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Okay, let's do a quick comparison.
$184 billion.
By one estimate, that's how much the video game industry made last year.
Now, if you look at movies, the record for the global box office is $42 billion.
That was back in 2019.
Blockbuster movies like Avatar and Avengers Endgame made billions of dollars each.
So did games like Minecraft and Pokemon, but the difference is maybe that video games
just have a more lucrative shelf life than movies.
Take Grand Theft Auto 5, the franchise's most recent release from 2013.
That's already made more than any movie ever.
All this is to say, the business of video games is huge and growing, and yet it's easy
to miss the scale of the industry and what it takes to build one of these blockbuster
games.
There is a cost to putting out these complex products and that cost is often felt in
human terms.
Workers at video game companies are known for putting in long, grueling hours.
This punishing schedule is so entrenched in the industry that it has a special name.
Crunch.
Crunch.
Crunch has long been treated as a necessary evil for producing high quality games on time.
Do you always hear about crunch?
I've definitely done the, you know, get there very early, like, 3 or 4 a.m. and like
stayed until very late sort of thing.
It was truly a lot of suffering until we were not suffering anymore.
But those attitudes are changing and video game workers are organizing to push for better
conditions on the job.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Whalen Wong.
I'm Jerry Moods, and I'm Adrian Ma.
Planet Money's daily podcast, The Indicator, just wrapped up a week long series decoding
the economics of the video game industry.
Today on the show, we meet some of those workers trying to improve their industry.
Then we check in on how game developers are pulling in new audiences by creatively designing
for people who couldn't always play.
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Skylar Hennings is a quality assurance tester at ZennyMax.
That's a video game publisher that is owned by Microsoft.
Like a lot of people we talked to in this industry, Skylar first got into games by playing
them as a kid.
The procedure of working on something that you grew up playing is really cool.
So there is a certain level of passion tax that you pay to get into the industry.
A passion tax is when an employee might do unpaid work or put it with not so great conditions
because they really love what they do.
This may be a familiar feeling to people in creative field or in helping professions
like social work.
Skylar knows about the passion tax in video games.
He was first hired as a contractor that meant no paid time off for health benefits.
The job could also be unstable.
Skylar says contractors would sometimes be hired for three months.
Let go when a project was over, rehired for a different project, and then cut loose again.
And Krenge was a normal occurrence for both contractors and permanent employees.
Skylar says the thing about Krenge is it wasn't like an occasional hiccup in the production
process.
It was planned for and expected.
It's sort of like this train that you can see coming from a mile away, but there's
no way to avoid it because our industry hasn't able that for so many years.
In a 2021 survey of game developers, one out of four workers said Krenge meant working
more than 60 hours a week.
The entertainment press has documented more extreme schedules and not just for developers,
but across departments.
For example, one executive said that the writers for the game Red Dead Redemption 2 worked
a hundred hours a week for three weeks.
Another report said that employees at Epic Games regularly worked at least 70 hours
a week on the Blockbuster Game Fortnite.
The company acknowledged that workers had put in extremely long hours in rare cases
instead of trying to keep that from recurring.
Making video games is a creative process, which means surprises can pop up.
MGyger is an editor at Sega.
Their job is to polish text that's been translated from Japanese to English.
And M says that sometimes when they think they're all caught up, game developers will unexpectedly
ask to tweak the copy.
We are just at the whim of the devs and higher ups who are trying to get this game out as fast
as possible and it makes things a little bit difficult.
But M says they get it.
M loves writing and cares about the work.
People work in video games because they play video games and because they understand
intimately that it is a form of media that people are going to love and enjoy for years
to come.
And they want to make sure that the product is as good as it possibly can be.
It comes from a place of love and dedication.
There's also an economic explanation for why video game workers put up with Crunch.
Joanna Westar is a professor of labor and employment relations at Western University
in Ontario, Canada.
The problem here in Marxist terms, if you want to go there, let's go there.
Yeah, there's a reserve army of labor.
That's what we talk about in terms of labor demand and labor supply.
If there are a lot of people willing to do the job, companies can afford to pay workers
less.
The working conditions could be more harsh and if somebody burns out, then they burn
out and income somebody else.
And what we see in the game industry is that there is quite a large reserve army of labor.
Joanna also says that the video game studios get caught in something called the Iron Triangle
of Project Management.
In the Iron Triangle, you need to deliver your game on time, on budget, and within the
scopes that you promised, right, you've got to build the parts that you said you were
going to build.
And what happens is that that starts to be so constraining that really the best piece
of flexibility in that triangle is the workers themselves.
The most natural thing to do is just say, all right, everybody buckle in.
Here we go.
Executives have talked about this lack of wiggle room where neither deadlines nor budgets
can stretch.
Others have conceded that overwork happens and they're trying to address it.
For example, the studio that makes the Witcher game series says it's combating crunch by
making sure employees are giving comp time or extra pay for overtime.
But some video game workers aren't waiting for their employers to act.
In the last few years, they've started organizing to push for better work conditions.
Skyler Henness and about 300 of his fellow quality assurance testers voted in 2023 to
unionize, they became Microsoft's first US union.
Employees at Sega of America also unionized in 2023 and they recently ratified a contract.
Employee M. Geiger says the workers were encouraged by organizing efforts both within their industry
and at other places like Starbucks.
It's part of a generational shift where younger workers are more pro union than older ones.
It really does boil down to a group of colleagues who just want to make the place where they
spend so much of their time.
They want to make that time more comfortably spent, better spent, more efficiently spent.
They want to make it more livable for one another.
The Sega contract includes pay raises over the next few years and it has protections
for laid off workers like recall rights.
That's a commitment to notify them first when there are open positions.
This protection is especially important to workers now because the industry has been rocked
by mass layoffs in the last year and a half.
Companies aren't seeing the kind of growth they were enjoying during the pandemic when
people were staying at home a lot more.
At the same time, costs and time needed to produce blockbuster games have gone up significantly.
And some companies have made expensive bets on things like blockchain technology that didn't
pan out.
The fallout has resulted in thousands of workers losing their jobs.
Elise Wilkker is among those workers.
She was a quality assurance tester at Sega.
And she says she's relieved that her union secured recall rights for laid off workers
in the contract.
It feels like every company will hire big and lay off in the start of the year.
So to have the right to be the first person contacted when a company starts hiring again
really is important.
Still the layoffs have been brutal and demoralizing for the industry.
Elise says some of her former co-workers are considering switching over to software or
web development.
It really is tragic to see a lot of this passion kind of just bleed out of the industry at
a time like this.
Just people are over it.
Do you feel over it?
Me personally, I think I'll always be in the games.
I love this industry.
Something you love is so fulfilling in a way that other jobs can't really compete with.
So I don't think I'll ever fully leave, truly.
The video game workers that we talked to said they hope their efforts help make the industry
more humane and stable.
And that having a happier workforce will lead to better games.
After the break, who those games are for?
But for decades, was somewhat of an afterthought for major game developers is now an expectation.
And maybe offering a few lessons for other industries on designing for wider audiences.
Jasmine Morris here from the Storycore podcast.
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It was around the age of 12 when Steve Spawn discovered video games.
He was at home, which is where he was most of the time because he has spinal muscular
atrophy.
It's a condition that gradually takes away a person's ability to use their muscles.
And one time one of the nurses helping him asked, have you ever tried playing video games?
And I told her that I was too disabled.
There's no way that I could.
And she challenged me that there was no reason I couldn't just hold the controller.
I was using a powered wheelchair so why couldn't I hold the controller?
She brought over in Nintendo and it was like love at first sight.
I literally kidnapped it and wouldn't let her take it back.
And it was really great.
I ended up falling in love and beating Mario.
As Steve's condition progressed over the years and moving became more difficult, he's
had to find more creative ways to keep playing, like using a dentist pick to push keys on
a keyboard or wearing a special hat with sensors that allows him to control a game by tilting
his head.
He's had to do all this because for a long time the video game industry just was not thinking
about gamers like Steve or gamers with disabilities generally.
But that is starting to change.
So for most of video game history, accessibility was sort of an afterthought, if it was thought
of it all.
But then back in 2020, a company called Naughty Dog released a game called The Last of Us
Part 2.
Now The Last of Us Part 2 is this action and adventure game where you run, jump, and
shoot your way through this sprawling post-apocalyptic world which is filled with zombies.
Now normally this sort of game just would not be accessible to players with hearing, vision,
or physical disabilities.
But The Last of Us Part 2 was pretty different in this respect.
Amelia Schatz is a lead designer at Naughty Dog and she says years before she started working
on the game, she hadn't necessarily been thinking about how to make it more accessible to
people with disabilities.
She was really thinking about how to make one of her games accessible to her mom.
I mostly was just like, okay, I want my mom to play this game.
That was my goal.
And the reason was Amelia's mom would often be like, I don't really understand what it
is you do.
And Amelia thought, well, if you could just play the game, you would get it.
But a big obstacle for her mom was learning the controller.
You know, with its buttons and multiple joysticks, it could be pretty overwhelming for a non-gamer.
At the time, Amelia was working on a game called Uncharted 4.
And she thought, what if we added an option that players could turn on that would basically
simplify the controls, make gameplay easier?
Then my mom could enjoy all the cool games I'm making.
Has she played the games that you've made?
Yes.
I don't know how much she enjoyed that.
That's a thing.
Wow.
Such a tough audience, those moms.
Who cannot relate?
Right.
So these new features didn't make a gamer out of Amelia's mom.
But they did get a lot of positive feedback from other people who played the game.
And so Amelia and her colleagues thought, what other options could they add to a game
to make it accessible to even more people, including those with disabilities?
And so they started having meetings with disability advocates and gamers with disabilities.
And at one of these meetings, a gamer who is blind asked them, could they make an option
that would allow him to play one of their games?
Like somebody who could not see a screen at all?
And to be honest, I mean, the first thought in my head was like, probably not.
You know, like, no, I don't think so.
But it was so interesting of a question and it caught me thinking about, I could let
it go.
So as Amelia and her colleagues started working on their next game, the last of us
part two, that question kind of snowballed.
And they thought, why just focus on one dimension of accessibility?
And after a lot of experimenting and consulting with gamers with disabilities, the developers
eventually added more than 60 different accessibility options to the game.
For example, players had the option to reassign what each switch and button does, which
could be really helpful for players with certain physical disabilities.
Players with hearing impairments could turn on multiple visual cues, and then there
were options aimed at people with vision-related disabilities, people like Ross Minor.
Starting up, so many blind people, including myself, have developed crazy, convoluted ways
to play video games.
Ross works as an accessibility consultant and actually specializes in video games, which
he says he's been playing since he was a little kid.
You remember back then, this Pokemon video game was really hot.
And even though he couldn't see the screen, he adapted.
I literally went home and got my Game Boy and memorized every single sound in the game
just to play alongside my friends.
Over time, Ross figured out how to play other kinds of games, even if they weren't designed
with him in mind.
But there were certain games that Ross thought he would never be able to play.
What some call triple A games, big budget, epic titles with epic storylines that often require
players to navigate vast 3D worlds.
I had these thoughts when I was a kid, like, oh, if they added this feature, like, I'd
be able to play the game.
But it always just seemed like a pipe dream.
It was, until he played the last of us part 2, because it had all these accessibility
options for vision impaired players.
There was a screen reader that helped him navigate menus, voiceover that described what
was going on in scenes, and oh, the sound cues.
Sound cues for when you need to vault over something, when you need to crouch, when you're
aiming at an enemy, like, there's so many different sound cues.
It's truly a work of art.
And maybe his favorite feature was an option that allowed a player to send out a sort
of sonar pulse in the game.
And then, like, in stereo, you know, it'll play like a sound to the left or a sound far
off to the right.
And then you can track that object and it'll guide you to it.
So yeah, you're literally able to go through the entire game, you're able to collect items
and weapons and all of that, completely by yourself.
I'm not an emotional person, but like, it literally brought tears to my eyes, because
something like this was never done before.
This game, the last of us, part two, kind of set a high watermark for game accessibility.
And in fact, the game awards, which are sort of the Oscars of video games, gave it its
first-ever innovation and accessibility award.
And since then, Ross says he's been seeing more and more game companies follow that example.
I have hope that, you know, this trend will continue.
I'm 100% positive at will, because at the end of the day, it also just makes great financial
sense.
Right, because a lot of people with disabilities play games.
According to the Census Bureau, about 13% of the overall population has some sort of disability.
And according to some estimates, the percentage is even higher in the gaming community.
Ross says it's a big market.
But on the other hand, Steve Spawn, the gamer we met who has spinal muscular atrophy, he's
less confident that companies will always be willing to address the needs of disabled
gamers.
I mean, don't get him wrong.
He says there's definitely been progress.
Now, it's a matter of keeping people caring.
It's not something that can be taken for granted.
For years, Steve has helped run a nonprofit called Able Gamers.
On top of providing information and resources to gamers with disabilities, they also lobby
game companies to add accessibility features to their games.
But he says making games accessible isn't just about the games themselves.
A person who is quadriplegic, for instance, may not be able to even hold a controller.
That's why his organization also focuses a lot on providing individual consultations to
people who want to play video games, but aren't sure how or don't have the assistive technology
to do so.
One of the things that runs through everything that I stand for and that we do is you really
want to meet people where they are.
They have certain abilities.
They have certain things that they can do.
And you got to bring the technology and the gaming to them, rather than making them come
to you.
And Steve says that's something game companies should think about too.
Today's stories are from Planet Money's short daily podcast, The Indicator.
You can hear the rest of our week long series on the gaming industry and the indicator
podcast feed now.
We look at the economics of something called the live service model.
We look at esports and competitive gaming's boom and bust and more.
Cory Bridges produced this episode with help from James Sneed.
It was edited by Kicking Cannon, fact check by Sarah Hottes, and engineer by Robert Rodriguez
with help from Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez.
Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
I'm Whalen Wong.
This is MPR.
Thanks for listening.
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