Have you been following Game Journos’ exposé of shenanigans at VGChartz? It’s a tale of a site withholding payment, refusing to honor its
agreements with writers, and generally exploiting its labor force. Obviously,
as part of the labor class, this is a subject of great interest to me – not
because VGChartz’s treatment of its writers is so unusual, but rather, I believe,
because it is so common.
Let’s start with a couple of disclaimers. As a freelancer, I
can’t speak to the working conditions of full-time staff, especially at sites
that offer salaries and benefits. My experiences as a freelancer are surely not
the same as those of every other freelancer. I’m sure there are some writers
who have it better than I do, and probably many more who have it worse. I’ve
been lucky to have been able to write for awesome editors, and publications
with integrity. I’ve rarely been stiffed on payments. I love what I do, and I don’t intend to
stop doing it.
With that said: freelance game writing has got to be one of
the worst ways to make money in a developed nation. There’s no relationship
between the flat fee you accept from a publisher, and the amount of time and
effort involved in delivering the work. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an
hour. If you play a game for 25 hours, and spend another 2-3 hours writing
the review, you’d need to be paid around $200 just to make minimum wage. If you
know of a publisher who’s paying that much for a review, please put me in touch
with the editors.
Sure, not all games take that long. It’s why reviewers enjoy
reviewing downloadable titles and short AAA releases. You get paid the same fee
whether the game you played was 6 hours or 40 hours. You don’t need an MBA to
know which one is more profitable. But somebody’s got to go out there and sink
a week of their life into Skyrim,
watching their wages drop with each passing hour, knowing that the fanboys will
tear them a new one if, god forbid, they miss even the slightest detail. It doesn't matter if you love the game. Every hour you spend earning peanuts is an hour you're not doing something that earns you enough money to live on.
I’ve also found a significant difference in rates between
print publications and online publications. Online publications – the ones that
are growing, where more opportunities are – pay less than print, often much
less. It doesn’t take any less time or effort to review a game for a website
instead of a newspaper, but it is apparently half as valuable to the publisher.
Lots of people who work in the web space get pageview bonuses, which, to this
outside observer, seems a lot like a scam. Not only does it lead to garbage
link bait instead of quality content, but you can be sure that the math is
always in favor of the person paying the bonus, and not the person getting the
bonus. There’s no good way to know what the standard rates for pageview
bonuses should be, and the publishers like it that way.
What does this all mean in terms of compensation? It means
that game writers are letting themselves be exploited, and even folks who are
paid by the article are working for sweatshop wages. It’s not an exaggeration
to say that my standard rate for reviewing a game, across all publications, probably
averages $3-$4 an hour – well below the federal minimum wage. And I suspect I’m
one of the lucky ones.
But I love writing about games, and if I won the lottery
tomorrow, I’d keep doing it. In that sense, I’d write for free. The truth is
that I do write for free. Nowhere, in
the past five and a half years, have I written more words than I have for this
blog. My total earnings in that time, between Google AdSense and Amazon
Affiliates, are about $150. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I would
guess that my hourly wage for working on Insult Swordfighting is in the
hundredths of a cent, if not thousandths. That’s far less than a kid making
Nikes in Vietnam.
Look, I’m not pleading poverty here. Writing about games is
a choice for me, a luxury, and a passion. It’s something I do when I’m not at
my day job. I make a good salary; I’m better off than 99.9% of the world. But
there’s an important principle at stake here, which is that people deserve to
be compensated for their work. If someone is profiting disproportionately from
your labor, then you have a right to be angry and you have a right to demand
justice. Not that I think the owners of sites like VGChartz are lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills, only that they seem to be one of the frontrunners in a race to the bottom.
The story of videogame writing in the year 2011 is the story
of publishers who don’t care about the quality of their product, and writers
who are so eager for exposure that they take shitty deals which drive down
wages for everybody. Again: there are many great sites out there, staffed by
talented editors who care about what they do. But the marketplace for writers
is lousy, if not outright hostile. If the only viable business model is to
underpay and rip off their writers, then there is no viable business model for
these sites. I’m afraid that the malfeasance at VGChartz is the rule and not
the exception. And I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse for writers – and,
therefore, for readers.
