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Demolishing The Excuses Made For 'AAA' Publishers' Exploitative Greed (The Jimquisition) (Patreon)

Published:
2018-10-15 14:30:36
Imported:
2020-05

Content

The excuses people make for multibillion dollar publishers have to stop. They ignore so many ways in which the "AAA" game industry both makes money and takes shortcuts.

From tax havens to worker mistreatment, from the avoidance of royalties to the sheer amount executives make in compensation, the game industry actually has it EASY while pretending it's got it hard. Let's look at all this.

Files

Demolishing The Excuses Made For 'AAA' Publishers' Exploitative Greed (The Jimquisition)

http://www.patreon.com/jimquisition http://www.thejimquisition.com https://www.thejimporium.com The excuses people make for multibillion dollar publishers have to stop. They ignore so many ways in which the "AAA" game industry both makes money and takes shortcuts. From tax havens to worker mistreatment, from the avoidance of royalties to the sheer amount executives make in compensation, the game industry actually has it EASY while pretending it's got it hard. Let's look at all this. __ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jimsterling Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimsterling0 Jim’s Big Ego (No Relation): http://bigego.com/ Bandcamp of the Sax Dragon - https://carlcatron.bandcamp.com Nathan Hanover - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-8L7n7l11PJM6FFcI6Ju8A

Comments

Anonymous

Amazing vid, applause!

Perpetual Noob

*sighs* Capitalism. And I can't stand this idea of constant growth. Why do people expect it? That is actually unsustainable and impossible. The rate at which the population is increasing is not keeping up with the rate at which companies wish to grow profits, not to mention diminishing resources. I agree Jim, you know exactly what you're doing because every industry does this. Every industry exploits its customers and its employees. Every industry wants to only grow and be more profitable year after year. The system as a whole is busted and I thank you for once again calling this abhorrent behavior out. I know you're not the only one doing this but I'm glad you are someone who is. Some days I imagine what it'd be like if you were a shill and it's frightening. You would be like Sean Hannity levels of scary so thank god you're on the customer's side. As an aside, wasn't it Bobby Kotick who said when he became CEO of Activision that he believed video games shouldn't be fun and that he was going to take the fun out of the video game industry? Am I mistaken. I thought that was a big statement that came out when he took over all those years ago. Anyway, I'm sad Activision is distributing Sekiro because I love FROMSoft and hate Activision and I know that my purchase of Sekiro will put money in Kotick's pocket and hardly any into the developers'. I do wish this video has an appropriately scaled graph to show what CEO's make versus the lowest paid workers. The vertical axis would have to be logarithmic to even see what the worker bee is paid a year in comparison to the CEO. It is beyond absurd the discrepancy between their compensations. Okay, apparently this is a hot button topic for me as I watched for nearly a decade as co-workers were laid off constantly (it was a random choosing and I got lucky every time, I survived nearly a dozen lay-offs in just 9 years) and every year I'd see the annual fiscal report and see the top executives raking in tens of millions of dollars and the company itself made 5 billion (yes billion with a 'b') in profits. But gotta keep culling the herd as it were. Every few months, another hundred people lost here, a few dozen there, oh a thousand there. Anywho, brilliant video Jim. Thank you for making it. :)

Anonymous

Great video Jim! I think you are getting back into a really good groove :)

Anonymous

But really, thank god for you. As a 3D artist nearing upon graduation and trying to nail down my next move, I often have anxiety over the possibility of finally getting hired on at a studio, picking up my life and moving to a much more expensive part of the country to work at said studio, only to be let go after a year no matter the quality of my work because it's just "standard practice." Artists are, like customers, treated like cattle who should be grateful for the opportunity. It also seems to me like this greed-driven aspect of the industry has had a negative effect on the culture surrounding this kind of work. Because everyone knows they could be fired at any moment, it's created this idea "Well if you can't handle it, you shouldn't be in games. Tough it out" attitude about things like 100 hour work weeks. It's both a toxic and an unnecessary motivating factor to continue the grind to be better. I shouldn't be expected to neglect my home, health, and happiness to be considered worthy of maintaining employment.

LonMcGregor

You briefly touched on why crunch should never happen. You're right, in a normal working environment, it shouldn't. I can think of one case where you would want crunch - if your company has been the victim of a targeted hacking attack. In these cases, you need to ensure the safety of not just your own data, but also that of your customers, and I can envisage you wanting to get employees to work more to fix it (or at least mitigate further damage as much as possible - you could pull the plug pending investigation to lighten the workload). That said, you don't plan being the victim of an attack, but these AAA companies certainly do seem to have planned for crunches. And if you can plan for crunches, you should have been able to plan around them. ... oh and yeah, screw recurrent player spending too.

Kraken

IPOs are the weirdest thing. It seems like a lot of company founders who are fortunate enough to stick with a company until it can sell shares regard it as their big payday... Without regard for the possibility that they just shackled their baby to a cabal that's going to expect constant profits and growth and may not know or care the first thing about the industry they're buying into. (And I wonder if there's any charts out there regarding how long founders tend to stick with a company after it's seen its IPO or been merged/acquired by a company that's publicly traded...) I have to wonder just how long "add microtransactions to games" has been game publishers' goal. The conspiracy-minded part of my brain thinks that it's a lot easier to keep your precious pay-walled content away from the player (which is often an incredibly trivial unlock) if, say, their single-player game is always online and making sure you aren't grabbing it for free. If the game is multi-player, if the game is unfinished and "happens" to need a constant online connection for patching, the excuse for constantly hovering over the player's shoulder is baked in. If a what a publisher *really* cared about player choice and time in single-player games, cheat codes would be a far better way to show it.

noxamillion
>>16331839

I looked up the Bobby Kotick statement you mentioned. <a href="https://www.gamespot.com/articles/activision-games-to-bypass-consoles/1100-6226758/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Is this it?</a> Quote is at the bottom (use Ctrl-F and search 'fun').

Twit In A Hat

In response to your closing remark (before the closing bit at the podium), I just want to clarify that when I've commented here in the past that much of the problems you discuss apply to other industries, I didn't mean that as a rebuttal, but a nod in agreement and more of an acknowledgement that the problems are even more widespread, not that they're OK because they're common.

noxamillion

I do not have much to say to you Jim other than that you are a beacon of sanity in a insane world. This is a much needed video. A documentary could be made on this issue but the Jimquisition is not made for that format. I compare the greed of the game industry in the same vein of the Party in George Orwell's 1984 for their pursuit of power. There is no end goal with it. It is just there for the sake of it in sacrifice of the well beings of other people.

Anonymous

Hooray, Jim!

Anonymous

Thanks for this one, Jim! There seem to be a lot of people in games press who really fall in for these arguments you're bashing down. And that's fine that there are a lot. But especially recently it's been some writers whose work I tend otherwise to like and respect. You know, for games they happen to like... It's a weird bit of dissonance, and I only expect it to feel weirder and more gross (grosser?) once Red Dead comes out and the love fest begins, just with a few strategic asterisks for otherwise vigilant critics to cover their own asses

Anonymous

I don't get the whole defending corporations thing some people do. It's a business, not a person. It doesn't need or deserve sympathy, regardless of whether it's doing well or poorly. Which is why I don't care when a development studio is closed--again, it's a business, not a person. I care that the employees lose their jobs (note that employees are people, not businesses). If these businesses want my money, they need to offer a product I want at a price I find attractive. I don't care how much it costs them to make the game their offering either: That's their problem. If they didn't have super high turnover because of their obscene hours and habit of laying off staff after each release, maybe their labor costs would be lower. Maybe if they didn't work their developers 100+ hours a week, their games wouldn't be buggy messes on release, and I'd be more interested in paying full price for them, instead of waiting 18 months for them to patch the game and offer it to me at 75% off in a Steam sale. But so long as they stuff their games with microtransactions, they can fuck right off regardless of price. I'm not going to pay for the privilege of being marketed to or nagged about some stupid skins pack. For that matter, while I'm sympathetic towards people with serious problems (like unstable jobs with no health insurance), I don't actually like people or want to play games with them, so publishers can stop offering me multiplayer games any time now. At least if they want my money. As far as the shareholders thing goes...that's my retirement you're talking about. Most of the ownership of a large public corporation are funds handling peoples' retirements in one form or another. At the moment, 97.1% of EA is owned by institutions--overwhelmingly mutual funds that are investing people's 401k and IRA accounts. If you think "I have a real, actual pension, not a 401k, so #notmyretirement", then you are wrong. Your employer invests money in a pension fund to pay for your retirement. The pension fund buys (mostly) stocks. Stocks that are sold with the promise that the firm will try to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. So yeah, as a shareholder, I'm greedy, because I want to be able to retire some day. I don't really care how much the CEO makes, as long as he makes money for me. I also don't care if he goes broke--he may be a person, but only barely.

Kevin Bartelen

To me "I didn't feel pressured to spend more money" could mean "I'm not the target", or it could mean "I wasn't pressured to spend an additional $400 on the newest NHL (or take your pick of game), I just felt they deserved it."

Anonymous

Very timely video Jim. I can't help comparing the emotional cloying defence of big business with the kind of "naive idealist" archetype character that you'll always see in sci-fi series defending the necessity of the some sort of evil society or tradition they belong to, only to realize at the end of episode that the Federation or that SG1 team saw through it all along.

Faith and Valor have a good month creators. Love all that you do.

Typically when these AAA games start with the multiple releases and micro-transactions I just wait to consider buying it only after seeing reviews from a collection of critics I trust such as yourself. I no longer feel the pressure I once did to purchase a game and play it on "release day" much less "release hour." In some cases I've waited a year for the game to go on sale and then buy the Pan-Ultimate-Galactic-Platinum-Gold Edition for around $30. But then Devil May Cry 5 announced micro-transactions and I got livid. I've been waiting on the release of a new game from this cannon since DMC 4 (nothing against the reboot DMC it's fine). I won't be purchasing a DMC game for the first because I cannot support this. I think until we "cash cows" (because we're not customers) stop eating whatever their feeding us and say "no" this will never change. It's not like we need these games to survive. It's also not like there aren't options for other games to play and replay in the meantime. Jim you've always been good about not telling your viewers what to do but I think reminding some of them they can just not buy it and play something else could be the first small step in telling AAA publishers "No."