No, I Don't Want To Come To Your Pity Party

The games and esports industry have had unprecedented layoffs in the past month. Everyone seems sad. Let me tell you why you can hold back the tears.

As I’m sure you’re all aware the past few months have seen an almost unprecedented number of layoffs at both games developers and esports companies. It currently feels like every time I open X.com for my hourly doomscroll posts of people saying farewell to their employers are getting in the way of my World War Three coverage… Those who aren’t fired all say the same things… “Thoughts and prayers to all those affected” or “these people are irreplaceable” or “wow, who would have thought the big corporation would be ungrateful to its workers.” It’s happening so often it’s just become a reflex ritual everyone goes through.

Not me though. While my journalism will always be a platform for those impacted by these things to talk about what is happening behind the scenes, as a person with close to twenty years of having to deal with these indoctrinated dunderheads I struggle to sympathise. Even if I overlook, which no-one should, the fact that many of these individuals took jobs in what was clearly an unsustainable boom period, being one of the few who managed to spin the horror of a global pandemic into an opportunity, I will not overlook the behaviour the majority of these people have exhibited.

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the great unspoken truth of the games industry. Once you’re aligned with someone that has influence, that can flex a bit of power to get what they want, you all do it as often as possible. The rest of us have to walk around on eggshells, terrified to offend any one of you in your little branded T-shirts, lest it leads to career jeopardy. You all love that part. You love the illusion of importance. You’re not so fond of accountability or repercussions. It’s the old reaping and sowing paradigm. I’m so past the bullshit so you can consider this an open letter to you all seeking gainful employment right now and hopefully it helps you understand why many of us won’t be attending the pity party.

For example perhaps I’d have felt more sympathy if working at a games company didn’t suddenly mean you became a member of the Twitterati Police Force on day fucking one. I have to wonder if there’s a rule that you can’t bring any other hobbies with you when you start working for one of these companies… Upon arrival your spare time is suddenly filled with only one of two things; either self-fellation about how fucking awesome you and your colleagues are or screeching about how someone, who coincidentally doesn’t work at your company, should be cast out of the industry. For us on the outside we watch a kind of Wankas Personality Factory where you go in as a relatively well adjusted person, sit on a conveyer belt where your brain is bombarded with Corporate and California bullshit, then you come out the end as a tiresome, blue haired wokescold that never even thinks about shutting the fuck up for even just a day. And because of your association with a company that is a “major player” you get away with it. Every time you’re insufferable no-one points it out. You are pandered to right up until the moment you leave the room and then everyone breathes a sigh of relief and talks about what a fucking drag you are.

Then let’s also talk about the “secret blacklists” you all run in this industry, where you anonymously smear broadcast talent, journalists, streamers and anyone else that you feel like. Speaking as someone who has been threatened with the old “you’re not making any friends” spiel from games developers, let me also share a few other greatest hits that you’re all complicit in. I know colleagues who were smeared as drug addicts and emotional basketcases for having the temerity to refuse to sleep with your precious executives who turn up to afterparties and behave as if they’re Drake. I’ve seen colleagues have to be told they can’t attend gaming events because the developer doesn’t want them in the building due to some mild criticism of their shit games. Speaking from personal experience for the mere act of telling the truth about the fucked up companies you all enable I’ve been blacklisted, threatened, censored and on multiple occasions even had work I was contractually hired to do taken away from me. I didn’t see a line forming for the solidarity party when that was happening to me, despite you being the exact people my reporting is designed to help. Now you’re in the unemployment line. Boo fucking hoo.

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And no, you don’t get to just blame the executives and walk away clean on this one. It’s YOU, the rank and file, who gather the “intel” and feed the gossip up the chain of command hoping for a promotion or to be bestowed with crony job security. I’ve seen so many of my colleagues brought to the brink of insanity as they try to relentlessly correct the record about themselves and in turn secure their careers but YOU always seem to be on hand with a new lie or exaggeration to make that a remote possibility. Why do you behave this way? I’ll tell you. Working at one of these companies, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not, is the closest you will ever get to being able to wield real power over people and you simply can’t resist doing it. However, yours is a mafia of the mediocre and when all is said is done bigger forces will take away what little influence you have be it a merger, a mass layoff, a game being shut down, a new technology, being replaced by AI… Then you’re back out in the yard with all the people you fucked over. If all you get is gloating you are getting off light.

You know, I wouldn’t mind so much if your secret blacklists actually caught any of the perverts, predators and bigots that infest your companies but they never seem to for some reason. Instead every month we have to watch as another one of your lot is exposed and you all pretend you never saw it coming when it only would take you two drinks to start babbling about what a creep they were. When too many of them congregate in desirable positions then and only then do you seem to have the “clean out,” where after a period of trying to smash unions and intimidate complainants, they write a big check signed “fuck off” and you all come out and bleat about how the company has finally changed.

The most embarrassing part of all this is that the moment you are eventually let go the prospect of having to get a real job immediately deprograms you. You’re suddenly self-aware again and can talk casually, joke about how shitty the company you worked for actually is, say how much you’ve missed talking to all your old friends but it was just so complicated. “You were right” you’ll say “it was like being in a cult.” I’ve had that conversation well over a hundred times now and I’m just bored of it. You’re all doing it now, posting publicly about how you can’t believe the company who has fucked over a million people before you is now for some reason fucking you. “How could this happen” you wail. Yeah, if only there were some clues to what your eventual fate might be.

As for the esports set it’s even harder to sympathise. I mean, everyone knows the industry has been one big lie since about 2017. If it was a successful space why are you all being paid as contractors? Why do these companies have to tether themselves to every get rich quick lifeline that appears? Why does it turn out that when you divide your salary by how many hours you work you realise you’d be better off bagging groceries? Why are so many of these esports companies hiring their friends and family on six figure salaries while paying you a pittance? Who are they? The government?

It was all fun and games when you were hired on a bullshit contract to go and work in a needlessly expensive office that came with the accompanying YouTube tour. Wow, they have a Foosball table and bean bags. Ain’t it the coolest… You don’t even have a supervisor and no one even notices if you do your job or not. You can flip off the world, you made it, It’s going to last forever. Except it never does and now you’re stuck in one of the world’s most expensive cities with no job, no savings and no-one else hiring. You got sold down the river by either a brain-dead BRO-CEO or a man having a midlife crisis using venture capital to live out their sports owner fantasies and absolutely everyone outside your bubble saw it coming.

How do you fuck up an industry that can do this?

Ask yourself this simple question. Does a business that has had tens of millions of dollars of investment, provided without any real demand for a return on it, deserve pity when it fails? You’d all be chortling into your latte foam if it was a company you didn’t like. Yet that is the reality of the esports industry. We DID make it. I was there. Then I watched a group of mostly American morons piss unprecedented amounts of money up against the wall for no other reason except they wanted to have bragging rights over their fellow owners. It was them who deceived the sponsors, it was them who fudged the numbers in the reports, it was them who inflated the salaries and it was them that crashed the industry. Now esports is a dirty word and those people who could have underwritten the industry for decades are never coming back.

If there’s one thing I can tell you about the cartel that took over esports is that they all think of themselves as being political masterminds. If only you could hear them talk as I’ve had to down the years. It has always cemented my belief that if politics is showbusiness for ugly people then esports is politics for stupid people… They spend their time moving meaningless pieces around a board that can get flipped over at any time and tilt at imaginary enemies just to feel in charge. They leverage any small piece of influence they can to fuck over competitors while publicly proclaiming there’s enough “pie” to go around for everyone, just so long as they get to be Jason Biggs and stick their dick in it. And the funny part of it all is for all their posturing they repeatedly lost hand after hand in the most basic of poker staredowns of all time.

You see the fundamental problem esports has had for the past six years is that these executives kept slapping a “for sale” sign on every facet of it, which was an easily understood contradiction to the declaration that we were “never better.” With this being grasped by anyone with even the most basic of business acumen the latest round of bidding has been conservative and measured by previous standards. After having witnessed our industry leaders burn through an unprecedented amount of venture capital only to build absolutely nothing but an extension on their houses, esports is back to being offered the scraps from a table it is never going to be invited back to. It kind of tells you everything that the average tournament operator pays out hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a high quality broadcast but is then so insecure about viewing numbers they hand it over to some quasi-literate co-streamer who simply shows the exact same broadcast and occasionally grunts over the top of the audio. That right there is the tacit admission that what we have really isn’t worth shit, that we’d run it in airport lounges if it still allowed us to package those numbers in sponsor decks so we can run the same old tired grift.

And now everyone’s selling out to the Saudis after years of your bogus sermonising about how much you champion those that unjust societies would harm you take a paycheck from one of the world’s biggest human rights violators. It comes natural I guess as you all lost your tongues over Uyghur Muslims being rounded up and put into “re-education camps” because that would mean you couldn’t do business in China. I hope there’s a moment when you performatively post your rainbow flags this June that you all see yourselves for how utterly pathetic you all are. The nerve of you all to talk down to me and my peers about how complicated it is and how you’ve got a business to run and families to feed when you’ve never given a single consideration of how that reality applies to everyone you bulldozed over so you could get a fake Forbes valuation. You will never get to lecture anyone ever again about anything and the best part is that I know for all the money you’re going to make it is this fact that really upsets you.

For years you’ve all been part of something that started out pure and became malignant. A few of you were just unfortunately caught up in the web of bullshit and could certainly be viewed as victims in all of this. Some of you were just ignorant. Many of you though actively pushed it in that direction driven by vanity and greed. Whichever you were it’s best to recognise that you were ultimately just a cog in a machine that once used to serve consumers and enthusiasts. It stopped doing that a while ago and I can’t shed a tear now I’m watching that machine break down and fall apart. I’d use this time to think about your contribution to that reality between filling in application forms.