ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the challenges confronting game developers who work for the majors. This chapter connects the quotidian working conditions of game developers to the global structure of an industry oligopoly dominated by a handful of publishers. Researchers have enumerated three historical stages to the globalization of labour, beginning with manufacturing, service, and most recently creative labour. This chapter examines the work in the video game industry, paying particular attention to the respatialization of production, the increasing precarity of high-skilled labour, and the deteriorating working conditions. It also describes the specific practices and protocols of the productive apparatus that feeds the major game publishers, demonstrating the impact on workers and labour organizing efforts. Finally, this chapter offers a middle-range analysis that connects specific local labour conditions to the elaborate global production networks of the major game publishers. The off shoring of game production became an industry standard with the releases of the seventh- and eighth-generation game consoles.
