Console Wars, Crunch, Cyberpunk 2077, and Consumerism

by Christian Haines, Managing Editor

While PC and console gamers have been scrambling to place preorders for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nvidia’s RTX 3080, CD Projekt Red has been crunching to release Cyberpunk 2077 on time (well, on November 17, 2020, anyways, after numerous delays). If console preorders and forced stretches of overtime (crunch) seem unrelated, it’s only because in a capitalist economy, it’s easy to forget that behind intense consumer demand, there’s a hidden world of workers struggling to ship a product.

Cyberpunk 2077

Game critics and fans spend a lot of time discussing the “console wars” but a lot less time discussing the pressure, pain, and conflict of the development cycle. It’s fun to ask questions like, “Will PlayStation trounce Microsoft in the next console generation because of its exciting exclusives, or will Microsoft (the $1 trillion underdog) retake the market with its emphasis on backwards and forwards compatibility?” It’s less fun to think about the hours and hours of workers’ lives that go into making games possible.

Gaming isn’t unique in this respect. When we go to the grocery store, we don’t usually think about abusive farming practices just because we’re pushing a cart through the vegetable aisle. Likewise, it’s easy to forget about the miners, working in miserable conditions, who make it possible to play Grindstone on your iPhone. Karl Marx argued that this blissful ignorance isn’t an accident. It’s part of what it means to live under capitalism: when we’re shopping – when we’re consuming – we see the products and the relations between the products, but we don’t see the work that goes into them.

Xbox Series X

Marx called this commodity fetishism, drawing attention to the fact that we endow consumer products with an almost magical aura – the promise of perfect satisfaction – and that this mystique distracts us from the material reality of the economy. Is there a better illustration of this magical aura than the “Puddlegate” controversy, when disgruntled gamers accused Insomniac Games of downgrading the graphics in their Spider-Man game? Who cares about the hard work put in by dozens, sometimes hundreds, of artists, coders, and QA testers when you can complain about the image quality of puddles?

In the games industry, when fans of roleplaying games see Cyberpunk 2077, they don’t see crunch. They see a list of gameplay features (what kind of hairstyles can I give my avatar?), a narrative premise (just how gritty is the story?), and a quest count (but, seriously, how many side quests are there and will they be as hand-crafted as they were in The Witcher 3?) Even if you search out news about game development, what you generally find has been prepackaged by marketing teams who, understandably, are trying to make their products look good (and not trying to let you know, for example, that at Ubisoft, 1 in 4 employees have witnessed some kind of misconduct).

There are exceptions, of course. Jason Schreier continues to offer excellent reporting on the labor of making games, and sites like Polygon and Kotaku have a knack for telling the stories that surround games. But, for the most part, breaking news in games journalism typically means the latest Assassin’s Creed title has leaked or Fortnite’s servers are down for a few hours.

There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of changing how gamers see the labor that goes into their games. There are the numerous non-disclosure agreements that make it difficult for any information regarding the development of a game to escape the reins of marketing. Most developers, for legal reasons, can’t tell you very much about what they’re working on.

Second, there’s the fact that critical discussion of game development often devolves into debating whether or not something is pro- or anti-consumer. I would argue that this debate actually does more to hide the material realities of making games than to illuminate them. Take console exclusives, for example: When we debate whether console exclusives are anti-consumer, we’re focusing so much on what’s good for the player that we’re ignoring the consequences for developers. On the one hand, exclusives imply a degree of financial security for game developers, usually in the form of an advance on sales revenue that can be rolled into the production of the game. On the other hand, especially when exclusivity is linked to ownership of the developer, it can also mean a loss of creative independence, the pressure to make games at a faster pace, and sharing in the parent company’s financial ups and downs. For an example of these kinds of costs, just look at the way in which Activision has put the screws to Blizzard, pressuring them to improve their bottom line. When all we’re concerned with is whether or not something is “anti-consumer,” we’re reducing complex issues to a single question: is it good for us (gamers)?

Game Workers Unite Unionization Organization

Ignoring the vocal minority of right-wing gamers who revel in the idea of developers crunching, perhaps the biggest obstacle is that the only obvious alternative to this situation is ethical consumption. If you don’t want to support bad employment practices, don’t buy the game. Of course, as many gamers already know, this approach risks hurting the developers, not only because most of them genuinely want to see their game get played but also because pay bonuses and continuing employment are often tied to sales numbers.

More generally, the framework of ethical consumption has a bad habit of muting the politics of the game industry; it turns social problems into individual ones. The problem isn’t that gamers don’t care enough, it’s that we live in an economic system that makes it difficult to care and even more difficult to translate caring into practical change. Commodity fetishism doesn’t just mean we don’t see the labor that goes into games, it means we’re disconnected from those workers, that our desires are different from theirs, that our conversations with them tend to get boiled down to “but is your game fun?”

So, what’s the answer? Unionization in the games industry is a good start, but it doesn’t really address the relationship between developers and gamers. I do have a suggestion, though. What if instead of focusing on the divide between players and developers, we spent more time thinking about our shared conditions as workers? What if every time a game crashed, instead of blaming “lazy developers,” we thought about how all of us (as workers) are facing longer shifts, increased costs for basic needs like food and housing, and bosses who care more about the stock market than employee benefits? Finally, what if instead of envisioning the gaming industry as a fairy tale land where developers get to realize their creative dreams, we considered how the fantasy of the “dream job” is often an excuse for employers to pay their workers less – if you like doing this so much, why not do it for less, maybe even for nothing? These questions may or may not lead us to class consciousness – a shared political perspective on our working lives – but, at the very least, they might amplify the conversation surrounding crunch in a way that gives CEOs and other executives pause.

Recommended Reading:

-       Jason Schreier, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made (2017).

-       Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

-       Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle (2019).