Enough with the layoffs. It sounds like an innocuous statement, something which most should accept as normal. And yet not everyone sees it that way. We take “Enough with the layoffs” for granted. The layoffs have been happening and will keep on happening.
“What layoffs are you talking about, Horatia?” you might be asking. If you weren’t aware, in the past 3 years we have seen an unprecedented rise in layoffs in the gaming industry. 2022 saw 8,500 layoffs across the industry. That rose to 10,500 layoffs in 2023. And now, as we near the halfway point of the year, we have seen 9,500 layoffs.
It is important to note that most layoffs happen around the end of the fiscal quarter. Why do most layoffs occur at the end of fiscal quarters? It is because capitalist logic states that the next quarterly report needs to be better than the previous quarterly report. It is a logic of constant perpetual growth, costs need to always descend, and profits need to always rise. One way to artificially boost growth is to lower costs, and the easiest way to reduce spending is through layoffs. It is a twisted logic that is scarily common and, considering the current layoffs, it can only get worse from here.
The recent bout of layoffs were launched by Microsoft closing many studios that they acquired with their Zenimax acquisition. This move shuttered incredible gaming studios like Arkane Texas and Tango Gameworks, two studios that were creating some of the best games in the history of gaming.
The following essay is not a technical breakdown of the situation. That has been covered extensively by many news outlets better than I could. And neither is it trying to explain why. That has also been covered elsewhere.
I will briefly explain why below, but this is only to lead into the point of this essay. This essay is a call to action; a flawed attempt at a solution. This essay is me trying to figure out how we can build a better world, something I have been musing on for a while. If you have read my work for the past few months you might have noticed that trend.
There have been too many layoffs in the past three years, although any layoff is too many. A question that has roamed the brains of many in the past few weeks has been: Why are there so many layoffs?
The adults would give you the frustrating answer that they had to do it. They will argue around the topic using corporate speak to essentially say one very simple thing: “It hurt their bottom line (i.e. profit margins, or more specifically profit growth) to keep those employees, so they had to fire them”. Simple. It’s a tale as old as capitalism.
It is a long winded justification that boils down to: We had to do it. It is painted in fatalistic words, as if this was the only option before them. It is painted in a way that they think that if they had had another choice they would have picked it, but they didn’t have another choice so they had to lay them off. This is a lie.
And do not let anyone tell you otherwise. It is always a lie when they tell you that layoffs were the only option. This line of reasoning is just the poor man’s trolley problem, the idea that they had to pull the lever and kill the old lady to save the children on the track.
It is a false dichotomy. The idea that there has to be a choice between one bad choice and one worse choice is a lie. The lesser evil is the biggest con in the history of cons, and this con has permeated our society. Pessimism is seen as wisdom, incompassion wears the clothes of rationality. We take choosing the lesser evil as if this is not only the norm, but the only way we can organize ourselves and be.
In fact there is a lot we take for granted.
This essay was written with an air of frustration. It has been pent up for a long time, and I don’t think I am alone in that. Frustration has become a mainstay in our culture, a normalcy. We take it for granted that we are frustrated. Anger is the norm, and reactions to anger are normal. We live in a culture built upon rage and reaction. Everything has to be a reaction to everything else. Nothing can just exist. Everything needs a response.
Reacting to things though is not the problem. Those who rile against reactionary discourse forget that reactionary discourse is just a consequence of a wider societal norm, i.e. frustrations with the current economic, social and political system. We also forget who gets to wield the reactionary banner; or put a different way: Who has the right to get angry?
We bathe ourselves in an air of respectability and niceness when it comes to radical critique and reaction. We apply the politics of politeness to those who want to change the world for the better. We believe that if you want to make the world a worse place then you are justified in your rage and your anger, because anger can only be a destructive force, right? Meanwhile those who want to change the world for the better need to police their language, be wary of words, think about their actions, and always consider all perspectives before acting. We are not allowed to be angry.
Well, I am angry. I am angry at the state of the world. I am angry at climate change, angry at the genocide in Gaza, angry at the increasing rise of fascism across the world, angry at being told that caring for people is for the naive, angry at being told that love is utopian and not realistic. I am angry that I am tired and I am tired of being angry.
The difference between anger and love is that anger is exhausting. You are always thinking of the other that you are angry at and every time you are reminded of them you have to exert energy to show that you are angry. While love is tiring, it is not exhausting. I will never be exhausted of having compassion for my fellow human beings, but I will always be tired of being angry.
But right now I am angry. I am angry at so much. I want to solve all of the problems of the world. I want to live in a better world. The reality is that we don’t live in this better world, and so I hope for the strength to imagine a better world. If I can’t have a better world, I might as well have the dream of a better world? But a dream is not material, it is immaterial.
And yet I don’t hate dreams. I am not angry at dreams. Because without dreams we cannot have existence. We must be able to imagine the world before we can have it. No, I am not angry at dreams. I am angry at those who tell me that my dreams are impossible.
They tell me that I am childish to even believe in them, insinuating in some way that the thoughts of children are of less value than our ‘sophisticated’ adult thoughts. What makes our adult thoughts better than those of children? Is it that we can see violence? No, because if you look at Gaza right now you will see that children have seen their fair share of violence.
No, the truth is that the reason we think our adult thoughts are more sophisticated is because we have forgotten how to dream. We see the world as it is and we can’t even imagine a better one. We can only imagine a slightly less bloodthirsty one.
The adults will tell you they can’t get rid of the bloodthirst because that is intrinsic to who we are. They will tell you that humans are self-interested creatures, who must be coerced into compassion. The truth? We have to be coerced into violence and hate.
I am angry. I am angry at being told that there can’t be a better world. And right now I am angry at the layoffs, and I am angry at being told that they were inevitable, or had to happen. Because none of that is true.
“What can we do though, Horatia?” you might be asking me. What can we do to make the world a better place? I might not have a fool proof perfect plan for how to solve all of the worlds problems right now, but I think I have one that can help us stop the layoffs. It is not my idea, and it is not even a new idea. It is an old idea brought back. It is nothing less than unionizing.
The video game journal Polygon has been among the most vocal for unionization within the games industry. They would report on the layoffs for many years, proposing unionization as the solution to layoffs and abuse within the games industry. But how do you actually implement it?
It is under this exact line of questioning that Polygon published a step-by-step guide in the form of a zine on how to materially establish and run a union:
It is free for publication and sharing. Its purpose is to give us the direct tools we need to form unions in the gaming industry. This is the solution. It is not an easy solution, and neither is it a quickly practicable solution, but it is one.
Unlike the pessimism-as-rationality which permeates our thought, this offers us optimism. This is not the same as naivety. We tend to conflate the two, as if hope itself, as a concept, is in some way shallow or less valuable.
The whole point of the Pandora’s Box story isn’t that the horrors of the world now exist and we need to learn to co-exist with suffering, pain, and evil. Rather the point of Pandora’s Box is that despite suffering, pain, and evil, hope still exists.
In the same way that we can’t change the world if we don’t first dream, we can’t change the world without hope. The enemy of suffering, pain, and evil is hope. Hope lives in all of us. It might be as small as a moth but it as powerful as a galaxy.
And so this is what I hope to give to you. By reading through the guide posted by Polygon a gaming studio can hope. What will this hope bring? I can’t tell you that, but what I can tell you is that the hope is there. I can show you the box and show you the moth inside. The problem with hope is that it is infectious. As soon as one person begins to have hope, it spreads like wildfire.
So hold strong, have hope, and join a union.
