Media as Ads

Last week, the Game Awards took place. While I didn’t watch the show, there was a moment I read about and saw online that was a complete summarization of the show. Geoff Keighley, creator and host of the award show, stood on stage in his suit jacket/t-shirt combination, under the lights and in front of the cameras, and told the audience that he and the Game Awards condemn harassment in the offices of video game studios. Then he introduced a trailer for a new Quantic Dream game, a studio notorious for an abusive workplace culture that includes sexual harassment and bigotry from its higher ups, including CEO David Cage. This sardonic moment was not too surprising, honestly. The Game Awards have seemed concerned in being a vehicle for commercials and hype—pretty much just wanting to be a mini E3—then actually celebrating video games, their accomplishments of the years, and their creators. Video games are a billion dollar industry and, like anything making that incomprehensible amount of money, it is in the pocket of capitalism overlords sucking their workers and consumers dry while getting fat and bloated with obscene wealth. 

I said the Game Awards being a platform for ads isn’t surprising. That’s because game companies have had a long history of treating game media and journalism as a source of advertising for them. From blacklisting reviewers or media outlets for not reviewing a game positively or making reviewers sign NDAs saying they will not mention bugs in reviews or have to show pre-approved gameplay footage. Cyberpunk 2077 recently used NDAs to gloss over known issues with the game prior to release. It is estimated that CD Projekt Red spent almost twice as much on marketing Cyberpunk as it did actually developing it, which is absurd frankly. That is, until you realize that it worked. Advertising the game, hyping it up as much as possible, making everyone think they needed to have it at launch, was the plan and it led to over 10 million copies of the game being bought in its first month. Publishers will use hype culture to try to squeeze as many day one sales of a game as they can, especially when they know the game is going to launch broken to all hell or is just plain awful. 

But that is just to get money when the game is released. Capitalism isn’t satisfied just making money once on a product, no matter how much profit it brings in. Capitalism is only interested in infinite growth, infinite profits. So how do you continue to make profit on a product that’s already been bought?

To Feed Off Whales

When a whale dies in the ocean, its body sometimes sinks to the sea floor where its decaying corpse will attract and be fed on by scavengers and fauna. This is called a whale fall. It can create unique and localized ecosystems among the sands since plants and animals can survive for decades off the nourishment taken from the dead whale. In nature, this is a fascinating, grotesquely beautiful thing, but as a business practice, it is simply grotesque.

Sadly, in-game purchases like loot boxes, microtransactions, and gacha mechanics are standard now, even in full priced games. More often than not, they have a direct impact on a game’s quality. When the purpose of a game is to push additional payments from the player, they have to be designed around microtransactions. They become grindier to incentivize purchasing experience boosters, they create FOMO by offering limited time cosmetics, and they offer new characters or weapons only from random chance pulls instead of letting the player pick and choose what they might most want. But if a developer or publisher wants to bend a game til breaking just to fit money grubbing schemes into them, that’s their choice. It’s stupid, but it’s their choice. I’m not going to bemoan a game for what it could have been without extra monetization because, at the end of the day, it is just a product to be sold. However, I will always rage against the cost these in-game purchases have on actual human lives.

Loot boxes and microtransactions often use gambling mechanics like flashy animations during unlocks, randomized odds to get what you actually want, and confusing menus with the purchase button always being the easiest one to find. They are built to prey on people with gambling addictions, OCD, or other mental illnesses. There are countless stories out there of recovering gamble addicts or people compelled to complete things having to stop playing their favorite games because they felt targeted and pressured to buy in-game purchases, of adults and even kids spending thousands of dollars on a single game through microtransactions, and of folks falling down a pit of loot boxes just trying to get a character or skin they want. It’s easy to say “Well just don’t spend the money” if you don’t feel that pull, if you do not have an issue with gambling or mental illness, but the fact that games make it so easy to do, so easy just to put spend a little more money with the click of button, is the real problem here. 

Of course, not every player is dropping hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars into a single game. The vast majority are not, but, in a sick reversal of the richest 1% elite, the burden of cost on these games are often put on very few players–the whales. This dehumanizing term refers to the small percentage of players that spend the most amount of money in a game–the biggest fish in the shallowest pond. These games can strip these players bare, lead them to economic disaster, and continue to build their digital empires upon their bones.

Bloody and Bruised, Crunched and Abused

Capitalism’s contempt doesn’t end just at the consumers buying their products, but also the workers making them. Since companies will do anything to make even a little more money, an easy way to achieve this is to limit costs in production and this often comes from exploiting their employees. This is true in the video game industry and the most egregious manifestation is with crunch.

Crunch in terms of game development refers to the time when employees are working in overdrive to meet a release. It can take many forms, but the common thread is long days and weeks without time off. Think of any major game from the last decade or so and it’s pretty much guaranteed the developers had to rely on crunch to ship it–twelve or more hour days, six or seven days a week, for months at a time. This overworking can have severe effects on the workers’ mental and physical health. It shouldn’t have to be explained why crunch is wrong. No one should be working so long and hard that they become ill, no one should have to go weeks at a time without seeing their family to finish any project, no one should ever feel obligated to sleep under their desk. It’s inhuman. Crunch is abuse to workers. Sadly, it’s not the only type they will have to face.

The past few years have been terrible in terms of abuse at video game studios. Both Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard have had many employees come out with their stories of being sexually harassed by people in the companies, many of them managers, and often seemingly being protected by other higher ups. Activision Blizzard laid off hundreds of employees both in 2019 (even after making record breaking profits in 2018) and just this month when many members of the Ravensoft team were let go after being told for months that pay increases were in the works. These layoffs are often argued to be necessary to balance the costs of game development. This also strikes as incongruous though since the easiest way to reduce costs at one of these companies would be to reduce the outrageously bloated salaries of their CEOs (especially at Activision Blizzard where Bobby Kotick is already a billionaire).

The Ethical Consumption of Video Games

Before promoting the product of an abusive company at the Game Awards, Geoff Keighley said we should show companies our true values and “vote with our wallets.” And this is the only true thing he probably said all night. Was is tone-deaf and out of touch? Maybe. Was it well meaning? Probably. Was it a mealy mouthed, idle threat of a weak puppy dog in a den of hungry wolves? Absolutely. But it is true. The best thing you can do as a consumer to show companies their practices are not ok is to not purchase their products. Boycotts can be an effective way to tell a company to fuck off since the consumers’ purchases are what give them the money and power to continue to exist.

Video games are in a unique position for consumer goods since the second hand market is so accessible and thriving for them, meaning that boycotting a company and never having to purchase their product only has to last until their games appear on the shelf of your local used store. Since companies do not see any additional revenue from the purchase of a used game, you can buy a game you might want without having to worry about that money going to companies that are overworking and underpaying their staff. As someone who prefers collecting physical copies of games, this is how I buy a lot of them. I have a long list–too long to get into here–of developers and publishers whose games I refuse to buy new. I will wait to find a used copy of their games if I know crunch was used in making it. I completely understand the preference for digital copies of games and if you prefer those, I suggest waiting for sales so terrible companies see less profit from them. In the end, everyone will have to decide for themselves which companies they feel alright to support and they will have to draw their own lines in the sand.

Apart from boycotting companies that are practicing harmful business practices, you can also do the opposite and support good companies. Show some appreciation for companies that do rely on crunch and treat their workers with respect–this is why I have purchased every Supergiant Games, even though I’ve only really played Hades so far. And support video game workers attempts to unionize. Follow social media pages like ABetterABK and Game Workers Unite. Educate yourself on the more nasty practices of the industry–personally, I’m a big fan of the Jimquistion and Matt McMuscle’s Wha Happun? series on YouTube. I know it can be a bummer–hell, it can be downright depressing and disheartening–but the industry will never get better if we all turn a blind eye to the capitalist hands pulling the string–exploiting workers, preying off their own fans, releasing half-completed, broken games. Remember that we all do better when we all do better and in this case “we” stands for us the consumers, the workers in trenches, and the games we love.