We Need to Change How We Talk About Game Studios Closing

We need to change the way we talk about videogame studios. But even more than that, we need to change the way we talk about them when they close.

In the past year, according to PC Gamer, 10 major game studios have closed, each employing anywhere from a dozen employees to hundreds. From Capcom Vancouver, the developers of the Dead Rising series, to Visceral, an EA subsidiary responsible for the Dead Space games and working on a highly anticipated Star Wars open-world game, studios keep shuttering.

The latest, and perhaps most notable, collapse is Telltale Games. The award-winning studio known for its legion of story-driven adventure games—the acclaimed The Walking Dead among them—terminated 275 employees recently. While the San Rafael, California, company kept a skeleton crew, it sent the vast majority of its staff walking, reportedly with no warning and no severance.

When a studio closes, there are generally two kinds of responses. From within the professional videogame community, there's an outcry for the workers who have lost their jobs, sympathizing with their position, helping them find other jobs to apply for so they can land on their feet. That exists among the fan base as well, to an extent, but in the gamer community sympathy and service is overwhelmed by another voice. This other voice is loud and shrill and always noticeable; it asks, and not kindly, what about our games?

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To find this voice, all you have to do is look at the replies on Twitter to Telltale's reports of its partial closure, or the various Telltale staffers who in the wake of the layoffs have been talking about the studio's possible cancellation of the final season of The Walking Dead. I don't want to link to these responses—they exhaust me—but you can find them. Their tone even makes its way into press reports that cover Telltale's promise to find some way to finish The Walking Dead, a promise that ignores the long history of worker abuse and studio mismanagement that led to Telltale's partial closure in the first place.

Games are made by people. And if we care about games, at all, we need to care about the people who make them. In fact, I think we need to care about the people a lot more than we care about the games.

Studio closures are the result of a whole host of factors. Often, as in Telltale's case, it's clear-cut mismanagement. Sometimes it's economic factors that might be outside of anyone's control. Most of the time, it's a complicated mix of economics, questionable decisions, and the messy boom-and-bust nature of working in the videogame industry.