The 1% Solution

I’m not a politician. I’m not an activist. I’m not an organizer. I’m a game designer. If you ask me to solve a problem, I’m going to give you a system, a dynamic, a set of mechanics. I’m kind of a crap designer - really, just ask the people I’ve worked with - so it’s just a starting point for a conversation. I know it’s not realistic; I know it’s not practical; I know it’s not achievable. But, what if it were?

If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, you’ve probably seen all the posts about layoffs in the game industry. I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last several months about the why and the how of this - the explicit reasons, the implicit reasons, the structural reasons. People keep talking about how game developers should unionize, but traditional union tactics like strikes are next to impossible with widely scattered teams. Where would we picket? How do we assemble?

So, here’s an alternative. I call it the 1% solution.

Imagine a mutual aid society, a game developer’s benevolent association. It’s a non-profit whose mission is to make working in the game industry more survivable. For now, let’s focus on one specific issue: layoffs and losing health insurance. This is a particularly USA issue, since most civilized countries have universal health care, but activism in this area is going to have to happen country by country.

I don’t have great data on this, but Google says there are about 270K people working in the game industry in the US. I recently asked people in a completely unscientific poll how much of their salary people would be willing to pay out to have benefits while unemployed. Here are the results:

Now, I wouldn’t put too much faith in a poll like this, but more than half of the respondents were willing to make a significant contribution (5% or more) and 4 out of 5 were willing to pay something.

So, let’s do some math. If 270K people contribute 1% of their salary, and for sake of argument let’s go with 100K as the average salary (8K per person month is pretty cheap, but it’s an average, so QA balances out engineering), you generate $270M a year. Not everyone’s going to participate, let’s say it’s only that half that were willing to make a substantial contribution. You’re still looking at $135M a year. That could buy a lot of health insurance. That could buy a lot of supplemental unemployment insurance. That could buy a lot of lobbying and PR.

So, at some level, if game developers were willing to put in the time, energy, and money, we could go it alone. But, we have other players in this industry. Ideally, everyone would have skin in the game.

In the US in 2022, mobile games are estimated to have made about $92B. From that, Apple and Google take 30% off the top. We know from Apple’s latest moves in the EU that the cost of storage and download bandwidth is less than 3%. So, of that remaining 27% (which is PURE PROFIT), if the platforms kicked in 1% to our theoretical fund, that would be another $248M a year.

But, there’s a third leg to this stool - publishers. Let’s imagine that publishers also kick in 1% - in this case, if a game makes more than $100M, they put in 1% of the revenues after that. Just looking at the major publishers and blockbuster franchises, that’s easily another $200M a year.

In this theoretical universe, each group gets seats on the board - publishers, platforms, developers. But the explicit mission is to provide a safety net and ongoing support for game developers. Administrative overhead can be capped to guarantee that the vast majority of the money is paid out to developers, but with an operating budget of $600M, we could be talking not just about health insurance and supplemental unemployment insurance, but also retirement, crisis funding, and other supports.

Now, the immediate objection is that these large corporations aren’t going to just give up their profits without a fight. I get that. And we don’t have a union or the ability to strike. Yeah, I get that, too.

But what if we stood up just the developer side of this. We’re not going to get anywhere close to half of the industry to buy in, but, what if we could get just 1%? 2,700 developers, each contributing $1K could put together a $2.7M starting fund. That’s not a huge amount of money, but it could buy us a small army of community managers.

Imagine turning the full, righteous wrath of the gaming community on the platforms. Imagine the PR hellstorm if every gaming community started to yell about the unfairness of the platforms taking billions of dollars off the top while game developers are losing their houses and dying from lack of health care. We don’t have to strike to cause enough pain to bring people to the negotiating table. We get the platforms first; then we go after the publishers.

We’ve got the stories. We’ve got the artists. We’ve got the storytellers. We’ve got the organizers.

Who’s in?