The Real Enemy of Gaming Isnât DEI. Itâs the CEO
Iâve been playing video games for as long as I can remember. From the days of the Game Boy Color and Super Nintendo, my hands have gripped dozens of controllers across dozens of consoles, and Iâve played more games than I can count. This industry means a lot to meâas Iâm sure it does for many of you reading this.
It means so much, in fact, that countless people decided to make careers out of creating games. They rolled up their sleeves and poured their time, creativity, and energy into the experiences weâve come to love. Whether itâs a big-budget blockbuster or a scrappy indie gem, the games we cherish were built by people who caredâpeople with passion, talent, and heart.
But in return, this industry has met that passion with exploitation, burnout, dehumanizationâand the creeping hand of unchecked greed. Slowly, and often quietly, the games industry has started to rot from within. And yet, when people look for someone to blame, they rarely point the finger where it belongs. Itâs not âwokenessâ or diversity thatâs bleeding this industry dryâitâs corporate greed, executive bloat, and a business model built on disposable labor. Most people donât even see it happening. The average player only sees the final product, not the toll it takes to get there. The human cost is easy to ignoreâbut we shouldnât.
So as you read this, and as you think about the games you love, I ask one thing: No matter how good the game is. No matter how excited you are to play it. Remember the human cost.
If you asked me where things started to go wrong, Iâd point to the rise of downloadable content. Not the good kindâthe kind that expanded on a complete game, like Sims 2 expansions or Halo 2 map packs. Those were fine. Those were optional. They added more to an already full package.
But once consoles started integrating online connectivity out of the box, something changed. Developers and publishers realized they didnât need to sell you a whole game anymore. They could sell you parts of one. And then they asked the question that would haunt the industry for years to come: How little could they get away with charging for?
Gone were the big expansions and chunky map packs. In came the trickleâbite-sized DLC, cosmetic add-ons, paid cheats. Most of it was harmless at first. It felt like a novelty, not a threat. But it was a signal. A quiet test. One that would explode on April 3rd, 2006, when Bethesda dropped what I still consider the first real domino: the infamous, mocked, dumb-as-hell Horse Armor for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
It cost 200 Microsoft Pointsâwhich didnât seem like much⌠until you realized you couldnât buy exactly 200. You had to buy 400 for $5. Meaning that dumb cosmetic armor, which did nothing to help you in-game, effectively cost you five bucks. It was instantly roasted. Forums lit up. Magazines dunked on it. Even people who didnât own Oblivion knew about the Horse Armor.
But hereâs the twist: some people still bought it. Curiosity, maybe. Support, maybe. And when the outrage faded, the publishers took notes. We thought weâd laughed it off.
They saw a new revenue stream.
Note: Microtransactions Made Up 58% of PC Game Revenue in 2024, Research Shows
According to financial analysis by Digital River, microtransactions have fundamentally transformed gaming economics, with free-to-play games generating 80% of digital game revenue despite representing only 15% of total releases. The model has proven so effective that the average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) in free-to-play mobile games ranges from $15 to $25 monthlyâsignificantly higher than traditional one-time purchase models could achieve. (source).
If Horse Armor was a joke, 2012 was the punchline. By this point, DLC wasnât just acceptedâit was expected. Extra characters, costumes, new levelsâit all became part of the launch conversation. But this was also the year when big publishers showed us just how far they were willing to twist a good idea for profit.
Asuraâs Wrath dropped in February. Great game. Wild game. It played like a playable anime, with sky-punching gods and over-the-top boss fights. But when April rolled around, Capcom released the gameâs âtrue endingâ as paid DLC. The actual ending. Behind a paywall.
Then Mass Effect 3 landed in March. Solid game. Controversial ending. But what made it worse was the Day One DLC, From Ashes, which locked away a critical lore character. The content was on the disc. You could see itâbut you couldnât access it unless you paid extra.
Oh, and Street Fighter X Tekken? Also released that same day. Capcom again. Twelve full characters were locked on the disc at launch, waiting to be sold back to us months later. Not future content. Not bonus content. Content that was already finished.
And while it didnât invent the concept, Borderlands 2 doubled down on the now-standard Season Pass modelâpay us now, get content later, maybe. If youâre lucky. And yet, despite all this, 2012 is still remembered as a great year for games. Even the ones caught up in these controversies were (and are) beloved. Which just proves the point: publishers bet that players would eventually accept the bare minimum if the games were good enough.
Over time, outrage turned into eye-rolls. âDonât like it? Donât buy it.â âHow else are they supposed to make money?â People stopped pushing back. And once the industry realized they could nickel-and-dime us without consequence, things only got worse. Microtransactions stopped being cosmetic. âTime saversâ replaced skill progression. Premium features started showing up in single-player games. And the idea of getting a full experience for $60? Ancient history.
That bet paid off. (Click here for additional context)
Note: In 2022, DLC sales accounted for 13% of PC revenue and 7% of console revenue in the US. DLC boosted monthly active users (MAU) overall by 11% across PC and console games. Some game genres benefitted from DLC more than others. Strategy games experienced the highest MAU growth from DLC releases, followed by role-playing and simulation titles. On average, 30% of MAUs for Dead Cells (one of the games we cover in the report) in DLC-release months were new players.
(source)
Over the years, the industry kept pushing. And little by little, the outrage faded. Players who once mocked Horse Armor were now paying for boosters, cosmetics, currencies, and convenience. Publishers had successfully rebranded greed as player choice.
We started hearing phrases like âtime saversâ and âoptional content,â usually from executives trying to explain why their $60 game now had a microtransaction menu baked into the pause screen. Why grind for upgrades when you could just buy a shortcut?
Take Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, for example. Capcom sold red orb packsâused to unlock moves and abilitiesâfor real money. You didnât need to buy them, sure. But thatâs the trick. If theyâre so unnecessary, why sell them at all? Thatâs where âtime saversâ come in. A term popularized by Ubisoft, time savers were the beginning of a quiet shift in how games were designed. Progression got slower. XP gains got stingier. Suddenly, buying a multiplier didnât just save timeâit felt necessary to avoid tedium.
Assassinâs Creed: Origins was the flashpoint. It introduced a permanent XP boost you could purchase to level up faster. Players noticed. Some even ran tests, comparing the grind with and without the booster. The results were clear: the game was built to be slower without it. And that wasnât by accident. At this point, âoptionalâ started to mean âoptimized.â If you didnât pay up, you werenât getting the best experienceâyou were getting the longest one.
And hereâs the part that sealed the deal: time itself became a commodity. According to the ESA, the average gamer in 2004 was 29. In 2024, that number has jumped to 36. Gamers are older now. Busier. Time-strapped. And when youâre juggling work, family, and life, ten bucks to speed things up doesnât sound so bad.
Thatâs how they got us.
The Illusion of Infinite Wealth
If you asked me whoâs doing the most damage to this industry, Iâd point to the CEOs and the investors. Itâs hard to choose between them. CEOs make the calls, but investors set the rules. One exploits for profit, the other demands it. Either way, their obsession with infinite growth is bleeding the games industry dry. And while they chase those profit margins, the people actually making the gamesâthe artists, the writers, the animators, the engineersâare the ones who suffer.
Letâs be clear: this isnât about âwokeness,â or DEI initiatives, or whatever culture war talking point is trending this week. The mass layoffs, the studio closures, the waves of burnout and abuseâit all stems from corporate greed, not diversity. From shareholders who want more, faster, and cheaper. From executives who get bonuses for cutting corners and slashing teams. And while players were getting nickel-and-dimed, developers were getting crushed.
Itâs hard to pinpoint when things started unraveling inside the studios, but once social media cracked the door open, the stories came pouring out. Twitter became a confession booth. Forums turned into therapy circles. We started hearing about what development really looked like behind the scenesâand it was brutal.
The biggest red flag? Crunch. Defined by the IGDA as âemployees working overtime in order to meet a deadline,â crunch sounds tame on paperâuntil you realize just how extreme it gets. Take Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser once proudly said the team worked 100-hour weeks âseveral timesâ during development. Thatâs not passion. Thatâs exploitation. And Rockstar was hardly alone.
Crunch became a silent expectation across the AAA spaceânormalized, even praised. Naughty Dogâs Neil Druckmann once said people chose to work longer hours out of passion. But as developer Carrie Patel from Obsidian pointed out, one personâs âpassion projectâ becomes everyone elseâs emergency. Even if you donât want to crunch, the team still has to meet the deadline. Voluntary or not, the pressure is real. And crunch isnât even the worst of it.
Note: They do not get paid extra for working overtime. (Click here for additional context)
If employees are classified as salaried and meet certain criteria (such as being considered "exempt" computer professionals), they are not legally entitled to extra pay for working additional hours, including during periods of crunch. This is due to exemptions in federal and state labor laws that allow companies to avoid paying overtime to employees who meet particular salary thresholds and job duties, which is common for software developers, engineers, and many other technical roles in game development. In practice, this means that even though crunch often involves working well beyond a standard 40-hour week, most salaried game developers do not receive additional compensation for those extra hours unless their company voluntarily offers bonuses, paid time off, or other incentives.
Crunch was only the beginning
However, crunch wouldnât even be the worst violation. Behind the scenes, a much uglier pattern was forming. Harassment, discrimination, retaliationâespecially against women, queer developers, and marginalized voicesâbecame regular headlines. The workplace wasnât just grueling. In many studios, it was hostile.
Blizzard was one of the biggest implosions. In 2021, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard for fostering what they called a âfrat boyâ workplace culture. The stories that came outâabout sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and leadership turning a blind eyeâwere stomach-churning. It wasnât just a toxic work environment. It was systemic abuse.
Ubisoft followed with its own wave of allegations: executives accused of predatory behavior, HR departments covering it up, and a revolving door of survivors who left the company while their abusers stayed. For years, people at the top promised reform. Most of them are still there.
And these are just the companies we heard about. Smaller studios? Outsourced QA teams? Contract workers? They face the same issues with even less protection and none of the headlines.
And when developers do try to push backâthrough walkouts, organizing, or speaking publiclyâtheyâre hit with layoffs, blacklisting, or legal pressure. Unionization efforts have grown, but so has resistance. In 2024 alone, dozens of studios saw record profits⌠followed by mass layoffs. Entire departments gutted. Entire teams axed. Projects canceled mid-development, not because they failedâbut because they didnât hit some arbitrary forecast set by executives who likely never touched a dev kit.
All of this has made one thing painfully clear: To the people in charge, developers are disposable.
You can pour your life into a game, work nights and weekends to make it shine, and still be on the chopping block the moment the stock dips. Because to shareholders, youâre not a personâyouâre a number. And when you cost too much, they replace you with a cheaper one.
The Pay Gap (Click here for additional context)
Average Compensation:Â The average total compensation for a gaming CEO rose from about $6.1 million in 2019 to $8.6 million in 2024.
Top Earners:Â In 2020, the highest-paid video game CEOs received over $100 million in total compensation, with some (like Robert Antokol of Playtika) earning $372 million and Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard earning $154.6 million, mainly due to stock awards and bonuses (source: 4,5,1.)
Pay Gap:Â The gap between CEO and median employee pay has widened, with some companies showing a CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio as high as 1:1,560
The Price Increase Fallacy (Click here for additional context)
đ Editorâs Note
You may have heard the argument that rising game prices are necessary to ensure developers get paid fairly. But the numbers tell a different story. While some premium titles have crept up to $70 or more, that extra revenue hasnât gone to the people making the gamesâitâs gone to executives and shareholders. Entry- and mid-level developer salaries have grown modestly in the past decade (mostly due to inflation and demand), but C-suite compensation has skyrocketed, often increasing by hundreds of percent through bonuses and stock payouts. So no, higher game prices arenât trickling down to dev paychecks. Theyâre padding profit margins. And thatâs not a sustainable or ethical model.
The Blame Game is Undefeated
So where does that leave us? Some will tell you that gaming is in decline because of âwokeness.â That developers are too focused on diversity, too distracted by inclusion. But thatâs not just wrongâitâs a deliberate misdirection. A smokescreen. Something to keep you angry at the wrong people.
The truth is simple: this industry isnât being killed by politics. Itâs being gutted by profit.
Itâs being dragged down by bloated executive salaries, bad faith investors, and CEOs who treat workers like spare parts and players like wallets. Itâs being undone by an endless hunger for growth that no creative industryâno human-driven industryâcan sustainably meet.
And yet, despite all this, people still make games. Beautiful, creative, heartbreaking games. Developers still pour themselves into projects knowing they could be laid off the second it ships. Thatâs not just passion. Thatâs resilience. Thatâs love. But love shouldnât be exploited. And passion shouldnât be a license for abuse. As players, we have a role in this. We can speak up. We can support developers. We can stop accepting bad business practices just because the game is fun. We can stop pretending that âoptionalâ means harmless. And we can stop falling for the lie that representation is the problem, when the real villain is sitting in a boardroom.
The next time you hear someone blame diversity for the state of the industry, ask them how many women and queer devs were in the room when Activision laid off 1,900 employees after posting record profits. Ask them who really benefits when teams are slashed, games are rushed, and content is carved up for sale. Ask them where all the money goes. We deserve better. The people who make our games deserve better. And the industry wonât get there until we stop taking baitâand start holding power accountable.
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