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“Due to tax and employment laws, companies can only employ contractors for a limited time. There are also restrictions on contractors' activities, such as attending company meetings. According to contractors Polygon spoke to, these regulations are widely flouted, with part-timers treated much the same as employees, right up until their contracts are terminated.”

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“If a company is audited or there's a misclassification lawsuit, one of the first questions is going to be whether the contractor was invited to company meetings, company excursions and official social events. To keep inside these red lines, savvy employers exclude contractors from community events.”

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“Some contractors choose to live this way, and they enjoy the freedom and variety it offers. High-end contractors can earn more than $100 an hour, working from home.”

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“...most contractors work on-site for an hourly rate that starts at $15. They are often treated like employees, but without the benefits and protections... Many contractors are frustrated that they can't land a full-time position. Some of the contractors... feel mistreated and even mislead by managers who dangle the possibility of full employment, but rarely follow through... this is known as "employment misclassification." ”

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The main message of this article is that the video game industry can and does take advantage of how many people have aspirations to be a video game designer. They pick and choose only those that are talented and willing to put up with poor treatment to achieve their dreams. Thusly, video game designers are treated unfairly and are often overworked to the point that they become depressed, and or, retire early.

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Game designer jobs - problems with treating employees as disposable

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Game designer jobs - problems with treating employees as disposable

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“It (Telltale Games) kept its staff on and in the dark about its precarious financial position, and then on Friday, September 21, it laid off 250 people. The company was trying to secure a last-minute funding deal. When that fell through, it didn’t have enough money to pay out severances to its staff.”

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Game designer jobs - requirements after getting hired

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Game designer jobs - requirements after getting hired

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“Individual developers have to build their lives around the studios they work for. They have to move to certain cities and work specific hours that often include 14-hour days, weekends, and sleeping at the office. And the companies on the other side of those bargains don’t feel the need to make any guarantees or to offer any protections.”

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“One of the defining characteristics of labor issues in the video game industry is that companies tend to treat workers as disposable. If you are a good artist but you don’t want to deal with the crunch, the culture, or the job insecurity, don’t worry — someone else will. And yet, people still long for these jobs. They want to make games.”

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Telltale Games - how the change negatively effected the company

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Telltale Games - how the change negatively effected the company

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“...a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. “Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation,” says a former employee. “People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that’s the last thing they heard.” ”

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Telltale Games - what it was like before

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Telltale Games - what it was like before

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“Former employees describe Telltale in its early days as a small, tight-knit group with a strong sense of camaraderie. New hires trickled in slowly. Upper management had been much less involved in the day-to-day, and developers were given more freedom to do their jobs as they saw best.”

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“...the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy... “We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people,” says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley... “You walk around the office, and you don’t really recognize anybody anymore.” ”

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Telltale Games - how the problem started

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Telltale Games - how the problem started

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“...Telltale was a studio of under 100 people, small... the win established Telltale as a successful developer that valued storytelling and character development above all else... tripling its headcount over just a few years... capture the attention of some of Hollywood’s most well-loved franchises, delivering spinoff games... that focused on narrative and emotional investment instead of action or bombastic set pieces.”

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Unionizing - steps towards accomplishing it

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Unionizing - steps towards accomplishing it

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“...“The only reason that a lot of non-union commercials or episodic television or movies mirror working conditions is because those working conditions unions set become standard.” ...first contracts are rarely “home runs” for workers, but that they form the basis for further bargaining and help workers build better projections over time through renegotiations.”

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“...interrogating attendees’ knowledge of unions and trying to poke holes in the concept that unions are bulletproof protections against the game industry’s many perils... unions may control which jobs its members take and which projects their employers pursue... could be used to prevent studios from staffing up adequately... raised concerns about union abuses in unrelated industries... as evidence that unions can abuse their power.”

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Unionizing - issues unions could help with

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Unionizing - issues unions could help with

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“...issues... unions could help with... included more inclusive policies for minority and LGBT employees like gender-neutral bathrooms, more transparent and proactive policies around workplace harassment aimed at holding management accountable, and improved industry-wide standards around benefits like internship compensation, severance, and healthcare.”

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“...game studios... work their employees aggressively in pursuit of creating lavish virtual simulations for an industry now estimated to be worth $36 billion. Yet unlike Hollywood, which has had... unions for decades that protect workers across fields like screenwriting and voice acting, the game industry is largely decentralized. Studios exist all over the world, subject to disparate labor laws... ”

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The main point of the article is that their is a common problem in the video game industry where the designers passion for game making is used against them in order to push them harder and farther than they’re comfortable. Though the problem isn’t easy to fix since the designers also receive “communal pressure” to work harder from their colleagues, and want to make sure that they do their part.

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“ "Crunch has been prevalent in the games industry for decades, and while it’s not unique to the games industry, it has become a negative practice that has perpetuated for too long... It burns people out, discourages them from continuing in the industry, and has seriously negative effects on physical, mental, and social health." ”

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“What steps can studios take to avoid crunch? ...after considering studio culture and the desire to be a team player so no one is let down. "Most, if not all of these people are your colleagues first and foremost so that communal peer pressure plays a much greater role in getting you to push than the decisions coming down from the hierarchy," admits Nosek.”

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“A survey conducted by the IGDA in 2015 found that 62 percent of developers said their jobs involved crunch and of those nearly one-third said crunch meant 50-59 hours of work a week... most common reason for developers leaving the video game industry was "poor quality of life." ”

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“The game industry's disposable workers”

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“The game industry's disposable workers”

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Link:

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“A heartbreaking story of getting into the games industry”

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“A heartbreaking story of getting into the games industry”

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One of the defining characteristics of labor issues in the video game industry is that companies tend to treat workers as disposable. If you are a good artist but you don't want to deal with the crunch, the culture, or the job insecurity, don't worry - someone else will. And yet, people still long for these jobs. They want to make games. In a new video on YouTube, the channel People Make Games recounts the journey of one of these folks. It's a true story, which makes its ended especially difficult.

The video is called "Getting into the games industry." You can watch it by clicking play on the window up top. Over the course of just a handful of minutes, it tells how a creative young man from Kentucky named Derek was able to get his break. I'm avoiding specifics to maintain the video's gut-punching climax, and you should definitely watch it for yourself.

Feeding game developers to the machine

But the point of the video is one that we are seeing play out in the industry right now. Individual developers have to build their lives around the studios they work for. They have to move to certain cities and work specific hours that often include 14-hour days, weekends, and sleeping at the office. And the companies on the other side of those bargains don't feel the need to make any guarantees or to offer any protections.

We are seeing this with Rockstar. The Red Dead Redemption II studio has made headlines this past week because one of its founders bragged about working 100-hour weeks. Since then, reports have come out about crunch conditions for employees at various Rockstar studios. We're preparing a story of our own about that company.

The focus on Rockstar came right on the heels of the collapse of Telltale Games, which is the studio that made first big The Walking Dead game. Based on our sources, other reports, and the statements of Telltale management, that company played chicken with the livelihoods of its employees. It kept its staff on and in the dark about its precarious financial position, and then on Friday, September 21, it laid off 250 people. The company was trying to secure a last-minute funding deal. When that fell through, it didn't have enough money to pay out severances to its staff.

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A heartbreaking story of getting into the games industry

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One of the defining characteristics of labor issues in the video game industry is that companies tend to treat workers as disposable. If you are a good artist but you don't want to deal with the crunch, the culture, or the job insecurity, don't worry - someone else will.

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“TOXIC MANAGEMENT COST AN AWARD-WINNING GAME STUDIO ITS BEST DEVELOPERS”

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“TOXIC MANAGEMENT COST AN AWARD-WINNING GAME STUDIO ITS BEST DEVELOPERS”

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In 2012, on a light-drenched stage amid screams and cheers, Star Trek actress Zoe Saldana announced Spike Video Game Awards' game of the year: The Walking Dead. The win was a huge coup for its relatively small developer, Telltale Games. Its emotional, storytelling-focused take on the popular zombie franchise beat out hugely popular games like Dishonored and Mass Effect 3 that required hundreds of developers and cost tens of millions of dollars to make.

The Telltale Games team, including co-founders Kevin Bruner and Dan Connors, and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, made their way onstage to accept the award. Kirkman accepted the large, black statue from Saldana with both hands and handed it off to Connors and Bruner. Bruner, in turn, gestured two others onstage: Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, the project leads and co-creators of the game, thanking them for creating the game's heroes. Neither of them was named onstage for their work in creating the studio's biggest creative success. Shortly before two women in sparkly outfits ushered everyone offstage, Vanaman abruptly pulled the statue from Bruner's hand in a moment that appeared unplanned and said, "We work with the most talented people on the planet."

At the time, Telltale was a studio of under 100 people, small by mainstream studio standards where headcounts can range from hundreds to thousands. And in an industry where storytelling often takes a back seat to "fun" gameplay, the win established Telltale as a successful developer that valued storytelling and character development above all else. Over the next several months, awards for The Walking Dead continued to pile up - a pivotal and defining moment for a studio that had been in a challenging financial situation just a year before. The company began hiring at a breakneck speed, tripling its headcount over just a few years. Soon, it would capture the attention of some of Hollywood's most well-loved franchises, delivering spinoff games like Batman, Game of Thrones, and Guardians of the Galaxy that focused on narrative and emotional investment instead of action or bombastic set pieces.

But the studio's meteoric rise would not last. In November 2017, the company announced that it was laying off 90 developers, roughly a quarter of its staff. For some at Telltale, the news was a shock. For others, the inevitable outcome of what sources familiar with the company describe as years of a culture that promoted constant overwork, toxic management, and creative stagnation. ( The Verge spoke to more than a dozen current and former developers at Telltale for this story, many of whom requested anonymity for fear of retribution from current and prospective employers.) Although some of the problems were specific to Telltale and its management, many of the developer's troubles were emblematic of the unsustainable and erratic development practices that plague the video game industry at large.

These conditions almost always hit one group the hardest: developers, or the people who actually make the games. Layoffs are a pervasive fact of life, even at successful studios where developers are often hired en masse to help hit tight deadlines and then fired to cut costs after the game ships or is canceled. With the next deadline, the cycle begins anew. Overwork, job insecurity, and profound burnout are omnipresent concerns; more than three-quarters of developers report working under "crunch" conditions, which can mean working up to 20 hours a day and more than 100 hours a week. These practices can have a significant and debilitating cost to employees, one that often feels baked into video game development culture.

The story of Telltale - its rise, decline, and potential reformation - is not just the story of the missteps of one studio. It's a shocking window into the $36 billion video game industry (which is now so large and lucrative that it rivals the film industry), and how its worst practices can grind down and burn out even the most devoted and valuable employees.

Telltale emerged from the ashes of the adventure game genre, which was once synonymous with PC gaming. In popular titles like King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst, creativity, imagination, and puzzle-solving skills were the most important toolset to have. Adventure game developers Sierra and LucasArts were kings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but by the late '90s, their popularity declined in favor of shooters and 3D games. Telltale Games' founders - Bruner, Connors, and Troy Molander - were all former LucasArts employees, and by the time they created Telltale in 2004 and resurrected once-popular LucasArts properties like Sam & Max and Monkey Island, adventure games were widely considered " dead and buried."

To make this style of gaming mainstream (and profitable) again, the co-founders decided to focus on improving interactive storytelling and deepen the role-playing that came along with it. In 2007, Telltale raised more than $6 million in venture capital funding, investments that inevitably came with strings - namely a burden to prove growth and success to a board of members outside of the direct studio.

Just like in film, licensed properties offer a safer alternative to pursuing the costly business of building out original IPs. So rather than putting its resources into creating original worlds, Telltale turned to established worlds and the fanbases that love them - franchises like Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, and of course, The Walking Dead.

Coming off the heels of 2011's Jurassic Park: The Game, which was described by critics as " subpar" and " a disappointment," The Walking Dead was the studio's most exciting project yet: a perfect storm of in-house creative talent, mainstream name recognition, and storytelling that took advantage of Telltale's narrative strengths. Instead of a typical adventure game where players wander around and solve puzzles, The Walking Dead focused on the paternal relationship between the hero, Lee, and a young girl named Clementine, whom he rescues and protects. It had a cinematic feel that set it apart from other Telltale games, with riveting writing, powerful voice acting performances, and high emotional stakes. It pushed players to make tough moral choices with no easy answers: two members of your small band of survivors are on the edge of death. You can only save one. Who gets to live, and who will you abandon? Your choices transform the way the story unfolds.

Internally, multiple sources pointed to a specific locus for the success of The Walking Dead: lead developers Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. Vanaman wrote several of the game's episodic chapters, and Vanaman and Rodkin directed the first chapter and guided the overall first season together. If Telltale's financial woes had one positive creative impact on The Walking Dead, it's that the poor reception for Jurassic Park meant the studio had little time to slow or halt development. The game had to come out, which gave the Walking Dead creative team leverage to ignore or skirt around feedback from upper management that they vehemently disagreed with. Rodkin and Vanaman developed a reputation as personalities strong enough to challenge the founders on creative decisions, and pushed over and over again to create the game the way that they wanted, says a source familiar with the project. "They won, and it ended up being this huge success."

When Telltale released the first episode of The Walking Dead in April 2012, even some of the people who worked on the game were surprised by how positive the audience reaction was. By January 2013, the game had sold more than 8.5 million copies - or episodes - raking in more than $40 million in sales. In October 2013, the company claimed to have sold more than 21 million different episodes individually across all of its platforms. Telltale started to expand, signing partnerships with Gearbox Software, HBO, and Mojang and transitioning from a small studio to a midlevel company with multiple licensed properties.

The culture of the company changed dramatically as a result. Former employees describe Telltale in its early days as a small, tight-knit group with a strong sense of camaraderie. New hires trickled in slowly. Upper management had been much less involved in the day-to-day, and developers were given more freedom to do their jobs as they saw best. But the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy, it became a company that many long-standing employees no longer recognized. "We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people," says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. "You walk around the office, and you don't really recognize anybody anymore."

Sources say the culture of the studio never properly adapted from its indie mentality to one more appropriate for its larger size. Tribal knowledge persisted over clearly documented processes, and a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. "Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation," says a former employee. "People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that's the last thing they heard."

Then, of course, there were the personnel shifts. Despite shepherding the studio's most successful project to date, Vanaman and Rodkin didn't stay to continue work on season 2. Their high-profile departure, particularly in the wake of their success, foreshadowed problems that would come to the fore again and again as Telltale moved forward - ones that would lead some of their best voices to leave the studio, time and time again.

As Telltale became more prolific, it took on more and more simultaneous projects. In 2013, it released episodes of The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead: Season 2. In late 2014, it launched episodes from its newly procured licenses with Game of Thrones and Borderlands that would stretch into 2015, along with a Minecraft game. As 2016 rolled into 2017, it also took on Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more seasons of The Walking Dead and Minecraft. One employee described a T-shirt that the studio distributed with its episode release dates as so packed that it looked it was promoting a concert tour.

To keep up with the workload, the company started rotating developers in and out of different games during the development process, sometimes in ways that employees say made little sense. As the developer's schedule grew more aggressive, management sought to remedy tighter turnarounds by adding more people to the department - a "solution" that did little to help the problem. As one former Telltale developer put it: nine women can't make a baby in one month. "Focus on quality really started to shift to 'let's just get as many episodes out as we can,'" the source says.

Time management was a major issue. Release dates would often slip after games underwent multiple, extensive reviews that came with a great deal of feedback, but failed to budget enough time to make the changes. "The pace at which the studio operated was both an amazing feat and its biggest problem," says a former employee. "Executives would often ask teams to rewrite, redesign, recast, and reanimate up until the very last minute without properly adjusting the schedule. The demands on production only became more intense with each successful release, and at some point, you just don't have anything left to give."

"Crunch culture" is well-documented and endemic in the game industry, and Telltale was no exception. Some former employees reported working 14- to 18-hour days or coming in every day of the week for weeks on end. But where most developers go into "crunch mode" in the final months of a game leading up to its launch, they described it as constant. Because of the episodic nature of Telltale's games, the studio's development cycle was a constantly turning wheel. As soon as one episode wrapped, it was on to the next one, over and over with no end in sight. "Everything [was] always on fire," one source with direct knowledge of the company says. "You never [got] a break." This sentiment was echoed over and over to The Verge by four different people across several parts of Telltale.

"Everything was always on fire."

Although many employees were sympathetic to the pressure to hit financial goals and meet the strict requirements and late requests of major IP holders, the rapid pace of development caused many employees to feel significant burnout. Eventually, the emails from higher-ups encouraging the staff to push through a particularly rough patch began to feel redundant. "This just feels like last month. And the month before that," said the same source, describing the reaction to the emails. "And the month before that... It was exhausting."

Telltale offers unlimited paid time off, but as is often the case, that places the burden on individuals directly to establish their limit and makes some people less likely to take vacations. At Telltale, sources say taking time off meant a willingness to push that work on to other members of their team and that while the crunch was never billed as a "mandatory" time to be in the office, it often felt that way.

Developers who were given a six-day-a-week schedule that lasted months typically felt they had two choices: quit or suck it up. "What happens is the people who give a fuck the most are the people who pay the price," says a former employee. "[People who] take a lot of pride in this product are the people who are going to kill themselves. And those are the people you really don't want killing themselves because they have the most value in the company."

More than half a dozen sources across the company also talked about a perceived culture of underpayment, citing salaries below industry standards that also required living in the notoriously expensive Bay Area. Issues of crunch and underpayment were particularly pervasive for the cinematics team, which was staffed by many junior members who had come straight from college.

"You'd get a lot of people coming right out of school, going, 'Oh I really want to prove myself, and I really want to make sure that they see that I'm contributing,'" says a source familiar with the company. "The thing that broke my heart the most was seeing new team members that were just so gung-ho and optimistic and excited to be at Telltale get overused and abused because they did not feel comfortable drawing the line in the sand to say, 'This is my limit.' They either worked themselves out and would get sick or would become bitter."

The cinematics department was also where the burden of visually building Telltale's fictional worlds fell most heavily, especially when production schedules did not account for the time they needed to address narrative changes. A scene could be rewritten in a few hours or days, for example, but translating that into visuals is a much more time-consuming process. One person with direct knowledge of Telltale's inner workings described it as building train tracks while the train is already speeding along them.

Some managers would try to alleviate the pain of crunch by supplying overtime workers with food or alcohol, "token gestures" sources say were an effort to make the process as comfortable as possible. "They were putting a Band-Aid on a wound that had been there for years," the source says. "They were just trying to get their job done right now, but nobody was looking long-term and being like, 'This is unsustainable.'"

In addition to Vanaman and Rodkin, who are often cited as two of the biggest creative losses for the studio, the resources at the company were diminished by other high-profile departures, including Adam Hines, Chuck Jordan, Dave Grossman, and Mike Stemmle. Earlier in 2017, veteran employees Dennis Lenart, Pierre Shorette, Nick Herman, and Adam Sarasohn left the studio simultaneously and moved to Ubisoft. Between the four of them, they'd worked on some of the studio's most successful games. Their absences left a vacuum of creative leadership. "These people who have been the stewards of the creative torch at Telltale, when they leave, it's like, who the fuck do we have left?" one source says.

Many more also quietly exited the studio. "They were really kind, hardworking people that didn't make waves, but they were really good at their job and kept their heads down and worked," says a source with direct knowledge of the company. "Every time one of them left, my heart [broke] a little bit. It was sad for me to see that the really talented, aggressive, abrasive people were very successful at Telltale, whereas a lot of the quieter, collaborative creative people were leaving."

Multiple sources say the some of the studio's most troubling dynamics originated from one person: co-founder Kevin Bruner.

Bruner worked primarily as a programmer prior to Telltale, including during his stint at LucasArts. But he wore many hats during his time at Telltale: first as the company's CTO and later as a director and CEO. According to numerous current and former employees, Bruner's behavior became significantly more abrasive and inflexible after the success of The Walking Dead. Thanks to his background in programming, he had been a strong force in creating game development tools for Telltale. As the studio's popularity exploded, some employees felt he wanted to step into the role of a design auteur, which sources say made him resistant to give the spotlight to other employees at the company.

"That's when things got really bad," says a former employee. "I think a lot of the insecurity came from The Walking Dead." The game's success had significantly raised the profiles of Rodkin and Vanaman and earned them widespread praise. "I think that that really irked [Bruner] a lot," says the source. "He felt that... he deserved that. It was his project, or it was his company. He should have gotten all that love."

Some say Bruner's behavior led Rodkin and Vanaman to ultimately leave after the wildly successful first season of The Walking Dead. "They were tired of fighting with [Bruner]," says a source with direct knowledge. They jumped into indie development and founded their own studio called Campo Santo, where they released the award-winning game Firewatch. One source points to Campo Santo's success, along with Night School Studios and its supernatural thriller Oxenfree - co-created by former Telltale veteran Adam Hines - as a catalyst for Bruner's tightening grip.

"He was hesitant to give anyone much credit for having significant creative vision," one source says. "He thought they would leave and become a competitor because he had a couple of strong examples of people doing exactly that." If Bruner's behavior was aimed at quashing future competitors, however, it only wound up driving more people out the door. Those who stayed as project leads often felt that they were no longer trusted to do their jobs, and were shuffled to the side in favor of giving Bruner the limelight. "There was a dark period of time where if you were in charge of a project, you are not getting any interviews," one source says. "He's going to be the one on the panel. He's going to be the one doing the interviews. He's going to be the one in the magazine."

Bruner disputes this characterization. In an email to The Verge, he says he wanted to ensure that no series had the appearance of being the brainchild of a single contributor or small set of contributors, because of each project was so collaborative. "All Telltale productions were truly team efforts and I thought it was important that they be presented that way," he says. "Developing any game is an enormously complicated endeavor with many people working together to make it happen. This is particularly true when you make a five-episode series, with five sets of leads (writing, design, art, chore, etc.)."

Former employees and sources with direct knowledge of Telltale's inner workings consistently describe Bruner as a creative bottleneck who micromanaged every part of the development process, from pitch to final product - even going so far as to personally rewrite tutorial text. "He wanted to be consulted on everything from the color of the walls to who they've hired to write specific dialogue," a former employee says.

"How many more times can you shoot a kid again and make it feel like a really intense, crazy game moment?"

Bruner took over as CEO of Telltale in 2015 from Connors, who former employees described as a far less imposing figure. Numerous employees describe Bruner as cultivating a culture of fear, and a running joke at the company compared Bruner's attention to the Eye of Sauron, the fiery gaze of the villain in The Lord of the Rings. "Inevitably, the Eye of Sauron looks at you, and that beam of light just blows everything up and makes it a hellscape where you don't believe in a thing you're building anymore," says a former employee. "A lot of times at Telltale, you don't feel like you're wanted there."

Executive review meetings with higher-ups like Bruner became infamous within the company as brutal, hours-long arguments where Bruner would belittle and question the choices of those involved with the studio's projects, according to half a dozen sources. "When [Bruner] saw something he decided he didn't like - which very often was exactly what he had asked for - [that] was really undeserved, and often really difficult for teams to deal with," the source says.

Tulley Rafferty, a former Telltale programmer who worked at the company from 2008 until the November layoffs, agrees that the critiques were often devastating. "There was no warning. You go into the executive review, and they take a giant turd on you. That was your feedback: 'We hate this thing that you made.'"

"I remember hearing one of my bosses say, 'I love that we can just shout at each other and curse at each other in a meeting. It's totally great,'" says one former employee. "I [didn't] feel that way at all. It sucks. I don't want to work every day where I have to yell at people and scream to have my voice heard... I think a lot of people burned out that way."

Bruner defended the executive reviews as a necessary part of the studio's process and disputed the way former employees characterize them. "I don't think anyone was intentionally bullied or belittled. The episodic nature of the games meant decisions had to get made quickly so we could produce the best possible content."

But multiple sources told The Verge that they often felt like they weren't making the best games possible, but rather the ones that Bruner personally preferred. "It often felt like we were building games specifically for him," says one source with direct knowledge of the process. "We were tailoring the type of content we were building - not just gameplay mechanics, but tone, the types of characters we chose to use - to his taste. This was one of the biggest issues with him as a CEO: he was pretty convinced that his taste was everyone's taste."

Bruner pushes back against the idea that Telltale's games only reflected his whims. "Taste is a tricky thing, and I'm confident the games reflected a lot of different tastes at the studio," he says. "Our style of gameplay was really powerful but also constraining, and not everyone was comfortable working within those constraints." Bruner said the studio's decision to develop an easily identifiable tone was intentional, a way for them to become "world-class" in interactive storytelling. Adhering to the model pioneered by The Walking Dead meant there was "a certain type of game and gameplay that people could expect when they saw 'The Telltale Series' moniker," Bruner says. "I'm very proud of that."

For all his faults, former employees say Bruner did have some positive impacts on the studio and often described him as an intelligent guy with a great understanding of programming. In addition to building Telltale's primary game development tool, he had a knack for spotting moments in game projects where players lost a sense of agency. One of the most recognizable mechanics in Telltale games, where players are told that a character "will remember that," was his idea.

"A lot of times, his gut instinct for some things was correct," says a former employee. "But the way that he expressed that to his employees was extremely toxic." Another pointed out that despite the difficulty in working with him, some excellent projects have made it out of Telltale's gates. "He didn't shut those down. He challenged those teams, and I think you can look back at some of the output of the studio and you can say, well, he made that happen."

Internally, however, frustration and resentment brewed among employees who felt the company had stagnated creatively. "How many more times can you shoot a kid again and make it feel like a really intense, crazy game moment that's heartbreaking and harrowing?" says a source with direct knowledge of Telltale's process. Many believed The Walking Dead was a hit because it broke the model at the time and did something new; creatives within the studio wanted to do that again. But they say the company's leaders were not just risk-averse, but adamantly opposed to experimentation.

Although developers tried to introduce new, more adventurous mechanics into games, including reinventing how quick-time events would work, their work never came to light. Despite the inherently unfinished nature of the sort of prototype they presented, developers felt that they still needed to present something "shippable" in order to get their ideas approved. "If it at all looked janky or not fixed or not done, [Bruner] would say no to it," says one source with direct knowledge of the process. "He just lacked that insight, to see beyond what was there and go ok, I see where this was going."

When asked why employees might feel they weren't trusted to do their jobs, he says it was because he asked them "to entertain ideas that were generated from outside their discipline or from someone more junior to them. I think it's important to be open to new ideas and that great ideas come from everywhere."

According to about half a dozen sources familiar with Telltale, however, the problem for most employees wasn't new ideas, but the lack of them. The Walking Dead had broken new ground for Telltale, both artistically and financially. Unfortunately, it also chained those running the company to an immovable idea: that the template of The Walking Dead was the only one worth pursuing.

As the company continued to expand, former employees say, its growth came at the expense of the creativity and originality that inspired their success in the first place. "They just wanted to put butts in seats," one former employee says. "The folks at the very top never really understood what made Walking Dead work. They were given a recipe book, and they just followed the recipe because they don't really understand why the recipe tastes good."

After The Walking Dead, to describe one Telltale game was to describe all of them: an episodic adventure game that unfolded across sequentially released episodes, where players make difficult choices with emotional consequences. This became the creative mold at Telltale, where former employees say every new game was - to some degree - trying to recapture the spark of The Walking Dead. "Every game was held up to that standard, regardless of how realistic that was," one source says.

Every source The Verge spoke to hailed Telltale as a studio full of some of the most talented, creative developers they've had the chance to work for. Many left - or say others left - because of their frustration or boredom with the company's unwillingness to innovate, exhaustion at the constant crunch cycle, and Bruner's tendency to cut people down, change objectives on a whim, proclivity to hog credit, or make them feel as though the company had no faith in them. But change has been coming to Telltale, however slowly and, in some cases, painfully.

Bruner's time at Telltale came to a close in March 2017, when employees spotted him leaving the Telltale offices with his backpack. He'd left most of his things in his office; shortly after, the company got an email from him announcing that he had stepped down as CEO, and Connors would once again resume the position. Though rumors of Bruner's departure had circulated widely, many were shocked when it came to pass. Others were more surprised by the quiet way Bruner had chosen to leave.

"My guess is that he saw writing on the wall," says a source with direct knowledge of the company. "We needed to break out of the Telltale formula, do something different, surprise and delight people, multiple years ago. It's reflected in [online] comments in articles about us. It's reflected in our review scores. It's reflected in our sales. It's reflected in our game scores. Everyone [could] see that, not just people who work for Telltale."

Asked about his departure, Bruner says that the time had come to explore other endeavors. "Telltale's board of directors has been pursuing a path that I know will be better served by someone else," Bruner says. "Of course, I personally spoke with the senior staff, producers, directors, and some longtime employees before I announced my departure more broadly to the entire staff."

With Bruner gone, some of the stifling pressure improved. Last-minute changes became rarer, crunch began to ease up. People within the studio began to feel as though they had more creative freedom, as well as ownership and power over the projects they worked on.

For many, it was a welcome adjustment. "I didn't realize how much we had learned to hold ourselves back from thinking big," a source says. "How much we learned to tailor even initial pitches to what we knew would fly and what we knew wouldn't with him ... We'd really been trained to think small, and realizing that and beginning to get over that was a freeing experience." And more changes were still to come.

"I didn't realize how much we had learned to hold ourselves back from thinking big."

By September 2017, Telltale had named a new CEO: former SVP and GM of games at Zynga, Pete Hawley. His hiring came with its fair share of trepidation. "Zynga's kind of the Uber of the video game world," Rafferty says. "Immediately, our guards [were] up." Zynga had also undergone massive layoffs during Hawley's time there, and when he held a Q&A session for Telltale employees, one of the first questions was whether layoffs were on the table for Telltale as well. Hawley's response, which one source describes as a "PR answer," did little to assuage their fears.

On November 7th, little more than a month after Hawley's start, Telltale laid off 25 percent of its staff. Around 10AM, the affected employees - roughly 90 people - received emails asking them to attend a mandatory meeting. When they showed up, they learned that they no longer had jobs, before being shuffled off to a separate meeting to discuss benefits. "To use a cliche, it was like The Walking Dead," says Rafferty. "People shuffling around hugging. There were tears. It was a blow." The cuts affected both new and longtime employees in every area of the company.

By all accounts, the layoffs were handled as professionally and gently as possible. Those who had lost their jobs were paid out until the end of the year, and Telltale planned a job fair for them to meet and speak with recruiters. People were not denied severance or escorted from the building by security, but given time to gather their things and say goodbye. The remaining staff was given the rest of the day off so that they could spend time with their departing co-workers; they gathered at a pub in downtown San Rafael.

Many say they don't fault Hawley for the cuts, but see them as the result of years of questionable business decisions. "Where Telltale was [as a company] right then, absolutely inevitable," says Rafferty. "It was certainly preventable by not scaling up as aggressively as they did ... I think this new guy came in and saw that, and was like we've gotta do something about it. I don't totally blame him for doing what needs to be done to make the studio work."

At least two sources said it was an inevitable move for a company that continued to pump out the same sort of games over and over. "I kept kind of wondering if the audience was going to become a little fatigued with the amount of games we were putting out, and the kind of games we were making," says a former employee. "I guess my surprise was that maybe it didn't happen sooner."

Another source says that the professional manner of the layoffs coupled with Hawley's more hands-off approach to development were signs that the company has entered into a new and more positive era. "We want to help the company redefine itself and find what its new niche is because it's certainly not in making games that are cookie cutter what we've done before," the source says.

Telltale's mistakes - from its reliance on one monolithic vision to its inability to retain its top talent to its brutal and unending crunch - offer a cautionary tale for the wider games industry, where long hours, job insecurity, and unprofessional behavior are too often the norm. Now, as Telltale moves forward, it does so with a new plan in place: fewer, but hopefully better, games; fewer, but hopefully well-treated employees; and more support for creative innovation. "There is no Telltale secret sauce," says a former employee. "Talented passionate individuals are why the good Telltale games are good."

Although people within Telltale are still saddened by the loss of so many of their colleagues, many said they now feel more optimistic about the developer's future than they have in a long time. "We're certainly at a place where we have more freedom to experiment than we ever had in the past," says one source. "Between last year and now the difference in the company is like night and day. I now walk into an executive review meeting knowing I'll get usable feedback instead of wondering who will be in charge of the project tomorrow."

The company will continue with its previously announced projects, including new seasons of established properties like Game of Thrones and The Wolf Among Us. One source tells The Verge that those production plans were not impacted by the layoffs.

Among those projects is The Walking Dead: The Final Season, slated for summer 2018. Six years after the first episode's release, the fourth season of the game that helped define the best and worst of the studio will mark the end of an era - and perhaps the beginning of a new one. Telltale repeatedly declined any interviews for this article, with a representative noting in an email, "We want to be able to show our fans what the future of Telltale looks like rather than simply tell them, and we're just not ready to do that yet."

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Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

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Telltale Games went from meteoric success with The Walking Dead in 2012 to losing its top talent and laying off 25 percent of its staff in 2017. Interviews with current and former game developers provide a shocking window into the $36 billion video game industry and how it can burn out its most valuable employees.

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“Game developers look to unions to fix the industry’s exploitative workplace culture”

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“Game developers look to unions to fix the industry’s exploitative workplace culture”

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In a meeting room on the second floor of the newly renovated Moscone South exhibition complex, a wide-ranging and diverse group of game developers came together on Wednesday to voice interest in unionizing their industry. The discussion was billed as a roundtable event to be held during the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. It was coordinated by the International Game Developers Association (IDGA), a nonprofit membership group that formed in the '90s amid conversations about violence in video games, and it was moderated by IGDA president Jen MacLean with the pointed title, "Pros, Cons, and Consequences of Unionization."

From start to finish, it was a tense affair, filled with passionate voices but punctuated at times by MacLean's pronounced skepticism - mirrored in a telling interview she gave to Kotaku earlier this week - toward the benefits of unionization. It is the first of many promised discussions on the topic to be held by the IGDA, which does not in fact have leverage over game studios or publishers and is aimed only partly at advocacy issues. The IGDA has been called anti-union, and former members accuse it of acting as scapegoat for the game industry's biggest players, which are able to point to the IGDA as a representative force for developers despite its lack of concrete bargaining power.

The topic of labor organizing is top of mind for game makers at GDC 2018

The topic of game industry labor organizing has flared up as a flashpoint between developers and the studios and publishers they work for here at GDC. Unionization is now top of mind for many industry employees who, for years and behind closed doors, have discussed exploitative and toxic working conditions up and down the industry ladder. Now, that conversation is moving into the light - the first step in a likely protracted, painful, yet important battle to improve the working conditions of the game industry.

Video games are incredibly difficult to make. It is no longer a secret that game studios, beholden to the logistic whims and financial resources of large sales-focused publishers, work their employees aggressively in pursuit of creating lavish virtual simulations for an industry now estimated to be worth $36 billion. Yet unlike Hollywood, which has had powerful California-based unions for decades that protect workers across fields like screenwriting and voice acting, the game industry is largely decentralized. Studios exist all over the world, subject to disparate labor laws, and game designers work often in wildly different contexts and conditions. Circumstances can change depending on the type of game being made, the length of the employment contract, and the variety of work being done.

As Kotaku's Jason Schreier, who's written at length on the subject of game industry working conditions, has often pointed out, it may be impossible to produce big-budget video games without driving the human beings tasked with doing the day-to-day work to the point of mental, physical, and emotional collapse. The most visible and lucrative blockbuster video games are simply too big, complicated, and expensive to create without requiring large amounts of talented and passionate human beings working mind-boggling hours across dozens of disciplines, all to meet ship dates and management-imposed quality bars.

Work weeks in the game industry can stretch to as long as 100 hours during what are known as crunch periods - in which entire studios race to meet crucial deadlines - sometimes with no overtime or time-off compensation and often with little to no regard for employees' long-term well-being. Earlier this week, The Verge published an in-depth investigation into Telltale Games, the creator of popular narrative titles based on big tentpole TV franchises like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and how the studio's working conditions and accelerated growth pushed it to the breaking point in ways that echo the experience of many in the industry. "Everything [was] always on fire," one source told The Verge of Telltale's crunch culture. "What happens is the people who give a fuck the most are the people who pay the price," said another.

Attendees spoke of grueling working hours and little to no job stability in games

The mood at the GDC roundtable reflected this somber reality. Many attendees spoke of grueling working hours, little to no job stability, lack of overtime compensation, burn out and aggressive employee churn, and various other physical and emotional tolls of modern game development. There was no question from the people who make games for a living that unionization could provide a clear path toward finding solutions to these endemic issues.

"Every company I've ever worked for has required an insane mandatory crunch. A lot of the problems I see are tremendous abuse from overworking their employees, burning people out, giving inadequate compensation," Jean-Philippe Steinmetz, a veteran engineer in the game industry, told attendees of the roundtable. "For me, the problem is inherently in how studios and publishers across the board will abuse us as developers who are passionate about our work, who are willing to commit to the product, to work us insane hours without compensation and without respect for our personal lives."

Other attendees, some of whom wished to remain anonymous for fear of workplace retaliation, pointed out a number of other concerns at the request of MacLean, who prodded speakers to concisely verbalize issues they think unions could help with. Those included more inclusive policies for minority and LGBT employees like gender-neutral bathrooms, more transparent and proactive policies around workplace harassment aimed at holding management accountable, and improved industry-wide standards around benefits like internship compensation, severance, and healthcare.

"It's really important to unionize because workers have literally no representation or rights when it comes to negotiating with their companies or negotiating with their employer," a game developer who goes by the name Emma told The Verge ahead of the IGDA roundtable. Emma, who said she fears harassment and retaliation and so is choosing not to share her last name or the name of her employer, helped organize an advocacy group called Game Workers Unite. The group, which Emma said is largely leaderless and operates horizontally, has been handing out zines and fliers at GDC this week with information on the topic, hoping to further the conversation.

The effort, which started small within the last month but has grown rapidly in popularity, is aimed at building a grassroots movement around industry unionization and finding a viable path toward making it a reality. "We're looking at models like guilds and the examples led by a lot of digital media companies who are working with writers guilds to develop local unions," Emma added. "If you're working in games, there's a 99 percent chance you're being exploited as a worker. We're trying to start that conversation because it's really taboo." (Employees of The Verge parent company Vox Media are among those in the digital media industry currently in the process of trying to unionize.)

Emma said that she feared the IGDA roundtable event was going to be an anti-union affair, with the IGDA using the opportunity to dissuade developers from organizing. And MacLean's comments and questions did in fact veer toward anti-union rhetoric. Her questions and response were often aimed at interrogating attendees' knowledge of unions and trying to poke holes in the concept that unions are bulletproof protections against the game industry's many perils. MacLean stressed that unions may control which jobs its members take and which projects their employers pursue, and that they could be used to prevent studios from staffing up adequately. She also raised concerns about union abuses in unrelated industries like construction as evidence that unions can abuse their power.

Steve Kaplan, a labor organizer from Los Angeles who works with the labor union IATSE, also feared the event would be anti-union. He told The Verge he came to GDC specifically because he was made aware the roundtable may be skewed toward anti-union rhetoric. Kaplan, who's spent eight years working with labor unions and got involved with the game industry through the year-long SAG-AFTRA voice actor strike, was often an informed, pro-union voice to counteract MacLean's antagonistic moderation. "It goes back to getting yourself a seat at the table. Our brothers and sisters in France are striking because it took a year and a half to reach agreement that their employers didn't take in good faith, so they had to take the nuclear option," Kaplan told the crowd, referencing the ongoing game developer strike at French studio Eugen Systems. "Negotiations rarely are one-sided, both parties have to agree."

"It goes back to getting yourself a seat at the table."

Kaplan, easily one of the most experienced and knowledgeable in the room on the subject of unionization, had reasoned and pragmatic advice for developers. "It's a big thing to unionize the industry, but it starts with a small step," Kaplan said, adding it was very unlikely the entire industry would be unionized without first starting at specific studios. "It becomes this rising tide. The only reason that a lot of non-union commercials or episodic television or movies mirror working conditions is because those working conditions unions set become standard." Kaplan stressed that first contracts are rarely "home runs" for workers, but that they form the basis for further bargaining and help workers build better projections over time through renegotiations.

While the discussion left many attendees with more questions than answers, what's clear is that the rising tide Kaplan references is indeed underway. We don't know if it's possible for the game industry - which isn't centralized in a city like Los Angeles, but instead spread across multiple continents - to replicate unionization models that have protected workers in the US for decades. It also feels painfully unlikely that companies as large as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Take-Two Interactive will be supportive of any attempt of its employees to unionize. But developers are eager to figure out how to improve their lives and the working conditions of thousands of other workers, whether or not the IGDA or the Electronic Software Association, which has kept quiet on the subject this week during GDC, want to participate in good faith.

"We want to be the pro-worker IGDA, and we really do want to go in and have a conversation. We're not going in to protest or fight or yell," said Emma of the Game Workers Unite movement. "We want to see if there is a path to go forward where we work on these things, negotiate, and talk about first steps."

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Game developers look to unions to fix the industry's exploitative workplace culture

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In a meeting room on the second floor of the newly renovated Moscone South exhibition complex, a wide-ranging and diverse group of game developers came together on Wednesday to voice interest in unionizing their industry. The discussion was billed as a roundtable event to be held during the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco.

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“How crunch is more than a labor issue in the video game industry”

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“How crunch is more than a labor issue in the video game industry”

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- Former executive director of the IGDA Kate Edwards on the game industry's attitude about crunch.

A piece recently published by Game Informer features interviews from various people working in the game industry, discussing a massive labor problem that has been plaguing developers for years: crunch.

"Crunch has been prevalent in the games industry for decades, and while it's not unique to the games industry, it has become a negative practice that has perpetuated for too long," explains former executive director of the IGDA Kate Edwards. "It burns people out, discourages them from continuing in the industry, and has seriously negative effects on physical, mental, and social health."

A survey conducted by the IGDA in 2015 found that 62 percent of developers said their jobs involved crunch and of those nearly one-third said crunch meant 50-59 hours of work a week. A 2014 IGDA survey found the most common reason for developers leaving the video game industry was " poor quality of life."

Krzysztof Nosek, the multiplayer programming lead on Call of Juarez: The Cartel discusses how crunch forced him to take a step back and reflect on the repercussions. Not only was it bad for his physical and mental health, but it was affecting his personal life. "In retrospect you see the different directions that you and the world around you have taken, and you must judge whether it was worth it or not," Nosek says. "It's a tough moment that can quite often bring bouts of depression or low morale - the infamous 'post-crunch realizations,' as they are known."

What steps can studios take to avoid crunch? Is it that easy? It turns out the the problem isn't entirely black and white after considering studio culture and the desire to be a team player so no one is let down. "Most, if not all of these people are your colleagues first and foremost so that communal peer pressure plays a much greater role in getting you to push than the decisions coming down from the hierarchy," admits Nosek.

So what do these developers suggest when it comes to abolishing crunch? Check out the entire interview over at Game Informer.

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How crunch is more than a labor issue in the video game industry

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Former executive director of the IGDA Kate Edwards on the game industry's attitude about crunch. A piece recently published by Game Informer features interviews from various people working in the game industry, discussing a massive labor problem that has been plaguing developers for years: crunch.