Exploitation In The Gaming Industry - Modding

Reality check - The gaming industry’s exploitation provides a glimpse of how many of us may be working in years to come. Oops! Not yet, modding comes to save us from that gaming Industries’ apocalypse.

For us to fully understand what’s really going on behind the scene of your beloved online games, we need to debunk the anomalies & exploitations in the gaming industries.

If you think the video gaming industry isn’t a big deal, then you're highly mistaken.  According to Statista (A German online portal for statistics), the video gaming industry is to surpass 138 billion USD by 2021. Indeed, the industry is a big deal. Globally, yearly sales rival or surpass those of Hollywood.

Figure 1: Screenshot from Statista.com

Exploitation Behind The Scene of Gaming Industries

Have you heard of overworked? Yes! It’s a common practice among Gaming Industries; they will make you think and feel it’s leverage working for their company and doing something great in the gaming industry.

First, they will exploit your dream – being hired in a gaming company is a big deal, maybe some of us just really curious about how our favorite online games are made off.  Fast forward, you got the job you’ll always dream of – a cool job.  Maybe in the first few months, you’ll enjoy working overtime, but later do know you’ve been working your ass off for over 80-hours a week. Because some greedy corporates exploited your dream and they highly benefited from the costs cutting. Why hire additional people when we can exploit them, it’s their dream!

The best example is the first infamous EA video gaming company’s labor practices were discussed on a national scale.

 EA is one of the most successful video game company in the world at that time was revealed (through a blog post by a software engineer’s wife, herself a game developer) as a place that insisted on permanent “crunch time,” cutting costs by insisting on up to 80-hour work weeks from employees rather than hiring more workers to make production schedules. The story broke at a time when EA was buying up small studios throughout the industry, enforcing it's particularly draconian standards on workers with little say in the matter.

You may read more of these stories from the EA Spouse blog.

The Important Role of Modding in the Gaming Industries

For over two decades, modders have made significant contributions to the evolution of the gaming industry. Some of the worlds’ most popular games such as Battle Royle, DotA, and Counter-Strike were made by modders. They also helped countless games like Minecraft, Skyrim, and The Sims expand and live on with new and exciting content for players.

But what is really modding? And why is it so essential in today's gaming industry?

Modding is the art of modifying someone’s game to create new content within that gaming world. Currently, modding is an insanely popular activity because anyone can do it, you don’t even need insane coding skills to be a modder.

What makes it more popular and fun is that it unlocks creativity, builds skills, and brings happiness to gaming communities. For many people modding is a hobby where they can create, test ideas, or tweak a game to be smarter, easier, or do amazing new things. For people looking to get into the industry, modding can be a great first step.

As you enjoy modding you are also developing your skills along the way because you are using similar or sometimes exactly the same development tools that the game developers use.

Discovering your passion and enhancing your natural gift of modding though isn’t really a job guarantee. However, modders build up a portfolio of their work overtime, which they can show to gaming studios when applying for a job.

There are a lot of modding communities out there you can google, however, if you want to see some examples you can check out ModDB and mod.io.

Overcoming Exploitation in the Gaming Industries

Is it really Modding the answer for the exploitation happening behind the scenes of the gaming industries? Yes or Maybe not. I'm not being skeptical here, I just don’t want to put this into conclusion. But one thing is for sure, modding creates another space for unprivileged individuals to work in the gaming industries. A breath of fresh air for gaming enthusiasts.

The point here is, we can all be modders – we are as essential as the people working tirelessly in the gaming company. Modding creates opportunity, builds skills, and innovates a whole new experience of video gaming.

Will it reduces exploitation? YES! But will it totally STOP the ongoing exploitation we ain’t seeing behind the scene? NO! As long as those greedy corporate bastards’ feeds on money will always disregard the welfare of their workers, and that’s the reality whether you are in the gaming industry or other industries, there will always be exploitation.