and can be out of work at any time — despite record revenues and sales. The journalist illustrated the problem with several vivid examples, and at the same time suggested ways to solve it.At the beginning of his article for Bloomberg, Schreyer recalls two important events of the first half of the year: the closure of Google Stadia development studios and layoffs at Activision Blizzard.
According to him, since the beginning of 2021, “hundreds of people have lost their jobs in the gaming industry.”
The journalist notes that the dismissals have nothing to do with the economic consequences of the pandemic. First, last year turned out to be a record year for the gaming industry, with total revenue of almost $180 billion. Secondly, the problem of lack of stability for many years remains one of the most common in the industry. According to a survey conducted by the International Association of Game Developers (IGDA) in 2017, over the past five years, specialists have changed 2.2 employers on average.
Schreier also cites the stories of several studios as examples of the lack of stability. He also wrote about the fate of some of them in his new book “Press Reset” (Press Reset).
- Irrational Games closed a year after the release of BioShock Infinite, because the studio’s creative director Ken Levine wanted to make smaller-scale games.38 Studios, founded by former baseball player Curt Schilling, closed after receiving a $75 million bail from the state of Rhode Island.
- Employees were confident in the availability of funds, while in fact they were becoming less and less every day.Other cases include the sudden closures of Carbin Studios (developers of WildStar), Capcom Vancouver (creators of Dead Rising) and Telltale Games (authors of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us).
- Speaking about the latter, Schreier recalls his conversation with Derek Wilks, who came to Telltale three months before its closure.
- As a result, he had to ask for help from gamers on Twitter to buy plane tickets for himself and his wife back to his native Kentucky.Schreier sees two solutions to the problem:
- switching to remote work will allow people not to move with their family to other cities for the sake of suitable vacancies;the creation of trade unions — they will protect workers and guarantee the payment of benefits after mass layoffs and the closure of studios.
- However, the journalist is sure that stability is unlikely to come to the gaming industry soon — especially against the background of a possible drop in game sales due to the lifting of restrictions and the resumption of other types of entertainment.
In addition, it is still unclear how flexible gaming companies will behave in relation to remote work.