I have a dream for the game industry, where we not only fix what ails us but use our example to inspire other industries besides. And I guarantee we can do it, together. 🫂
We’ve now been faced with going on the worst three years the game industry has ever known. Companies hired like crazy during the 2020 boon, knowingly bringing on too many team members they probably wouldn’t be able to support as the pandemic ended. And as a result, we’ve seen more layoffs in a more condensed period than literally ever before.
But! The thing about the game industry is… the people who work here are wonderful. Outcast dorks come together to celebrate something we love, together. We are kind and energetic. We love to share our weird hobbies and get fascinated by the art of our fellows. We are an industry that untold outsiders think about as a dream career. A place many of them don’t even try breaking into, but some part of them wishes they would.
And as such, if we can fix this if we can make the game industry a beacon of how to be better, other industries will follow. ✨
But that means we need something, my wonderful, magical friends. We need to know what we need. What *hard rules* do we have to set to make this space better? What *exactly* can we change to fix it? We can complain all we like, but without a vision we’ll never actually change.
A few I know we need are:
1. Unions: While unions can complicate and slow, they also prevent a lot of the worst of what we’ve seen this past few years.
2. Release of IP: It should be an industry standard that publishers release IP to the dev team when they cancel a project. Damn stock prices. Let the art go free.
3. Grow Slow: This one is not a hard rule, but a mindset. I wish to see us break from capitalism, prioritizing *consistent* growth, rather than fast, volatile growth.
But I need to know yours. We can’t fix it if we don’t actually know what to change.
