The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 15th March 2024
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 15th March 2024
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
For decades children have been warned that they would get square eyes if they watched too much television. Today similar problems come from playing computer games, but making them is even worse. In December the Chinese Government announced plans to address this by imposing severe restrictions on the time and money allowed to be spent on computer games. This announcement caused a huge fall in the share prices of online gaming companies across the globe. Two years earlier the Chinese ruled that under-18 year olds would only be allowed to play for an hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays, but the new rules are much stricter in that they will ban entirely some games and force publishers to have processing servers and storage data kept in China if they want Chinese customers. In passing it is worth noting that the Chinese have also banned the sort of games which the British Army uses in recruitment as it thinks they are useful in instilling the shoot-and-kill reflexes which will come in handy for the next imperialistic adventure.
These actions may or may not be responsible for the fact that Sony, one of the giants in the online gaming business is laying off 900 workers, an eight per cent cut which involves the complete closure of its London operations.
As is normal in this case the 900 were sent off with a cheery message “while these are challenging times, it is not indicative of a lack of strength of our company, our brand, or our industry. Our goal is to remain agile and adaptable and to continue to focus on delivering the best gaming experiences possible now and in the future”.
Earlier Sony’s rival, Microsoft, cut 2,000 staff after it bought out the Activision Blizzard games company. Riot Games who made the League of Legends battle game is getting rid of eleven per cent of its staff. The relative failure of a single game is often followed by redundancies. Even the mighty Amazon cut 180 jobs for this reason.
Late last month another games maker, Guildford-based Supermassive Games announced it is planning to lay off 90 workers, about a quarter of its workforce. We ought to be grateful the company does so only after “much deliberation and with deep regret, we are therefore undertaking a reorganisation of Supermassive Games. As a result, we are entering into a period of consultation, which we anticipate will result in the loss of some of our colleagues”.
The global industry lost 10,000 jobs last year, with another 8,000 in January and February alone. Over 30 studios have vanished into cyberspace.
These cuts are coming at a time when the industry is globally expanding. In particular Sony’s cuts come at a time when its Playstation 5 console has sold 50 million units, three times more than its nearest rival, the X Box X/S. There are 3.24 billion gamers on this planet who last year spent £365.5 billion on their ever expanding hobby.
Some claim that as the industry expanded too rapidly during the pandemic it took on too many workers in an effort to keep up with the increased demand from people stuck indoors and this is now being reversed.
It is now a business far from its origins when spotty teenagers bashed away on heavy desktop computers in their bedrooms. While they could reap the rewards of their labour by helping to develop a popular game, nowadays the rewards go to CEOs and hedge funds.
The 1993 video game Doom was made by two developers, but the latest successful game Spiderman 2 cost $300 million to develop which means it needs to sell seven million copies in a fickle market simply to break even. The increasingly fancy graphics demanded by people shooting dragons and villains demand big bucks budgets and massive teams.
A Japanese veteran of the business, Katsuhiro Harada, laments that twenty years ago, “Development was going on at a much faster pace, with much lower labour costs than now. Now it is completely different. Everything has become huge, all costs have skyrocketed, and it takes a lot longer” In addition “there are more and more self-proclaimed game industry people and executives who are not creators, do not even have development experience”. Surprise, surprise, but that is how capitalism works.
Some veterans say the present situation is similar to the video game crash of 1983 when the industry crashed under the weight of countless amateurish efforts putting people off. Microsoft and Sony say the present business needs to be reformed, which seems to mean redundancies and outsourcing to smaller contractors who can be more easily dispensed with when demand is low. It is good to report that this has not always been successful as in the case of American companies finding that Swedish workers kept gentlemen’s hours and had unions to protect them.
The Crunch
One feature of working in the games industry is the “Crunch” which is a trendy term for very long hours of usually unpaid overtime to meet tight deadlines. Two years ago the second UK Games Industry Census, conducted by University of Sheffield researchers surveyed 3,600 workers. This naturally showed a great increase in working from home, and this was something they wanted to keep.
Gaming is one of these businesses where workers enjoy the creative work involved, which is probably more exciting than being an accountant. However such youthful enthusiasm is easily exploited by bosses who often do not need to offer large salaries to attract workers. The 2022 Census showed that 87 per cent enjoyed their job and the company they worked for.
It is clearly a boys’ industry having a 70-30 male to female ratio, with over 60 per cent under 35. The second census reported an increase, from 31 to 38 per cent, of the number of workers reporting they suffered from anxiety, depression or both. The “normal” figure for wider society is 17 to 18 per cent, so clearly the industry generates such problems.
Eighteen per cent of the employees are neuro-divergent, a proportion much higher than in the general population. While the CEO of the industry’s trade body United Kingdom Interactive Entertainment, Jo Twist, boasts about “building an equal, diverse and inclusive sector” it is worth remembering that people with such conditions can be easier to exploit. For instance autistic people who have found security in one organisation can be more easily forced to work longer hours than someone who could easily walk away into another job.
Excessive unpaid hours are the norm in the industry, especially in the months before and after the launch of a game. Sometimes these periods are known as “death marches”. They are definitely not “a rite of passage” as some claim. While the gaming companies insist that the “crunch” is voluntary, it is clear that a refusal to do so results in being shown the door.
The larger companies are particularly demanding. The American magazine, the Jacobin, reported that workers are having heart attacks at their desk as a result of a 75 hour week in busy periods and that a 50 hour week was the norm at the best of times. The only alternative was to leave, but the worker reporting this said that this was paradise compared to rival companies.
A Rocky Road
The lack of a union presence in the business is abundantly clear from the ongoing dispute at the American-owned Rockstar Games who have demanded that their British staff return to the office five days a week after Management withdrew the right to work from home.
This demand came a year after 170 staff objected to mandatory three-day office work. This was a protest by an independent street union, the IWGB Game Workers union, who are organising a petition, which they say is “one of the biggest cases of union action in the gaming industry”.
That such a modest action, about a comparatively small matter should be seen as a great advance for trade unionism demonstrates just how weak the unions are in what is a major consumer industry. Sadly many 21st century businesses have a Victorian Master and Servant approach to industrial relations.
IWGB complains that Rockstar have reneged on promises made when imposing the three days in the office rule.
Rockstar workers say the pandemic had demonstrated the benefits of working from home and said a return to the office would hit disabled workers particularly hard, along with those with caring responsibilities. In addition some had moved further away from the studios and will now have to endure longer journeys to work.
Rockstar are pulling the plug on remote working technology claiming security concerns and reduced productivity as the reason for the decision but they have not provided their employees with any supporting evidence.
One anonymous Rockstar worker complained that “working from home has been a lifeline for many of us at Rockstar, allowing us to balance care responsibilities, manage disabilities, and relocate as we need. Now, Rockstar is snatching away that lifeline without a second thought for the workers who’ll be impacted most. After so many broken promises we now fear management may even be paving the way for a return to toxic ‘crunch’ practices”.
Austin Kelmore, the IWGB Game Workers Chair added that “the workers in the IWGB Game Workers Union at Rockstar are pushing for transparency over pay and promotions, a healthy and inclusive workplace culture, and work life balance centred around what each worker needs. It is unacceptable that the Rockstar leadership have gone back on their word time and time again and have ignored the workers’ requests for basic working conditions”.
He added hopefully that “workers across the industry are done with letting executives make reckless and harmful decisions and the Rockstar workers are showing us the start of what’s to come if they’re continually ignored. There’s no better time than now to join our union and push for this to be the healthy and sustainable games industry we know it can be”. Let’s hope so.
There have been some efforts at organising gaming workers on the other side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. These tend to be reactive, coming after scandals involving cases of abuse, sexism, lay-offs, and overwork.
In June last year workers at Sega’s California headquarters organised – setting up a Communications Workers of America branch after a 91-26 vote in favour. Last October more than 100 developers at the Avalanche Studio Group in Stockholm set up a union after some brutal lay-offs. Last December 300 Quality Assurance workers at Maryland based ZeniMax Media also announced they were setting up a union.
Only last Friday 600 workers from Activision’s Q&A team joined the Communication Workers of America, which is now the largest game developer union in North America, so there is hope for what will be a long hard battle.
Open Wide
While we are on the subject of new union branches we note the formation of one for dental nurses at Manchester last weekend. This was formed by Community which also represents steelworkers and knitwear workers amongst others.
Community General Secretary Roy Rickhuss, a CBE no less said “we know there are increased pressures on dental nurses, so it’s really important that they have as many people fighting in their corner as possible. We are delighted to have been approached by dental nurses, having seen our track record of supporting and getting results for our members, to create a dental nurses’ sector within Community. We look forward to standing with dental nurses across the UK and becoming a strong voice for the sector – something these workers need and deserve”.
There are already plenty of NHS unions, but many dental nurses are employed in private practices so this development is to be welcomed, even if Community’s record of industrial militancy leaves something to be desired. However the smaller specialist unions often offer occupational expertise lacking in larger unions.
Celie Brookes, a dental nurse and one of those involved in the new branch said “Dental Nurses have been facing significant issues for some time ... It’s impossible not to see these challenges laid bare when people are pulling their teeth out with pliers because they cannot get into an NHS Dentist”. One wonders what their boss’ trade union, the British Dental Association thinks of this. It is likely the new union will have a fight on its hands if it tries to organise the larger private health care providers such as Bupa.