In the past handful of years, the video game industry has attempted to reckon with its history of workplace abuse, both in the form of crunch and managerial misconduct. Big companies will tell you they’ve been successful in their reform efforts, but the truth is that these are, at best, ongoing projects. Moreover, they’re ignoring an elephant in the room, perhaps because it’s not in the room at all: Outsourcing studios in Southeast Asia, according to a new video from People Make Games, represent a hotbed of existing and potential abuse. On this week’s Aftermath Hours, People Make Games’ Chris Bratt joins us to discuss his findings.
We begin by digging into the particulars of PMG’s video – truly harrowing instances of abuse at an Indonesian studio called Brandoville that include a manager convincing an employee to slap herself in the face 100 times as an act of penance – and then try to figure out what allows big companies to turn a blind eye to these incidents. Why are fans and media seemingly less outraged by clear examples of misconduct at a studio that's been attached to games like Assassin's Creed Shadows and The Last Of Us remake as long as they happen Over There? And how can people inside and outside the industry help?
Then we talk about how the wildfires currently raging in California – which have displaced video game studios, among many, many other things – are happening right next door to CES in Las Vegas, where tech titans spent the week trumpeting the latest environmentally destructive fad, generative AI. After that, we move on to slightly more lighthearted fare in our predictions for the year in gaming. Only one of us predicts a major industry-related crash, so that’s gotta count for something. Also, Half-Life 3 is getting announced this year. Mark my words.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can buy Valve and force them to actually release Half-Life 3, which is a whole other can of worms.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Chris: [In 2021, when we released our first video on outsourcing], the big conversation at that point when it came to working conditions was crunch, and you were seeing strides from certain studios to try and improve their approach to crunch – to have fewer long stints of overtime and death marches as part of game development. However, we realized that although you might see companies making those strides and claiming to have a better relationship with crunch, actually if they were outsourcing a bunch of the work on their games to these other companies in other countries, well, is the crunch still happening over there? And if so, I don’t think we can say that progress is as substantial as we might like to.
Last year, Brandoville Studios, the company in Indonesia [from our first video] shut down, and it sort of opened the floodgates on a bunch of stuff that had been happening for certain employees there. My first experience of that was when one of the people I had spoken to briefly via email in the years beforehand got in touch and said, “First of all, the emails I sent to you where I said everything was great actually, my boss told me to write that. And also, all this stuff was happening while I was there.” And she sent me, among other things, a video recording in which she’s seen slapping her own face as hard as she can 100 times in a row. We include a little bit of that in the second video we just put out where we investigate what happened. We only put in a short section with her permission.
But I’ve seen the whole video, and it’s just the most brutal thing to witness. It’s hard to get across unless you watch it what it feels like to watch someone hit themselves that hard that many times. Visibly, her own sense of self is not there. It’s really painful.
Nathan: It was like she wasn’t there when she was doing it – like she had gone somewhere else and was performing this action that was obviously incredibly brutal.
Gita: When you’re in an abusive workplace, you get conditioned to do things and to allow yourself to be treated in ways that you would not do otherwise. I used to stay at the office until 9 PM sometimes just because I was waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. I would go home – I was still drinking at this time – and I would crack a beer and get really afraid that my boss would call me because it would be my fault if on off-hours I was drunk and I couldn’t immediately return to work.
But the abuses here are so physical and so much worse. There’s some financial abuse that also occurred at the studio, which is really shocking, but also there’s already so many abuses occurring at the studio that you really shouldn’t be surprised.
Nathan: The recurring theme in a lot of those abuses seems to be this immense overstep into somebody’s personal boundaries – saying that I have the right to ask you to hit yourself or to personally hit you, that I have the right to control your money because you’re not good enough to control it yourself, that I have the right to talk about you in all these demeaning ways and say that you’re overweight.
Gita: They had to send their outfits to management!
Chris: All in all, you can tell it was a deeply disturbing story to work on. I’ve never felt so upset about a piece of reporting we’ve done. There’s so much going on there. I also felt a responsibility to do it because we had reported on this [studio] the first time around. To find out this was going on in the aftermath was just so shocking and also ties back into this issue we briefly talked about at the beginning of how outsourcing is so invisible. We all know it’s happening. Many of the products we’re using to do this stream [were outsourced].
Gita: It is a continuation of the colonial project. In the global north, we go to these countries that have fewer labor protections, and we extract the resource that we need from them, which is people willing to do work for very little money. There are emerging markets for video games. When I was at the UN recently, it was cosponsored by Japan and Morocco – Japan because it’s seen as sort of the ancestral home of video games and Morocco because they’re trying to establish their own mobile video game development industry there. That doesn’t mean original games coming out of Moroccan studios. That often means mobile games outsourcing crunch to Moroccan studios, and Morocco just trying to take ownership of that as a country.
Nathan: Right, because it bolsters the economy one way or another.
Gita: Exactly. But it is also true that while there aren’t many labor protections in the US, there are even less in these other countries. At the end of the video, you explained that a common phrase in Indonesia when facing abuses is “No viral, no justice,” meaning that if your case does not get significant attention on the internet, it is very, very unlikely that you will ever see any kind of recompense, even in cases where they egregiously break the law by abusing you in the workplace.
Chris: Something that helped me get through the reporting and I think helps viewers get through the video is that people like Christa and the other employees who eventually all come forwards – they have all of these messages, all this evidence to show what’s happened to them – they have had already a moment in Indonesia where everything did go viral. Social media went crazy with it. It was reported on by much of the mainstream news over there. The people involved – specifically the alleged abuser, Cherry [Lai] – fled the country. There’s a police investigation, and they’d like to speak to her.
So it’s not justice in its fullest form, but they did see that when they came forward, their country and their community and the Southeast Asian games industry did rally behind them. So there are some cathartic aspects that have already happened before we get to our video. And the reason our video exists – the motivations for them to talk to us and the motivation I have to report on it as well – is, yeah, it went viral in Indonesia and spread across parts of Southeast Asia, but most people had no idea this happened outside of that. In the global north, where the companies exist that contract studios like Brandoville–
Nathan: –That allow for this kind of work to even exist in the first place.
Chris: Exactly. No one was talking about it. No one seemed to know about it. And so that “No viral, no justice” aspect needed to apply to the rest of the world.
