I was reading an article about recruitment at Blizzard, which talks about how lousy an industry this is to work for: Low job security, long hours, low pay. Not just the people who make games, but also the attached industries, for example the people who talk or write about games. And the official numbers just cover those who "made it", that is who have a job contract with a game company or news outlet. That is just the tip of the iceberg: There are many more people who either make games or report on games without having a contract.

An economists view of the situation is very simple: There are far too many people who would love a job related to games, and far too few jobs on offer. The reason there aren't more jobs is that we are already in a situation of oversupply of the market, there are too many games around. So the laws of supply and demand drive down the prices for games, and then drive down what the industry can pay to the people making games. There are people who love games so much that they are perfectly willing to work a game-related job or perform a job-like activity for free. Me for example. My income from donations to this blog in 2014? $25.14. I'm clearly not doing this for the money.

There is a word for people who work out of love, from the Latin word for lover, "amator". They are called amateurs. The word has both positive and negative connotations. If I work out of love, unpaid, and not in any way controlled by an organization, my standards might be not as high as those who work for money, the "professionals". On the other hand in other aspects my standards might be higher, because I am not worried about the commercial impact of my decisions. An amateur creating a game out of love would have the freedom to make the game he thinks is best, and not be pushed towards the middle of the road by some marketing types. An amateur reviewing a game doesn't have to worry losing advertising income from the game company.

I don't believe in things being black & white. Almost always everything is somewhere on a grayscale. I'm not 100% an amateur, because I have those $25 income from donations. And many of the people making games or reporting on games are part amateur, part professionals as well, being either low paid, or part-time employed, or freelancing.

Now there has been a lot of hate going around lately, accusing many of the people involved in making games or reporting about games of having a lack of professional standards. There has been talk of corruption. And just like so much else in this industry, even the corruption appears to be somewhat amateurish. The sums being discussed are one extreme case of $200 Nexus tablets, more commonly swag bags of under $50 value, and $10/month Patreon donations. Even a Nigerian minor border official makes more corrupt money than that.

Now personally I get e-mails every week asking me to put up some advertising or to promote some product in exchange for some money. And I always say no, there are no advertisements or paid-for promotions on my blog. The only deal I accept is reviewing a free copy of a game or product, and even there I only agree if I already had some interest in the product in the first place. If I would never buy a game, I wouldn't review it either, even if I got the review copy for free. Now I am very much on the amateur end of the scale, but I've been to a Blizzard convention with a press pass around my neck and went home with a swag bag. Actually I went home with THREE swag bags, because my wife and me had first bought tickets to the convention before getting a free ticket, and each ticket gave you the right to one of those swag bags. And you could say that these bags had some value, because there was a code inside for a WoW pet, and those codes sold for some money on EBay. Me and my wife used ours and gave away the third code to a friend.

Because ultimately, if you do something out of love, you aren't all that interested in the money. I cherished the press pass as a symbol of recognition of my work, but I didn't give a damn about the monetary value of the free ticket and swag bag. And so if I hear the story of the indie game developer who is flat mate with a freelance game journalist, I don't see corruption. I see two adults who earn so little money that they have to share a flat, who both love games, and who share a certain enthusiasm about games. If would be extremely weird if in that situation the guy who is programming a game at home because his company can't afford an office ISN'T showing his game to his flatmate.

While I am not 100% convinced that an adversarial relation between game developers and game writers would even be a good thing, I am pretty certain of the way we could get there: Pay both of them a decent salary. Which isn't going to happen as long as there are so many people who love games so much that they are willing to work for free or for peanuts. To me it seems somewhat mean to first pay somebody less than a living wage and then to complain about his lack of professionalism. On the other hand we might well be on our way towards more professionalism, because all that hate is going to drive away a lot of the people who work mostly for the love of games. If we continue that hate campaign, we could see less people interested in working for free, leading to higher salaries and more professional attitudes. Just don't complain if games cost $100 then.