Inside video game economics (Two Indicators)

0:00Support for this podcast and the following message come from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what you see, it's what you miss. Recorded Future, bringing clarity to the signals that matter most to your business. Recorded Future. Know what matters. Act first. This is Planet Money from NPR. 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.

0:47But so do 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 V, 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.

1:30This punishing schedule is so entrenched in the industry that it has a special name. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. And Crunch has long been treated as a necessary evil for producing high-quality games on time. 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 Waylon Wong. I'm Darian Woods.

2:12And 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. This message comes from Babson College. Ever notice how one idea can change an entire market? At Babson College, graduate students learn to turn bold ideas into real-world impact, whether launching a startup or rethinking business as usual.

2:49In Babson's MBA and specialized master's programs, you'll gain the skills and experience to lead change. Ranked number one in entrepreneurship, Babson is shaping leaders who don't just study the economy, they build it. More at babson.edu slash grad school. Skylar Hinnant is a quality assurance tester at ZeniMax. That's a video game publisher that is owned by Microsoft. And like a lot of people we talked to in this industry, Skylar first got into games by playing them as a kid. The prestige of like working on something that you grew up playing like is really cool. So there is a certain level of passion tax that you pay to get into the industry.

3:33A passion tax is when an employee might do unpaid work or put up with not so great conditions because they really love what they do. This may be a familiar feeling to people in creative fields 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 or 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 crunch was a normal occurrence for both contractors and permanent employees.

4:12Skyler says the thing about crunch 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 has enabled it for so many years. In a 2021 survey of game developers, one out of four workers said crunch 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 100 hours a week for three weeks.

4:52Another report said that employees at Epic Games regularly worked at least 70 hours a week on the blockbuster game Fortnite. night. The company acknowledged that workers had put in extremely long hours in rare cases and said it was trying to keep that from recurring. But making video games is a creative process, which means surprises can pop up. M. Geiger 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.

5:35But 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 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, and in Marxist terms, if you want to go there.

6:15Yeah, let's go there. Yeah, that there is a reserve army of labor, right? 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 in comes 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 scope that you promised, right?

7:00You'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 given comp time or extra pay for overtime.

7:40But 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. Skylar Hinton and about 300 of his fellow quality assurance testers voted in 2023 to unionize. They became Microsoft's first U.S. 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.

8:17It 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.

9:01At 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 Willicker 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 then 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.

9:43Still, 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 bleed out of the industry at a time like this. People are over it. Do you feel over it? Me personally, I think I'll always be in the games. I love this industry. Working on 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.

10:32After the break, who those games are for. What 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.

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12:23Excellence takes drive, work, perseverance. Tiger Woods brings it to the course. Insperity brings it to your business. Want to be the best? Work with the best. Insperity. How you HR matters. Learn more at insperity.com slash tiger. It was around the age of 12 when Steve Spahn 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.

13:02There's no way that I could. And she challenged me that there was no reason I couldn't just hold a controller. I was using a powered wheelchair, so why couldn't I hold a controller? And she brought over a Nintendo, and it was like love at first sight. I literally kidnapped it and wouldn't let her take it back. And yeah, 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.

13:38And 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 at all. But then, back in 2020, a company called Naughty Dog released a game called The Last of Us Part II. Now, The Last of Us Part II is this action-adventure game where you run, jump, and shoot your way through this sprawling post-apocalyptic world, which is filled with zombies. Give me your hand! We're gonna have to run!

14:21Now, normally, this sort of game just would not be accessible to players with hearing, vision, or physical disabilities. but The Last of Us Part II was pretty different in this respect. Emilia 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 Emilia's mom would often be like, I don't really understand what it is you do.

15:00And 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, but I don't know how much she enjoyed it. That's a thing. Oh, such a tough audience, those moms.

15:35Who 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.

16:09And 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 got 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 II, that question kind of snowballed. 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.

16:47Players with hearing impairments could turn on multiple visual cues. And then there were options aimed at people with vision-related disabilities, people like Ross Miner. Growing 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. He remembers 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.

17:28Over 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 AAA 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, I'd be able to play the game. But it always just seemed like a pipe dream. That is, until he played The Last of Us Part II, because it had all these accessibility options for vision impaired players. There was a screen reader that helped him navigate menus, a voiceover that described what was going on in scenes.

18:07And 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. But 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.

18:46I'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 II, 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 in Accessibility Award. And since then, Ross says he's been seeing more and more game companies follow that example. I have hope that this trend will continue. I'm 100 % positive it 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.

19:24According 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 Spahn, 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.

19:59On 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.

20:34They have certain abilities. They have certain things that they can do. And you've 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.

20:50Today'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 in 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. Corey Bridges produced this episode with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Kate Kincannon, fact-checked by Sarah Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez with help from Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Waylon Wong. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

21:24Thank you.