Why do people still feel that gaming companies and publishers are our friends?

I started writing this as a dissection into why people are continually angry about changes at companies with regards to studio closures and layoffs, but it made me think about where this trust that they are breaking, originates from. Why do people feel a STRONG attachment to developers/publishers or hardware manufactures where they don’t towards others in other facets of their life? When a shoe brand closes a factory in the Philippines because sales are down, we don’t have the same reaction. It seems counterintuitive to connect yourself to a studio/publisher/game franchise like someone with Stockholm Syndrome. There has been numerous examples and evidence over the last 10-15yrs that these corporations do not care about any of their customers, or the product they produce in many instances, but they just want create money and growth.

A quick disclaimer here before we begin: I do not agree with the things the companies are doing. I do not endorse their viewpoints. I am not justifying their position or their decisions. I too am unhappy about where the gaming industry is going and what the logical and almost inevitable conclusion is to the current downward spiral that they are dragging us along against our will. But it also does not do anybody any good to dig their heads in sand and pretend we have a say or, more importantly, that they care what we think. The piece that follows is what it is, even if we don’t like it.

I also want to clarify something as I think many of these terms and arguments have been co-opted by people and overused leading to people becoming numb to them or dismissing them as tin foil hat or over exaggeration. When you hear people say that ‘corporations do not care about you’ your immediate response is to answer ‘well yeah, obviously’. There is no actual thought, it is just a fact with a caveat of ‘but if only they would listen it can all be better and we can work together’. A noble idea but the corporation does not want to work with you. They don’t care what you think or want. To be clear there is no malice in this corporate ideology but rather a focus on their role in the industry which is to make money. They focus on what gets them to their goal and if it leads to something you are happy with then all fine and dandy, but it is not their purpose. They want the most amount of return on their least amount of investment in order to keep their shareholders happy. This means making a product for the most amount of generic customers possible in order to sell the most amount of product. Call of Duty anyone? Obvious right? And yet people still feel that there is a halfway to be found between the company and us the consumer.

The most obvious example of this is Bobby Kotick. The evil genius who took Activision, Blizzard and King and smooshed them together to created the vile monster that is ABK. He took their beloved games, developers and publishers and made them into a generic game creating studio that made him billions. It was bought for $69Billion by Microsoft which declares just how well he did his job irrelevant of what we think of it. We were all reviled at what became of these once great studios and the desecration of their beloved IPs. ABK was spoken about with bile on our lips. Bobby Kotick was the incarnation of the devil in human form. And so on and so on. The cold hard facts are he took multiple failing or flailing companies and created a money and growth machine that devoured its competition. There was no malice to it. He didn’t hate Blizzard’s Diablo, Starcraft or Warcraft IPs, he took them and turned them into a cash cow that 20yrs later is now propping Microsoft up. He didn’t hate Call of Duty, he knew people wanted a new one every year and were willing to pay $70-$100 for it. He knew Candy Crush was like crack cocaine for many people on their mobile phones and made it into a product that made more money than the gambling apps. Was he greedy? Sure, but he was no evil genius destroying something for fun, but rather a guy with no emotional connection to the product he was selling and therefore no qualms about moulding it into something he needed it to be.

I will give another simple example. Asha Sharma entered our hobby when Phil Spencer left and people were concerned. Her background showed a ruthless and effective person who did the work that the companies needed and essentially got results. As consumers who were attached to many of the studios and games that XBOX now own and run, there were concerns that XBOX and by association Microsoft would come in with a chainsaw and rip the gaming division limb from limb, not with surgical precision but rather with what we see as reckless abandonment. Instead what they got for the first few months was an Asha Sharma very active on X listening to peoples desires for XBOX. One of the changes she implemented quickly was changing Xbox to XBOX based on the results of a poll, or making first party games exclusive again as requested by the fans. There suddenly was a moment where fans felt that XBOX was back (not that they ever really left). There were memes of Asha as a saint or XBOX rising from the ashes and so on. And then the layoffs, studio closures, reports and leaks of more hard decisions to come and overall doom and gloom happening, and somehow people were shocked, disappointed and angered by this. Asher Sharma does not care what you think. She has a remit. She has data. She has Mathew Ball on staff now who has consistently shown he knows what is actually happening in the gaming space from a data driven analytical viewpoint and not ‘feels’.

Then there is PlayStation getting rid of disc drives and physical copies of games in what I think is an unsurprising development. People were incensed by this. They ranted about not owning their games and game preservation. Others pointed out that if you get rid of physical media the only place you can buy your PlayStation games is directly from the PlayStation store and that means there will be no competition so they can charge what they like. There will no longer be any way of owning your games or being able to let your friend share your version of a game. This of course rendered the sarcastic advert PlayStation put out a few years ago showing ‘how to share your PlayStation games’ when XBOX detailed their new DRM policy completely moot. This development was not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. PlayStation has all the data to back this up. They know how many copies of games were bought digitally or on disc. They know how many discless PS5s they sold. They know how many disc drives they sold for the discless version. They know how many games on XBOX or PC were bought digitally because they watch their competitors. They know how much the PS6 is going to cost and how much they can mitigate that by making it digital while not reducing the price. They have all the data they need to make an educated decision in order to push the company forward and make that line go up. They do not care about their consumer because the voices we hear as gamers and on social media are the minority. Majority of people buy their games digitally. This is a fact even if people don’t want to believe it. I saw a stat that 95-99% of games on Steam were bought digitally and PlayStation and XBOX are quite high as well. They also know that if the only place you can buy their games is on the PS Store they will make more profit as they don’t need to share any of the revenue generated with third parties. By these metrics the decision is a no brainer.

The examples go on and on. From XBOX and PlayStation to Epic and EA. Everyone is ensuring that the profit and growth line continues to go up. Now this is where people get an image of Dr Evil or some other maniacal evil genius who will destroy anything and everything in their path to reach their goal. I do not think that this is the case. I imagine that most if not all of the CEOs of these companies are normal decent people. They don’t sit there laughing like some Bond villain every time they decide on another round of layoffs or studio closure or ‘restructuring’. Sure they are clinical and I imagine they don’t think too hard about the lives and incomes of the people they just fired, but I don’t think there is any malice to it rather hyper focus on what they believe they need to do in order to make that line go up. Tim Sweeny didn’t think about the 1000 people he let go, because he was staring at a balance sheet and needed to ensure the company made enough of a profit for the other shareholders who own 58% of the company. Cold sure, but not evil.

So why do people feel so connected to these studios and the devs in them? Aside from the obvious basic human concern about people who have made games we love having their livelihood ripped unceremoniously from them, these are essentially not people we know personally so why do we care so much? People are being laid off all the time. Elon Musk gutted Twitter when he took over and many people cheered. There are multiple examples of companies laying off people and, although there is the human reaction of sadness for these people involved, we don’t have as visceral reaction to those stories as we do to layoffs in gaming companies?

My hypothesis is over the last 30yrs we have got to know devs and development studios in a very personal manner. We saw many a documentary or promotional video letting us inside the studio as if we were a close friend and are included in the inner sphere of the company and it’s employees. We got to see people making the game. We saw what they were doing and how they did it. They introduced us to Johnny the animator or Jen the artistic lead and were invited to listen and understand why they put that section of wall there or why that character we would later come to know and love was written in the manner they were. We were invited to sit in on meetings like a fly on the wall and see the decisions being made and the back and forth of ideas being formed and then moulded. Before this we had developers like the John’s from ID Software speaking candidly in magazines or on the web about the formation of the company and work that went into making DOOM. Romero speaking about level designs and the passion he put in to each level including his love of secrets for people (or his fellow developers) to find. Or an insight into John Carmack’s coding that enabled us to look up for the first time in a video game. Some people might say they became rock stars of the gaming world but really they were more like a group of friends of ours who were doing something cool that we inevitably felt a part of.

Then of course there is my man Mr Tim Schafer. He has spent the better part of 30yrs building a company that makes cool and interesting games. I realise I am biased here (but it kind of proves my point) but due to his need to raise funding for most if not all of Double Fine’s games, we have often had deep and unfettered access to the goings on in Double Fine through the years. His passion and love for creating games is infectious. He is your geeky mate who showed you something cool that he is just way too into and excited about. To me he is what game dev is about. They have Day of the Devs where, along with iam8bit, they highlight indie games that they are excited about and feel other should be too with zero benefit to themselves. They run game jams within the office called Amnesia Fortnight. This is designed to be a time to clear the developers minds by removing them from the current development cycle for a time and gives people a chance to pitch and create games just for the fun of it. It stokes creativity and team cohesion. I am unashamed to say that this is a place I would love to work.

The news/rumour that Double Fine is one of the studios in Asher Sharma’s sights is personally concerning. It highlights to me the point I am making. Double Fine is the kind of studio that should exist, for no other reason than they make cool stuff. They will never be making the kind of money that will make the shareholders happy and there is a snowballs hope in hell that they will move that growth/profit line up by even the smallest of margins. They may not be a burden on the rest of the company per say, but they are certainly not an asset in the metrics that we imagine Asha Sharma is looking at in order to grow the company. Now I may be wrong here. She may look at the 3 games they have released since coming under Microsoft in the 7yrs since their acquisition and see value. I don’t know the internal metrics she is working to for XBOX or Microsoft, nor do I know their future outlook for the company and how Double Fine fits into it. But if we are realistic I think we all know the answer to that, even if we don’t want to see it.

If Double Fine closes (or is allowed to leave like Tango Gameworks) then that will be a really sad day for the industry (or for me personally if I look at it honestly). But there are many who will agree with XBOX that they were effectively deadwood. They didn’t create blockbuster, billion dollar games that added to XBOXs profit and therefore growth. They have no value. I stopped when I typed that because it is true. They have intrinsic value to me and many others, but undeniably not to Microsoft.

I wrote a piece of why Phil Spencer leaving XBOX was a bad thing for the industry as a whole and I feel that this is the difference between him and Asha Sharma. He bought Double Fine for a reason. He saw their value, she and others in Microsoft may not. This is not personal but rather business. I imagine this is why he retired. It is kind of like when two people in a relationship look at one another and realise at the same time that it is just not working. There isn’t a cohesive goal they share and they are looking to move forward in different directions. There is no animosity, rather sadness and an understanding that it has to end. This is of course conjecture as I do not, unsurprisingly, know Phil Spencer personally.

Every time I hear people speak about corporations ruining everything I agree but the idea that they are some evil group of people who are purposefully destroying the thing we love is untrue. They are a group of people who are part of a greed fuelled machine that is designed from the ground up to extract as much value and wealth as possible from the product they as selling. There is no malice or intention to destroy involved and they are people but they often have no personal connection or interest in the very thing that is making them money. We need to stop adding emotion to our relationship to them. They do not even notice us as an individual group rather we are a collection of data points to them. PlayStation does not care if people want discs or to preserve games. XBOX doesn’t care if you (like me) have a connection to Double Fine or Tango Gameworks. Tim Sweeny does not care that 1000 developers, many who are directly responsible for the very success he is afforded, are fired or if more will fall by the way side within Epic and other companies that use Unreal Engine due to the new AI features that make developers obsolete. Satya Nadella doesn’t see a problem with 25 000 staff being laid off across all of Microsoft as they are now surplus to requirement. And of course Bobby ‘the devil incarnate’ Kotick rides off into the sunset with his golden parachute while leaving behind the shells of the companies he destroyed that now create billions in revenue. All they see is data points and numbers and the layoffs and closures are an unavoidable necessity in business. Although they are sympathetic towards the people effected, and I do believe they are, and will do everything with in their power to support those people, it can’t be helped as the industry is as it is.

Even if you do not see games as art, and I think many do not, they are a product that creates emotional attachment like few others. Movies and music are similar but due to the same processes we are now seeing in gaming, their intrinsic value has been reduced. We still have many great games coming out, some of them even from these corporations, and we will continue to see great games coming out in the future. I cannot see a way for us to distance ourselves from the emotions that are created when the things we are passionate about are reduced to number value points on a productivity and value graph, but I guess we need to find a way to not get angry about it.