Here, have a cup of morning outrage at the conditions faced by workers in the video game industry.
Codemasters put out “Bodycount”, a game you didn’t play last year because it was terrible. So terrible, in fact, that Codemasters shut down their Guildford studio in England.
Now, imagine, if you will, you’re the poobah at Codemasters. You’ve just overworked your staff to an illegal degree (400 hours, in some cases). You’ve just fired them all. You’ve paid them an extra month for severance/avoiding getting dragged before the labor board. It’s Christmastime. How do you make this worse?
If you said “Demand they pay the money they’re actually legally entitled to back using a bank transfer and a painfully short deadline“, congratulations, you’re the Codemasters CEO.
Here’s the problem: this is really industry standard practice. Just look at Team Bondi’s practices and Brendan McNamara’s behavior, which boils down to “Yes, I scream at my employees and don’t think I have to pay them overtime. So what?” The Trenches has a litany of depressing and scary anonymous stories detailing worker abuse in the gaming industry. EA lost a massive lawsuit over behavior like this: ever wonder why suddenly they were so happy to work with overseas studios? You can treat the developers badly and pay them less.
What’s depressing is less than Codemasters did this in the first place and more that this is a long-term cultural problem: stories of abuses like this stretch back to the 1980s. So what can we, as gamers, do about it?
Try this: if you hear about your favorite studio being treated like crap, write the publisher and tell them that until they change their labor practices, you’re buying their games used or not buying them at all. There’s nothing a hit to the wallet won’t do to change a major company’s ways.
image courtesy Codemasters