Gaming journalist Jason Schreier

Episode notes

Jason Schreier on his new book, Press Reset, and the human cost of video game development

For the better part of a decade, the video game industry has made more in revenue than Hollywood. Year after year, it’s not even close. Some of the biggest blockbuster games can pull down a billion dollars within a week of being released, and they can continue making money for years afterwards.

But making huge amounts of money takes a huge workforce. Video games can take enormous amounts of work to produce — work that spans across dozens of disciplines and can take years to complete. Indie projects can be as small as one person working on a passion project in their free time, while some of the largest studios employ thousands of people across multiple countries.

The video game industry, at least by comparison to film and TV, is relatively new. It’s changing constantly — sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It’s a notoriously opaque industry, which can make for poor working conditions. And most of the people who make these games don’t have the same labor protections that movie crews get from membership in a union or a guild.

That’s where Jason Schreier has made his career: Instead of writing reviews or reporting on player communities, he investigates the studios that make games. He’s uncovered labor abuses, creative and legal disputes behind the scenes, and all sorts of workplace misconduct. And he does it by going directly to the workers involved.

His new book, Press Reset, is his latest work in that field. Based on dozens of interviews with people who make games, it tells the origin stories of some of the most renowned video game studios in the world — and how those same studios eventually collapsed.

Jason joins Bullseye to chat about how some of gaming’s biggest studios are adapting — or failing to adapt — to a constantly changing industry. They talk about what happens when game studios shut down and the human cost associated with these closures. Jason is also the co-host of the podcast Triple Click, where he and his co-hosts Kirk Hamilton and Maddy Myers talk about video game news and culture, answer listener questions, and sometimes replay old classics.