| People Make Games | |
|---|---|
 | |
| YouTube information | |
| Channel | |
| Years active | 2018—present |
| Subscribers | 497 thousand [1] |
| Total views | 33.1 million [1] |
Last updated: 9 January 2024 | |
People Make Games (PMG) is a British investigative video game journalism YouTube channel. The channel focuses on the developers and people who make video games. People Make Games has reported on topics such as video game crunch, [2] [3] outsourcing, [4] and worker exploitation.
The group was created by the couple [5] Chris Bratt and Anni Sayers in 2018, who were previously both journalists working for Eurogamer . Sayers creates the graphics. Quintin Smith, a journalist from Rock Paper Shotgun , joined in 2020. [6] The channel is viewer-funded with Patreon; [7] in June 2022, the Patreon made US$17,409 per month. [6] Additional funding comes from Loading Bar, a chain of bars in London and Brighton. [8]
In a video published in August 2021, Smith accused Roblox's parent company, Roblox Corporation, of exploiting the platform's young game developers. [9] [10] Smith argues the revenue split is significantly less favourable toward developers than other video game marketplaces, [11] [12] [13] and players are incentivized to keep all ingame currency, which Smith likened to scrip, on Roblox through high minimum withdrawal amounts and unfavourable exchange rates. [14] [15] In a followup video released in December 2021 titled "Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.", he further accused the platform of having child safety issues [16] [17] [18] and criticized its "collectibles stock market" by likening it to gambling. [19]
In March 2022, the channel reported on three video game studios publishing under Annapurna Interactive — Mountains, Fullbright, and Funomena. In all three cases, employees reportedly reached out to Annapurna Interactive, addressing concerns regarding abuse and a toxic work environment being created by the studio founders. In hopes of getting Annapurna Interactive to mediate, employees stated that the publisher was siding mostly with the founders in question. According to one former studio employee, representatives of Annapurna Interactive had been quoted responding that "without strong personalities, games don't get made." Bratt described these incidents as part of a greater pattern of auteur culture that can be found across the independent film and video game industry. [20] [21] Following the video, Robin Hunicke, one of the heads of Funomena, issued a Twitter apology, before stating to staff alongside Funomena co-founder Martin Middleton that there would be layoffs at Funomena and that the studio would likely close due to the video and its impact on the studio's ability to secure outside funding. [22]
In their video titled "Making Sense of VRChat, the "Metaverse" People Actually Like" released May 2022, PMG praised VRChat's ability to provide a social space for transgender and disabled people as well as furries, while criticising the approach of Meta Platforms to virtual reality, [23] and its "sexless, Zuckerbergian, brand-friendly presentation". [24]
In November 2022, PMG reported on skin gambling in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and argued that Valve generally avoided taking action on gambling websites using their game, thus "facilitating unregulated gambling by children". [25]
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | New York Game Awards | Best Games Journalism | Nominated | [26] |
| 2023 | Nominated | [27] | ||
| MCV/Develop Awards | Media Brand of the Year | Won | [28] | |
| The Game Awards | Content Creator of the Year | Nominated |
A video game developer is a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large business with employee responsibilities split between individual disciplines, such as programmers, designers, artists, etc. Most game development companies have video game publisher financial and usually marketing support. Self-funded developers are known as independent or indie developers and usually make indie games.
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Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corporation that allows users to program and play games created by themselves or other users. Created by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 and released in 2006, the platform hosts user-created games of multiple genres coded in the programming language Lua. For most of Roblox's history, it was relatively small, both as a platform and as a company. Roblox began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 2010s, and this growth has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Roblox Corporation is an American video game developer based in San Mateo, California. Founded in 2004 by David Baszucki and Erik Cassel, the company is the developer of Roblox, which was released in 2006. As of December 31, 2023, the company employs over 2,400 people.
Robin Hunicke is an American video game designer and producer. She is a professor of game design at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Funomena.
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Wattam is a 2019 puzzle-platform game developed by Funomena and published by Annapurna Interactive. It was designed by Keita Takahashi, better known for creating the Katamari Damacy series, and was released for PlayStation 4 and Windows on December 17.
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Annapurna Games, LLC is an American video game publisher and developer. The company is a division of Annapurna Pictures, and was founded in 2016. Notable games published by the company include Donut County, Kentucky Route Zero, Outer Wilds, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Wattam, What Remains of Edith Finch, Telling Lies, Neon White and Stray.
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Florence is an interactive story and video game developed by the Australian studio Mountains and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game was released on February 14, 2018 for iOS, on March 14, 2018 for Android, and for macOS, Nintendo Switch, and Windows on February 13, 2020.
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In the video game industry, crunch is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours. It is often used as a way to cut the costs of game development, a labour-intensive endeavour. However, it leads to negative health impacts for game developers and a decrease in the quality of their work, which drives developers out of the industry temporarily or permanently. Critics of crunch note how it has become normalized within the game-development industry, to deleterious effects for all involved. A lack of unionization on the part of game developers has often been suggested as the reason crunch exists. Organizations such as Game Workers Unite aim to fight against crunch by forcing studios to honour game developers' labour rights.
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...we've been in a relationship for nearly seven years now.