Thousand Cuts
When the gaming market crashes, it won’t be with a bang or an explosion. It will be with a whimper. The gaming industry is one of the largest growing industries of all time, succeeding with books, movies, and other legacy industries becoming a titian among titans. It’s hard to believe that something that screams “too big to fail” all over could ever crash, and is very unlikely it will hit shortly, but closer to our present than you think. The crash will not be caused by a single devastating blow but by a death of a thousand cuts. Cuts that, if left to fester and decay, will poison the industry built around those cuts, seeing them as a necessary evil instead of what they are. In the gaming sector multiple avenues in which the current system in place in the industry fails repeatedly. To major AAA developers and investors, these cuts seem like a drop in the bucket; in the grand scheme of things, losing a couple of million dollars by releasing a bad game is fine. Employee turnover? Just get more employees and reviewers not enjoying the game then pay them off. Game studios cannot deliver games that sell unrealistic sales numbers, so they liquidate the company and sell it off for a quick profit. Selling a game at a sixty(now seventy) dollar price tag is not enough anymore, and neither is loading it with microtransactions to make their money back. What happens when you can’t afford a game to be a flop, when you have no more employees you can’t exploit, when you have no more studios that make games, when the consumer gets fed up with predatory practices in games they pay for? This short-sightedness leads to an upsetting present and an ominous future.
Game development, like a machine, has many moving parts to make it work. Every component is essential, and each deserves equal respect,, but sadly, this isn’t always the case. Game developers take many forms and shapes. Game directors who keep the vision of the game intact, concept artists who develop the game’s personality through their art, game testers who make sure the game bugs are dealt with before the initial release, and the code monkeys themselves who pound away making lines of code to create a playable experience. The human element of games should always be a priority, but what happens when that human element is used and abused to the point of breaking? Crunch is a common practice used in the game industry where employees spend inhumane overtime hours in their office (usually without overtime pay), slaving away at their desks trying to get as much work done as possible in the hope that the game ends up worth the sacrifice. The sad part about this is that the crunch in the gaming industry is often self-inflicted due to the culture surrounding the industry and the expectations from peers. This is called “good crunch”. In the paper Game Industry Discourses Perpetuate Unsustainable Labor Practices by Amanda C. Cote and Brandon C. Harris
m. “In the case of crunch and labor practices, this research considers “good crunch,” the self-imposed or scheduled crunch that developers endure to make the best games possible, as a form of cruel optimism. This is because developers set good crunch up in opposition to (indeed, as a solution to) problems of bad crunch or extended overtime imposed on developers by publishers or technology”. Crunch, whether self-inflicted or mandated by upper management, is inherently toxic to the industry; as crunch has become commonplace instead of a last resort, the sector becomes reliant on a procedure that destroys employees.
Game reviews are intrinsically linked to the games industry and thus to the game development process. Industry leaders expect that a major release will be profitable and reviewed well, hoping to increase profits further due to good press. In Nikolai Surminskis’s The Role of Video Game Quality in the Financial Markets Journal, he states, “Data on a game’s financial success is only available weeks or months after the game’s launch. This means that game quality measured through reviews is the only new information released to the market during the release.”. Making a good game is the hard part and is in the hands of the developers; the same developers that are being crunched to complete said game good will eventually lead to burnout. When developers burn out, mistakes get made, people quit, and holes in development start to show. These holes cause games to get worse in the process, meaning that the same practice the industry uses to make their games is the same process, making the game review worse.
The Game industry loves to chase trends because its way easier to profit in an increasingly expensive market. When “World of Warcraft” came out and made an absurd amount of money, everyone wanted to make an MMO, same with Call of Duty and Fortnite. Now, game companies are not just chasing genre but copying a popular marketing strategy called ( GAAS) or games as a service. This strategy is used to make a single game last as long and be as profitable as possible, usually by implementing content packs before and after the initial release and microtransactions. GAAS is greatly inspired by the mobile game market, which profits nearly double the console market, as seen in the J Clements Market revenue chart in 2022. The problem with GAAS is that it’s a mobile game system with a premium price tag being used on games. There’s a big difference between being subjected to microtransactions in a free-to-download game that you play for an hour max on your phone versus a premium 70$ product that you need to pay hundreds of dollars for a console to have an opportunity to play and still needing to sell more money to get all of the content it has to offer. It pressures consumers to pay more for less and effectively lowers engagement instead of retaining it.
References
Clement, J. (2023, August 29). Global gaming revenue by segment 2022. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/292751/mobile-gaming-revenue-worldwide-device/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20mobile%20games%20generated,U.S.%20dollars%20in%20global%20revenue.
Cote, A. C., & Harris, B. C. (2021). The cruel optimism of “good crunch”: How game industry discourses perpetuate unsustainable labor practices. New Media & Society, 25(3), 609–627. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211014213
Surminski, N. (2023, June 3). The role of video game quality in financial markets. . https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1773250/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
I would like to see Feedback on the rhetoric I used in this first draft please.
I wish you had put it into Feedback Please, Anonymous. I did not see this request until now.
—Let’s break the paragraph here, Anonymous.
—Set up the concept of a thousand cuts, then start a new paragraph for the details.
—You’ll have to balance those lost millions with a bigger number that the industry takes in every year, or something similar.
—If employee turnover is exceptionally high, this is a good point.
—But you should say so to make sure we understand.
—That doesn’t actually make any sense.
—Is this one of the thousand cuts?
—What does “than” mean in this sentence?
—I guess this is a reprise of the points you’ve made earlier.
—Don’t ask a Rhetorical Question. Make your point clearly and directly.
—You should mention somewhere in this section that you’re developing the earlier theme of employee turnover. Be sure your readers always know their place.
—This gets confusing.
—If generic crunch is inhumane slavery, what’s the point of distinguishing good crunch from bad crunch?
—It sounds like good crunch is just working hard out of self-motivation.
—Really unclear.
—Is the difference between good crunch and bad crunch the difference between enforced overtime and self-imposed overtime?
—THIS I understand.
—This I get, and I presume it will lead immediately to some material about bribing reviewers, which you alluded to earlier.
—But you get side-tracked.
—The burnout and turnover should have been redeemed in the paragraph above.
—It’s good that you want to claim “bad crunch” results in poor games, and that the bad games are rightfully panned by critics, but you haven’t laid out the causal chain in clear order.
—You asked for rhetorical advice, so I’m going to strenuously recommend that you begin each paragraph with a CAUSAL CLAIM that is part of the chain of events you’re tracking.
As I see it, that chain goes like this:
1. Game companies used to make massive earnings and profits.
2. Investors now expect massive earnings and stock value increases.
3. Game companies don’t want to take chances on new titles because they need guaranteed winners.
4. They also need to cut expenses by getting as much work as they can out of their staff.
5. New titles have to come out on tight deadlines to meet investor expectations, so management overpromise on delivery dates.
6. Customers keep expecting higher and higher quality, which puts more pressure on the creators and coders, leading to more overwork and burnout.
7. On the revenue side, prices can only go so high for games, so companies are “nickel-and-diming” their loyal customers after they make their purchases.
Did I miss any?
Try to lead off every paragraph with a clear claim about one of the small causes that will eventually lead to the ultimate downfall of the industry. You may need more and smaller paragraphs to accomplish this. And that’s a good thing.
—This is clear, and good, but it doesn’t serve very well as a Conclusion paragraph.
—You want to briefly wrap up your thousand cuts argument here in a sentence or two. Conclusions can be quite short.
Helpful?
Some good grammar and punctuation improvements. Nothing major.
Regraded.