Brain drain is killing video games

The games business has always been brutal. There’s a long history of publishers offering lower pay than other software engineering jobs, all while expecting long hours and a willingness to crunch. Many of these companies, like Activision, have been sued for enabling wide-scale harassment and assault, especially toward marginalized groups. You can see why, on top of everything else, this latest job insecurity would be the final straw. The fact that nearly half of game developers are questioning their careers points to the worsening of one of the industry’s biggest existing problems: brain drain.

Making video games is a very complicated, multidisciplinary process that rewards the presence of seasoned hands, whether those are tech gurus familiar with ancient legacy code or artists and designers who understand how to push the medium forward. Without that kind of institutional memory, it’s easy to imagine many studios blundering into costly mistakes. But even more than this, not being able to carry out “continuations of practice,” as Sunset Visitor’s director Remy Siu (1000XResist) put it, means that these creatives can’t build on what they’ve learned. While you’ll sometimes see a bold freshman work that bowls everyone away, digging into these cases almost always reveals that its designers had made dozens of smaller projects on Itch or had some other experience with tech tinkering. It takes time and effort to build these skills, which are wiped away every time a developer packs it up and applies these lessons to other fields.

The effects of brain drain are hard to measure because it leads to an invisible kind of harm, but it may partially explain why the big-budget gaming space feels so static at the moment. When the ground is constantly shifting, auteurs are less likely to find their footing; to name an extreme example, imagine how much less weird and interesting the space would be if Hideo Kojima got laid off and called it quits before making Metal Gear or Snatcher (note that even in this extreme example, Konami did eventually force him out, just much later). Beyond these outlier cases, most of the harm probably comes when the “rank-and-file” are cast aside, as smart writers, programmers, artists, and designers aren’t able to contribute their collective knowledge.

For a case to the contrary, take a look at one of last year’s best games, Donkey Kong Bananza. Nintendo is known for having some of the best retention in the industry, and that consistency is felt when you play its games. Every time Donkey Kong pile drives his fists through rubble, you can tell Bananza was created by the same team that handled Super Mario Odyssey’s brilliant free-form expressiveness. “The people who first made Nintendo’s hits are still working at the company,” said Keza MacDonald, the author of Super Nintendo, in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “For the last 50 years, these people have been passing down knowledge and training up a new generation of Nintendo creatives.” By contrast, C-suites elsewhere, especially in America, frequently view the most tenured developers as the first to cut so they can save on salaries. There’s a willingness to burn the future for short-term profit. That kind of shortsightedness usually doesn’t end well, and it’s a price anybody who cares about games will be paying for years to come.