The tale of the mistreated bunch...

So today I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw this post, a thread, and a long one at that that has garnered quite the response. They go by the name Pauline or @SimplyRagny on Twitter, and there they decided that today was the day that they had enough. I'll link it down below, and I'll try to provide screenshots here, but the story goes with a lot of what has been going on with the gaming industry as a whole. The mistreatment of workers. Now a lot of prominent journalists in the gaming sphere, as well as not journalists (?) have been saying that devs, voice actors, and anyone related to the gaming industry needs to unionize, and it needed to happen like yesterday. Around America, we have done a great job of fucking ourselves and letting jackasses put "Right to Work" laws throughout our country, which means you have to trust the company you are working for, to not fuck you over. From factories, to grocery stores, all around the US, we've been letting our guard down to get more jobs. However, they are lower paying jobs. The gaming industry has been slammed by this just as much, if not even more, than the other industries combined. Hearing of tales of "crunch", or the thing that devs have to do with 12-16 hour work cycles for months at a time to make sure a game can get out the door on time. Hearing stories from the great Jason Schreier about how top Execs at EA recently made $40 million in a year, while the average (And anything "averaged" is super misleading) EA employee was making $96k. Now don't get me wrong, $96k is nothing to scoff at, but when most of those employees are the ones busting their asses to make EA it's record breaking amount of money, it starts to seem kind of fucked up. I'll talk more about this in a separate article in a bit, but this all ties together. So in comes Pauline who when going to their profile, says helps Sony get Certification for their games. They are QA person, tasked with trying to make sure their aren't any game breaking bugs, and if you've been playing the good PS4 Exclusive games, they run really well. Some of them in recent years are downright masterpieces, and while yes, the devs that worked on these projects deserve the most of the limelight, the QA people are nothing to scoff at.

Yet this person goes on to talk about how they get no sick time, no medical benefits, and are paid near Minimum Wage for their work. Now I don't know the history of games this person has worked on, but even taking something into account like God of War, which made 131 million in digital sales in the first couple of months, you start to realize that if the people that did QA on that game got paid $8-9 dollars an hour, maybe a little more, but not a lot, that it's pretty bullshit. A lot of the environments and stories this person told, were the very things that made ME leave the job I was working at for 9 years, and I was getting paid $18 an hour! But I couldn't do it anymore. Pauline talks about how if they won't send you home, you have to stay busy at your desk, which is something we had to where I worked. You had to push a broom, you had mop the floors, you had to stay busy, or get yelled at, because someone else fucked up, and you need to get something out the door right now. I was getting paid alright, and I HATED my job. I worked all the time. Friends thought I was just ditching them because I told them I had to work 60, 70, sometimes even 80 hours a week and I was exhausted. Now Pauline doesn't talk a lot about too many hours, but they do talk a lot about upper management being able to do and harass however they want. I had to deal with that too. My last boss was really great, but my bosses boss was a dick, who punished us repeatedly for "not doing enough while the machines are down" and reading a lot of those words nearly gave me a PTSD filled flashback from the very job I quit.

So why am I writing this? Well because the other thing my lousy job has in common with Pauline's job, is that neither are unionized, and we need to start unionizing again. This is just another story in which we need to start pushing more for better security, for better wages, and for better treatment. No matter what industry you are in, whether it's someone talking about their time in Amazon, or somebody talking about the games they QA, the stories sound identical, and the solutions are nearly identical as well. One of the last things Pauline wishes was that gamers would get just as upset about this, as they when they get yelled at by devs (Which may, or may not be a jab at the whole Arenanet debacle) and I have to slightly agree. Gamers as a whole have more power than they know. Instead of using it to get one or two people fired, they could harness it to make certain games better, or they could use it to make sure that QA, Devs, and VA get real benefits, and are largely taken care of. We should fight for that, and that's one of the reasons I do what I do with this blog. I want to get into the industry, sure, but I also want to see the industry get better too. At a time when some companies are making record profits, there are far too many people left in the wind. The stories shared by this person, and the many others that have come before it, sicken me. Let's change this, huh? If you get a chance, go check out what she says. She has a lot to say, and I can tell it was pent up for a while. Otherwise, I'll talk you all soon. Have fun, and stay safe out there.