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100 Slaps: The Breaking News The Games Industry Ignored in 2024
🕑 Added 2025-01-07 16:09:43 +0000 UTCHi patrons,
Thanks for bearing with us on this one. It probably won't take long for you to realize why we were a little concerned about publishing this during the middle of the holiday break.
To give you some context for what you're about to watch, this is a follow-up to a story we first published in 2021 in which we investigated the working conditions at two outsourcing studios in SE Asia. In short, we discovered that while there was some real progress being made to address the long stretches of mandatory overtime (also known as crunch) that was expected of employees at games studios in the Global North, those same discussions were not inclusive of outsourcing studios based in lower income countries.
I spoke to artists working at Lemon Sky Studios in Malaysia and Brandoville Studios in Indonesia and found a similar story unfolding at both: artists were routinely working late into the night, or over weekends, in order to complete totally unrealistic deadlines. And this overtime was, of course, also unpaid.
Anyway, we published our documentary and there was some limited discussion within the industry in response. But in the end, nothing much changed. Both Lemon Sky and Brandoville continued to secure contracts from big video game clients without any attempts to improve the working conditions of the artists doing that work.
Business as usual, then?
That was until last year, when Brandoville Studios shut down and the aftermath of that having happened, several employees came forwards with the most shocking allegations about the way in which they'd been treated behind closed doors.
One of those employees, a game artist called Christa Sydney, sent me a video in which she could be seen slapping her own face one hundred times. She told me this had originally been recorded at the request of her boss and as a punishment for having underperformed at work.
We would spend the next three months investigating Brandoville once again and what we uncovered here is, in my opinion, one of the worst examples of workplace abuse in the games industry to date.
This is, at times, a violent story and an upsetting one. But it's also a story in which a group of people realize that through their solidarity they possess much greater strength than the person who abused them. My hope is that by sharing this documentary with you today, that solidarity can be extended across the globe.
Because here's the other thing about this story! It should have already been one of the biggest scandals of 2024. This has already gone viral in Indonesia and there have been attempts to get this in front of the wider games industry too. But so far, almost nobody outside of SE Asia seems to realize that anything has even happened.
Why is that exactly? And if this story had unfolded within an American games studio, or a British one, would it have received such a muted response? We'll want to talk about that as well.
Anyway, this is another big investigation for us and as is always the case in these moments, we simply couldn't have managed it without the support of you, our patrons. So thanks for that and I hope you find some value in the work we've been up to here.
Watch on YouTube
Comments
Nicholas Caldwell
Ditto! This and the Roblox story are journalism at its finest.
Joshua Palmer
Superb work on this horrendous story. I've appreciated (was going to say enjoyed but that feels not quite v right with some of the stories) the channel content for a good while, but this made me join here. Have you reached out to any larger left wing media outlets (I'm thinking Novara) to try and increase the story's reach?
People Make Games
I've started to get more and more requests for this, will do! Added a link at the bottom of the post. Thanks L :)
L
Baffling to me that abuse like this could even begin and not be quickly noticed. I hope this pushes others to tell and share these stories. PMG are one of the few where every story is worth your full attention. Thank you. P.S. Please link Nebula in the post or upload directly to Patreon then link each video platform in the post above the write-up.
Charlotte KL
Yeah, it's total cult behaviour. Maybe "cult" is an overused word these days, but this literally has the hallmarks of a typical high-control environment that people in cult studies have identified. A cult can masquarade as anything -- a religion, a political movement, an acting class -- and here it's a company.
Benjamin
Thank you for this vital work! Please continue to give a voice to survivors of abuse mainstream games coverage all too willingly ignores (especially when the companies or those downstream are on a stock market).
DukePebbles
Yup, some of the abuse detailed here is almost a carbon copy of stuff you hear in cult documentaries, especially "self help" cults like NXIVM. Cherry saw her employees like her slaves.
QubaXR
It's not a company, it's a cult. Game companies outsourcing work to an abusive cult.
Anisa Sanusi
Oh shiiiiii-
Adnan Mirza
This is fantastic journalism in a world that this is type of journalism is becoming rarer. This is why I'm proud to support you guys. Amazing video production by all involved!
Luís Machado
Documentaries like these are one of the reasons why it was no brainer to support you over here - this is what journalism is all about. May investigations like these drive actual change in the industry one day.
People Make Games
Wow, what a lovely comment. Thanks so much John!
John Nolan
You guys really do your best to fill a void that desperately needs to be filled. You bring an empathy that is all too rare. I am proud to support work like this.
