◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 31, 202019ILLUSTRATION
BY
SOPHI
GULLBRANTS
THE BOTTOM LINE Video game industry contractors frequently
work full-time hours but are denied perks such as paid holidays,
parties, and company swag offered to permanent staffers.to provide them with benefits, but the case didn’t
result in a clear precedent. “This is the Wild West,”
says William Gould IV, an emeritus law professor
at Stanford Law School and a former chairman of
the National Labor Relations Board. A pair of con-
gressmen in July introduced a bill to boost protec-
tions for contractors, but the measure hasn’t yet
made it out of committee.
The path from the headline owner of a title to the
people who write the code and draw the characters
can be convoluted. The next Call of Duty, expected
this fall, will likely break sales records; the 2018 ver-
sion, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, grossed more than
$500 million in its first three days alone, according
to Activision. Most of the work on the game is done
by separate studios owned by Activision, including a
Santa Monica company called Treyarch, which hires
contractors from Volt. Several current and former
Volt employees with Treyarch say their pay is below
$20 per hour, forcing them to work nights and week-
ends to make ends meet.
Their Volt contracts stipulate that they have no
right to their host company’s perks. “I acknowl-
edge and agree that I am not eligible to participate
in or receive any benefits under the terms of the
Company Group’s retirement plans, health plans,
vision plans, disability plans, life insurance plans,
stock option plans, or any other employee benefit
plan, policy, or procedure sponsored or maintained
by any member of the Company Group,” reads one
contract, reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Volt didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Activision says that its staffing needs fluctuate as
games are developed and that it does its best to
include agency workers in as many studio activi-
ties as it can. (After dismay over the 2018 holiday
party, Activision contractors were invited to the
2019 event, according to people familiar with the
incident.) The company says that it investigates all
complaints about unfair treatment and that fewer
than 10% of the 10,000 workers at Activision’s stu-
dios come from contracting agencies.
Efforts to shrink the role of temps have had
mixed results. In 2014, as Microsoft sought to
reduce its reliance on contractors, it instituted
an 18-month limit for contract workers to “bet-
ter protect our Microsoft IP and confidential
information,” the company said in a memo at the
time. Because it can take years to develop a video
game—the latest installment of Microsoft’s Halo
franchise has been in the works for more than four
years—progress has been disrupted by the depar-
ture of contractors at the end of their 18 months,
according to people familiar with development.
Microsoft says that it encourages external staffersto raise any concerns about their treatment and
that it will take action as needed.
The industry’s structure makes it difficult to
break out of contractor status. To get a job with a
top company requires a portfolio of contributions
to finished games, but in Japan some workers say
their agencies keep their names out of the credits
so other companies can’t poach them. One contrac-
tor who’s served as a lead for a major console game
says his agency forced him to use a different pseud-
onym in the credits of every game he worked on.
And while there are nascent efforts to forge a sense
of solidarity among workers, there are no unions
in the U.S. or Japanese video game industry—and
legions of eager people are waiting in the wings.
For Chet Faliszek, a founder of independent stu-
dio Stray Bombay Co., which is working on coop-
erative shooter games, there’s a simple solution:
Don’t use temps. As Stray Bombay has grown, he’s
resisted hiring via agencies even though it would’ve
saved him time and money. “While staffers work for
middling pay and long hours, they have the prom-
ise of bonuses and perks, many of which don’t go to
contractors,” Faliszek says. “They get a raw deal.”
�Jason Schreier, with Takashi Mochizuki“Contracting
should not
be used as
a method
to avoid
employment
expenses”● The success of Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service
heralds a big change in the way the industry sells its waresA Bottomless
Pool of Games
On Aug. 11, Microsoft Corp. posted an alert on the
Twitter account of its Halo franchise: The game’s
next installment wouldn’t be ready this fall as orig-
inally planned, with its release delayed until 2021.
A few years ago, that would have been devastat-
ing news for the team that makes the company’s
Xbox game console, which had been planning to
roll out a new model in tandem with Halo Infinite.
But the Xbox will arrive as scheduled in November,
and Microsoft is bullish about its prospects—even
though Sony Corp.’s rival PlayStation 5 will also make
its debut in the coming months, with what many