Culture Clash

(December 2004)

Put Up or Shut Up

There's an insurance commercial in which the spokesperson says, tongue firmly in cheek, “We live for car insurance. And we've got the failed marriages to prove it.” Bittersweet humor is fine when advertising no-fault policies, but it loses luster when cast on industries that actually do demand the souls of their participants. Ours is one such, a fact long discussed but made today's hotbutton because of the anger-laced message from the anonymous wife of an Electronic Arts employee. It's the talk of the business right now, and the general perception of EA's overall sliminess has increased exponentially due to the posting. Perhaps if we were talking about a smaller organization fighting for survival in an increasingly consolidated business, ninety-hour weeks and no comp- or overtime would be (temporarily) acceptable. But we're talking about the 800-pound gorilla. EA is not short on cash, EA is greedy.

The blog poster sarcastically says “…it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry,” which is exactly what talent is doing. Newcomers and veterans alike find themselves increasingly fed up with the thanklessness, low pay, long hours, and antagonistic relationship with publishers in the biz – so they leave, finding more lucrative, less stressful jobs in the admittedly duller commercial sector. That we're making games doesn't offset the downside of the lifestyle: games are business. Anyone who thinks it's all fun should try working 80+ hours a week for two years.

The IGDA has discussed Quality of Life since dinosaurs roamed, and produced an open letter to the community, partly in response to the industry widow's online grievances. It also offers a Quality of Life white paper that pretty much mirrors the resentful complaints of our anonymous blogger. Her bile-laden philippic may be just the nudge the industry needs to change the current publisher stance, which can be summarized as “quit your bitching.” That attitude has to change. If quality of life issues continue to be ignored, it will destroy this industry.

Games are still occasionally stigmatized by outsiders as being only “for kids.” Even if games were only for kids, that's no excuse for companies that make them to behave like children. No other industry would get away with treating its employees in the eighteenth-century sweatshop manner that this business does, and it seems increasingly likely that only the application of lawsuits, regularly and often, will change the view of industry powers that have lost sight of their employees' humanity. It's becoming clear that this is the industry's last chance to make things right of its own initiative – otherwise it will be forced to, and no one will be happy.

There are studios and publishers both who don't subscribe to these medieval tactics. It's nice to see that major companies like Valve and BioWare do work hard to make their studios a pleasant environment in which to work. Less savory industry members should take note of the fact that some of the best games are produced by the handful of companies that treat their employees like people rather than millstones – good cheese, it would seem, really does come from happy cows.

Gamers neither know nor care what working conditions within the business are like. They want Game X, and they're not going to shun it because a team of developers were worked literally to physical and mental collapse in order to make the ship date. We can't count on consumers to help us in this, because they don't know about the problem and don't want to be educated. This is an internal challenge, and must be solved internally. So what can we do?

The first and wisest move would be to adopt Stuart Roch's New Studio Model, which would represent the equivalent of the Marian Reforms to the game industry. It reduces crunch time, encourages support for innovation, drastically cuts development cost, trims overhead for both developers and publishers, and offers a nice stepping stone for newcomers. It's pretty obvious that the current setup is headed for collapse: games cost too much to make and require too many people, and to break even on a project is rapidly approaching the realm of impossibility. The result will be an industry-wide crash of proportions not seen since 1984.

An optional step two is the equivalent of discussing Social Security in American politics, but it's time: raise the price of games. Barring the arrival of more middleware technologies that make development easier and faster without sacrificing quality, it's no longer realistic for gamers to expect thirty hours of play, supermodern technology, photorealistic graphics, Hollywood scripts and acting, and lifelike AI, and still expect to pay only fifty dollars for it.

Finally, publishers either have to stop behaving like Cruella DeVille or they have to go. I'll miss boxed games and printed manuals as much as the next man, but Steam has demonstrated that digital delivery is the future, like it or not; it's also proven that in one stroke, publishers could be rendered superfluous. While it would be vastly preferable to have an handful of major, publisher-controlled digital distribution channels rather than a hundred single-developer ones, it's now up to publishers to keep themselves in this business – and to do that, they're going to have to unclench a little and let developers have more money, more time, and more humane conditions.

The occasional crunch isn't the end of the world. Brief ones can even be fun, in their own pressure-cooker way – especially when they result in a fine product rolling off the line on schedule. But to enshrine the concept into the development process as EA has, and to tie it in with borderline illegal wage practices and a “deal with it or quit” attitude is as outrageous as it is self-destructive. It's been tolerated until recently, but the tone of complaints has subtly changed. The handwriting is now clear on the wall: fix the problem or fall away.