The State of the Games Industry with Nathan Grayson

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2:03Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:16Better Offline. and today i'm joined by the esteemed nathan grayson co-founder of the worker-owned gaming website aftermath nathan thank you for joining me again yeah thank you for having me so you just did two years what's it been like what what's what have you learned in the last two years from doing this uh yeah just nothing you know we came in as experts we were you know we didn't need to learn anything at all we were perfect yeah no um we have learned so so so so much um you know we entered it as five people who wrote for a living who never really had much experience with the business side of things because that wasn't really our purview um and when you go from being at a major publisher of any sort whether in our cases that was geomedia with kotaku or the washington post or vice or whatever else um you know a lot gets handled for you whether that is payroll or promotion or in some cases social media things of that nature um we have to do all of that ourselves now in addition to expanding the business finding ways to grow finding ways to support ourselves and keep it sustainable or even make it sustainable in the first place um so part of the reason we decided to do a relaunch was to kind of plant our flag and say like yeah you know we're we're a real grown-up business now whereas when we first started we We kind of just were cobbling things together and learning as we went along.

3:39So tell me about the relaunch. What you've been doing? You moved to Ghost, right? Yeah, yeah. We moved over to Ghost. Yeah, so we relaunched the website. We think it looks better and nicer now. There are more design possibilities. And also, we can accept more kinds of payment and have more ways to reach readers and let them know, like, hey, your subscription is expiring, all this nitty gritty stuff. but yeah we just decided to move over there because it offers more flexibility sites like 404 and Hellgate are on Ghosts and have nothing but good things to say and like you know we appreciated Lead which is what we were using before that's what Defector's on but yeah they're just a few things that we felt like we were not going to be able to get from Lead within a semi-reasonable time frame and Ghost already offered them so we're like yeah makes perfect sense.

4:27It's also grown into like a vibrant website. It was a, at first you were kind of testing things out, but now you've got a very developed stack of people. You've got freelancers now, right? Yeah. Yeah. We use freelancers or we, we accept freelance submissions. We also have two regular contributors, um, Nicole and Isaiah. They, they are in our Slack. They write for us, you know, every week. Um, yeah, you know, we're, we're going places. We're still a core staff of five. Um, but in the near future, you know, should we accrue enough subscriptions? We'd like to hire people on full-time and grow our staff.

4:59Again, similar to what we've been seeing with, well, I think 404 now has regular contributors as well. I'm not sure if they have anyone new full-time yet. Hellgate, I know, has grown. So yeah, again, we are following in the footsteps of, at least relative to ourselves, giants, and we would like to keep doing that. But that requires growing more, making more money, all that stuff. Typical challenges of a small business, but mapped on to independent media so and coverage wise you're fairly wired now like you cover games but kind of in the dead spin before the bullshit happened style thing where it's like gaming can mean many different things yeah yeah i mean and also like i think from the get-go what we wanted to do was cover games in the way that defector covers sports which is to say that you know we can cover a lot of things a lot of things fall under that umbrella and on top of that like Like, you know, games are relevant to many different areas as well.

5:54Like, and so I think that compared to other video game websites, for example, we spend a lot of time covering politics. For a long time, there's this refrain that like, oh, you know, games are escapism and like you should keep politics out of them, blah, blah, blah, which has always been bullshit, of course. But I think that even relative to our coverage at other places, like before we made Aftermath, you know, all of us have been fairly politically minded in our careers. But Aftermath, like we really go in on that. And I'm very proud of what we've accomplished on that front in terms of just covering that overlap, especially as it's become more and more relevant to the modern day.

6:29You know, like when Trump was running for president again, he was meeting with gaming influencers. Like, you know, you have all of these things where now the people who used to be considered just like outcast nerds are in incredible places of prominence. Yeah, and it's weird. I don't like seeing games bleed into politics at all. I think we were good in about 2011 with Homefront, which was, I think, the only necessary political game where what if North Korea radiated the Mississippi River? Classic game. I'm sure I'm going to get some great emails about the fact that there were political games before that.

7:07And you're wrong. But it is interesting where you are, where Aftermath is at in the current milieu of politics and digital culture. because it does feel like streaming and gaming have just kind of meshed into everything now outside of politics you've got a bunch of tons of like nba players and nfl players who game and stream regularly but you've also got these particularly vile and not vile streamers who do it too yeah um well yeah and i mean we just recently uh this week in fact we ran a story about kind of the aftermath of one person the aftermath haha dot say but anyway um about a uh an employee at a company called Sucker Punch, they made a ghost of Yote recently, getting fired as a result of a joke about Charlie Kirk.

7:51They were one of the people who got swept up in all of that. And so we ran a story about kind of what has happened to them since that occurred. And also just sort of like what that moment actually was versus what you might be able to misconstrue it as. So, you know, at the time there was all of this furrow over anybody saying anything negative about Charlie Kirk. And so this person got fired for a relatively innocuous joke that was probably in bad taste, but whatever um and so what she's contending now is like you know two months down the line she's like this wasn't actually about the joke it was because there was a harassment mob that already existed that decided to weaponize this person's death to get some people fired and to you know basically instill silence in them and anybody else who witnessed that happening um and you know just generally taking the the games industry to task for not defending its people better because when this occurred, the company in question, at least she says, did not really come to her or give her a warning or really do anything.

8:47They were just like, yeah, you're fired. And as long as the games industry continues to let that happen, which they've been basically doing since the original Gamergate back in 2014. As you would well know. Right. Then these kinds of things, that will just continue to let these mobs run rampant and kind of dictate the pace of conversation around games and even in some cases how they get made. It is so strange. As a child, I dreamed of the day that gaming would be a normal thing that everybody talked about. Now I feel like that was a monkey's paw situation. Maybe we should have less discussion of it.

9:24You know, I don't even mean in a mediated sense, in the sense that something happened as games came to prominence that dragged up a ton of stuff within gamers that wasn't anything to do with games at all. yeah well i mean i think a few things happened one of them is that you know for a while games were considered this thing like for nerds and for like outcasts and so there was always that bit of a chip on people's shoulder and that like once the mainstream started to care about games they're like hey well you know these are ours and if you do anything to them if they get altered to fit your tastes and your needs then we're going to like do an uprising or like get really mad but also that kind of energy that kind of like you know faux victimhood is very easily weaponized by other forces and I think that the far right seized upon that quite early again with Gamergate they noticed that there's this latent kind of resentment running through games seeking audiences whatever you want to call them like yeah yeah we need to find a way to seize upon that and Gamergate was the perfect flashpoint and ever since then you know people much smarter than me have said this but like gamer gate was the canary in the coal mine for a lot of the modern alt-right and that's sort of just how it all started and i wish that they would get angry at the real villains which is electronic arts and the actual like because can you imagine if any even a iota of this vile poison in their veins was a attack like i i know this is somewhat of a tangent but i swear i'm going somewhere playing madden last night because i hate myself and it's just this game has been broken in the same way for 15 years there are little you can play a game and without fail we'll see a bug i beat you the menus will hitch menus won't load and it's just see like these harassment campaigns i think are so as you've well put so nakedly not about video games but just aggression against woman aggression against any outliers which is ironic considering gate like gamers historic outlier status yeah absolutely when yeah you know again as with a great many things obviously the real villain especially in the case you're describing is capitalism yeah um and like you know if you look at madden sports games in general as you're saying they've been broken in fundamental ways for like decades but what's changed about them is that they're just more heavily monetized now that these companies have found more ways to extract money.

11:55Yep, to extract tons of money from them. And there is anger at games changing in that way, but not to this degree where it's like we're going to harass people. I mean, there are, in some cases, harassment mobs that have gone up to developers. Which they shouldn't do to anyone, just to be clear. No one should. But also a lot of the developers who end up in those crosshairs are also just marginalized, and that's the main reason people are going after them. um yeah it's very odd because you would think that games would be this kind of could be this hotbed for like resistance to the ravages of capitalism in that you know so many games present effectively what are supposed to be fair structures right you get out what you put in um like you know you gain experience for all of your work you gain rewards things like that and so in a lot of ways gamers brains are tailored to expect a certain degree of fairness and like egalitarianism.

12:50And so you would think the gamers would look at like all these structures and say, okay, well, there's a problem with the structure. It's not fair and we should do something about it. But, you know, again, they've been misled by a bunch of various forces, including the powers that be, including the people who are like are in charge of making the games, not the developers, the executives. And so they just never quite get there. But it is kind of funny to think about, like, you know, this could be the place where it all started. Gamers could start the revolution.

13:25This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something. Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity? They may be happening to you without you knowing. If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

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17:11bar more because i think there are plenty of people who are like oh these game how much the game developers make 700 000 a year like that they have these they see them as this ivory tower job versus a pretty brutal working stiff job at times i suppose and then even more so in things like qa you know as long as that still exists as an industry yeah right until it gets replaced by ai in square enix's case yeah um i could not remember the company thank you for being smart Yeah, they want to replace 70 % of their QA or have 70 % of the QA done by AI. I'm sure that they have some like bullshit line about how that won't displace labor, but it's like, but you just explained.

17:54Thinking this out loud, that doesn't make any fucking sense. First of all, QA from what I understand is a lot of repetitive tasks. So I assume that that's why they think AI will work. But is it going to play the games? Because that's a big part. So another big problem with that whole line of reasoning is that QA is like a relationship. right yeah in that you don't just need qa people to do the job you also need them to be effective communicators to the rest of the studio in terms of what they should be looking for in terms of how to reproduce various bugs and other issues and another like big element of qa that is super underappreciated is that typically because a game is made in bits and pieces qa is the part of the studio that earliest and most often gets a full picture of what the game is like to play and its totality as like a complete product or as like and so they can most often answer the question early on like is this good is it fun yeah admittedly they're playing it in a very specific way so they're not necessarily playing it to enjoy themselves but they do have that like broader overview of what it is kind of turning out to be um and they're all of those things that i just mentioned yeah qa is quality is so uh quality assurance i probably should have led with that but never but no you're right and it's i think seeing games as a labor thing is so it's genuinely one of my favorite things about aftermath is the if you talk about and now this is a little bit copium hopium whatever you call it but it's if you do want to change things you need to educate people about what's going wrong and why i'm not saying that vile right people are finding aftermath and going oh i'm changed but it's i feel like you have to build a body of work to explain the overall problem and it is a label one it is the fact that i'm paraphrasing my girlfriend here but it's like with movies it's like there are movies that are 100 million dollars there are movies that are 1 million dollars and i feel like games is in this weird position too where it's everything has to be triple a everything biggest most hugest game and then there are indie games and it's i feel like that like the capitalism problem you've been discussing is there too where it's the way games are made is broken and i feel like aftermath does a good job of explaining how the breaking has happened but also the consequences of that fracturing yeah um and then also like i think people just don't understand the scale of game making in general either like you know certainly there's triple a and there's indie but there's all sorts of stuff in between um a lot of indie games you know because like there's been this larger thing happening in video games where like it's been hard for companies to secure investment um a lot of games have gotten and canceled.

20:29A lot of studios have had to break up or go their separate ways. And so for a moment, there was this refrain of, okay, well, as a result of all of that and all these layoffs happening in the AAA space, pretty much every major AAA game company, be it Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, whatever, has had major layoffs in the past couple of years. And so a lot of people saw that and said, well, AAA is collapsing. It's going to go away in five or 10 years indies will save us though um but you know indies are facing their own problems again in terms of securing investment and also like a lot of indie games are not just you know one person in their garage or a few people making a game for you know pocket change um these are also full-scale productions these can have 30 40 even sometimes 100 people working on them um and they all require paychecks and so quickly the price for that on a per annual basis goes up to you know over a million dollars easily um and so it's like you know indies can't save us because they're facing a lot of the same headwinds as everybody else um and recognizing how games are made i think allows people to better get a grip on that and be like okay well then the games industry is actually facing very different challenges than it might seem on the surface.

21:46Yeah. I, even I, in my own ignorance, didn't even think of the kind of messy middle of what a hundred people working a hundred people would be an indie game studio, I guess. It can be, it depends on the studio. I mean, some of them are, you know, owned by again, Microsoft, Microsoft owns like half the games industry now, which is also bad. Um, but others are, yeah, doing their own thing and either working with publishers or securing outside funding. Um, and you know, For every one Claire Obscure Expedition 33 you get, which that studio is allegedly around 30 people, but they had tons of other folks touch the game over the course of its development.

22:23You don't get a lot of other games. Others just get canceled. They die on the vine. They can't secure funding. And studios either lay people off or cancel games or both. Yeah. I mean, even my favorite game of the year, Dead Zone Rogue by Prophecy Games, which I love. even that one they did tribes three rivals and just appear to have stopped updating it which it's just it it almost feels like we're reaching a breaking point with this and i was just so yeah let's briefly talk about the number of times that people have tried to bring back tribes and it didn't work it's insane how many tribes get like 17 25 100 of them that i've been playing tribes games since i was like in my teens yeah why like in theory tribe should be able to find an audience like we live in a time now where people are always looking for a new multiplayer game tribes is really interesting and different compared to pretty much every multiplayer game you can ski around and like you know figure out your trajectories and launch blue discs at people it rules it's one of like the best multiplayer shooters ever in my opinion um and like you know giant maps huge landscapes that's what like battlefield is doing now people love that shit and so it's so odd that each and every revival and they've been like relatively well spaced out it's not like they're you know doing these in like staccato rhythm um but each and every revival has just you know been dead on arrival basically like it's it's really sad to see yeah six of them six of them it looks like my bad i can't count uh it's with that one maybe it's the game thing which is a giant map is probably not that easy to put together and if you look up try i didn't play tribes through rivals but if you look at dead zone rogue which is an fps roguelike it's very i don't want to say small but it's condensed it's like a very focused game but i want to change because i'll just talk about dead zone rogue for now um to the steam machine how are you feeling it's the steam machine as you'll know from the episode before this one with steve burke it's the new gaming console style steam pc thing how are you feeling about it i'm oddly hopeful yeah i mean so um valve tried to release steam machines um a handful of years ago as well i think in the mid-20s and they kind of crashed and burned or rather they just never took off um i think that valve learned a lot of very important lessons from that and i think that also just the timing is much better now in terms of what people are looking for in terms of the prominence of PC gaming.

24:55Back in the mid-2010s, consoles still kind of ruled the roost. Whereas now, if we're talking about higher-end video game playing, pretty much everyone does it. Or not everyone, but a lot of people do it on their PCs because that also allows them to create content, stream, things of that nature. And then Steam itself, which Valve owns and operates, has also become so much bigger than it was even back then. It was already huge. Now it basically is the epicenter, the mecca of PC gaming. And so then you get to the Steam machines themselves, and you know there's long been this perception that the pc is for a lot of normal people kind of impenetrable from a gaming standpoint you know you got to install the game and install these patches and then like you know maybe it won't work with your particular hardware configuration blah blah blah blah blah and so what valve is basically saying is okay well we will handle all that for you as you might expect with a video game console and then you know you just click on a game and it'll work and they have a couple things working in their favor on that front one is that they have since made steam os steam os is a great little operating system for video games that's the whole point again it's super plug and play it's really easy um and then also the entire model they're going to deploy on steam machines they've already successfully deployed with steam deck which is their handheld steam deck is an incredible piece of hardware um it is deceptively powerful.

26:19It feels really nice in your hands and it's all entirely SteamOS based. And so you can just install a game on it. SteamOS will let you know if it's going to run well or not. Valve has this entire system where like they basically like will play games to see if they're verified or if they're like, you know, sort of edge cases where they'll work, but they're not optimized or if they're just like going to be a mess. They let you know that up front so you can go in with a good idea of how it's all going to function and then you just do it um it's great it's super smart and then you have your saves across like steam deck and every other place that you can install steam so you could theoretically be playing on your steam deck in one room and decide you want to play on your tv your monitor just go play on your steam machine yeah yeah you can do sick yeah it's so it's so nice it's it's i mean say we will about valve they are like a libertarian kind of nightmare company um but they do still make cool stuff unlike every other video game company that's not trying to like cut their way to profitability by laying everyone off i'm i want it i was talking to steve i want this to kill the i don't know if it will it's going to come down heavily to if it's 600 versus 1200 and if it's sold in retailers but it's i want it to smash microsoft i also think and this is a somewhat i know people aren't going to like this um i don't think game pass is good for the games industry no no i think a lot of people would agree with you at least in the games industry yeah it's i don't think i think it create i i don't know i have a weird thing with streaming services in general i think that they create a race to the bottom and actually make things way more unfair but i like that steam charges per game i think it's good to do that and i think a variety of games is good and a variety of prices as well i don't know i i know they're a deeply imperfect company but i genuinely think microsoft might be walking away from the xbox or at least they're not sure why they have it anymore yeah well i mean they they have their whole like campaign now where they're basically saying like anything can be an xbox that's their marketing line so the basic concept is like you know now xbox is more of an ecosystem an app-based ecosystem that lives on not just the gaming platform that you have you know in your living room like it could be on your smart tv um it could be on your phone it could even like be in your car and like it just seems in general that they don't really know what the brand is anymore that also goes back to like the game selection like what is the last major first party xbox game that came out or that like became the face of the platform you know question the fact that everyone still associates microsoft with like halo is on one hand a testament to the enduring power or nature i guess of like the master chief but on the other hand like that game came out in the early 2000s and still it is the main thing that people are like oh yeah that's halo or that's that's xbox um so i actually just had to look this up for the first party games doom the dark ages yeah yeah because microsoft bought id software in bethesda a while ago so they own those companies now that's the other thing is in order to like have more recognizable ip they just bought a bunch of studios and then in recent years because of the activision blizzard purchase and how expensive that was um and also just you know trends in gaming microsoft has been laying everyone the fuck off um they've laid off over 4 000 people in the past two years in games alone um and that's like a significant chunk of you know workers at those studios it's it's like a really bad situation over there i mean on the upside due to other stuff that takes a while to explain they did let a lot of people unionize but then also the most recent layoffs cut into the unions pretty badly too

30:21this is Sophie Cunningham from show me something do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or osa in adults with obesity they may be happening to you without you knowing if anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA. OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation. Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com. This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

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32:18Or call 844-844-iHeart. One more time, just call 844-844-iHeart and get radio working for you.

32:31For 25 years, I've explored what it means to heal, not just for myself, but alongside others. I'm Mike De La Rocha. This is Sacred Lessons, a space for reflection, growth, and collective healing. What do you tell men that are hurting right now? Everything's gonna be okay on the other side, you know, just push through it. And you know, ironically, the root of the word spirit is breath. Wow. Which is why one of the most revolutionary acts that we can do as people is just breathe. Next to the wound is their gifts. You can't even find your gifts unless you go through the wound. That's the hard thing.

33:10You think, well, I'm going to get my gifts. I don't want to go through all that. You got to go through the wounds you're laughing. Listening to other people's near-death experiences, and it's all they say. In conclusion, love is the answer. Listen to Sacred Lessons as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network. available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

33:37I don't think Microsoft knows what the fuck they're doing because you talk about, you're correct in saying, yeah, they want to build the ecosystem, but the ecosystem fucking sucks. I remember it used to be a while ago, a couple years ago, I'd say, I'd use the Xbox to be like, oh, this is kind of clean and functional. It's got a few doodads to it. Now, every time I load it up, it feels like I'm on the fucking Las Vegas Strip. It's like an ad for a movie. Right. It's trying to make me download a kid's ad. It's fucking bizarre. And it's about to get way worse because, as you well know, Microsoft is now obsessed with adding AI to every potential product and feature they can possibly get their hands on.

34:21And so, yeah, they're going to load, you know, the Xbox ecosystem down with AI products as well. Yeah, it's just like, and then on top of that, I guess like the best example here is again, to go back to Valve and Steam. I think that if Microsoft had been building the kind of platform that Steam has been for the past, you know, well over a decade, then they'd be in a good position to do what they're hoping to do with the Xbox now, which is to put it to to ensure that it's basically everywhere um but you know so like the microsoft recently put out their own version of the asus rog ally which is a handheld i like my rog ally but like yeah everything i've heard about the new one i thought they were going to do something special with it no they just put like a fucking shitty version of windows on it where you still have to like you know because again you want that to be like a plug and play product out the box you're ready to go and instead i guess like when you first open it up you've got to install all this stuff and do all these updates and it's just like tedious and horrible and all for an interface that still pales in comparison to steam in terms of just usability and versatility and like cleanness um it's so weird like compared to the steam deck is what i'm talking about the rog lax so before the xbox one it's it's just front ends on front ends it's just a we've got an asus we got but we got another fucking layer here oh and now you can load up an xbox thing which is a different layer and if you hit the wrong button it will load a completely separate menu and it really seems to be that no one sat down and went what if this worked like what what if this just because the the steam deck i bought one of those early on it is it's chunky it's too chunky in fact it's a little bit too big however it just fucking works you just do the button load the game log in buy game play game i don't have to fucking do algebra to make it like it's not gonna i'm not gonna brush a button with my hand and have it kick back to the windows desktop it's just it feels almost loathing for the customer at this point right right i mean it's a mix of loathing for the customer and then like hey if we're talking about microsoft and like yeah just maximal, you know, at least attempted profit extraction.

36:39But as you're saying, they didn't really think all the way down to the level of what will the end user experience be like and how does it compare to this other thing that's already out there and is already setting the standard for what people expect. And like, if that's where you're coming from, then you will forever. And I think this is also part of Microsoft's problem in general. If that is the way that you are thinking and approaching the creation of your video game devices and services, you will always be at least in second place if not third and microsoft has always been in third in the gaming space yeah and they're like i don't even know how the economics of buying these studios even works out for them because didn't they lose money when they bought activision oh yeah people weren't buying like who is mr bean running microsoft gaming it just feels insane to every time i see them do something yeah yeah and i mean like again you know the the question now is what is the strategy because i think yeah for a while the strategy was very much all in on game pass that's why they bought so many studios that's why they bought activision blizzard and everything else because they're like well we have this service that it's going to be the backbone of everything else we do and we need to populate it with content we need regular new games to be coming out so if we buy a third of the fucking video game industry and have them pump out new content then we'll be set but the problem with game pass is that the economics of it just aren't great.

38:02I mean, for one... How could they ever be? Microsoft will repeatedly insist the Game Pass is profitable, but that's only if you don't pay attention to the upfront costs of the studios under Microsoft's umbrella making the games, or the costs of the studios themselves. Once you get past Microsoft's fake math, it's like, oh no, this thing is not profitable at all. What,$68 billion for... Yeah, for Activision Blizzard alone. Insane. Yeah. But no, once you realize that, and I think Microsoft did, then they're like, ah, okay, we got to, you know, diversify this further. We got to figure out something else to do.