work ethic

On June 3rd, Zynga laid off 520 employees. (Coincidentally, that same day, LinkedIn sent me an automated email that Zynga was looking for a senior game designer in my city, though that posting has since been removed.)

Ramin Shokrizade — someone who’s built a small name for himself over the last decade studying monetization plans and virtual economies in multiplayer games — did not mince words in responding to the news on Gamasutra. It is his conclusion:

• That the huge influx of investor and stockholder money Zynga got by going public was not new money, but rather came mostly from investors and stockholders shifting their existing money away from other companies.
• That this loss of funding resulted in a loss of jobs at those other companies.
• That while Zynga did create new job positions using this investor influx, the company created fewer new jobs than the rest of the industry lost because it assigned them unusually high salaries to tempt talent away from competitors. Thus there was still a net positive number of layoffs.
• That employees who left existing jobs to take higher-paying positions at Zynga were fully complicit in causing those layoffs to their peers in the industry, and furthermore cannot credibly plead ignorance of that fact due to this being an issue of trivial observation and simple arithmetic.
• That, therefore, these 520 fresh ex-Zynga employees do not (and should not) have a reasonable expectation of compassion for losing their jobs.

Additionally, he claims:

• That Zynga’s market success was not due to making products that were legitimately desirable and superior to their competitors’, but by making psychologically manipulative products targeted at adults with poor impulse control and at children, and by preemptively buying out potential competing studios and talent.
• That even ignoring the layoff issue above, people who work for a coercive, unethical company such as Zynga, Monsanto, Philip Morris, or the financial agencies that caused the Great Recession create far more overall harm to the public than they personally gain.
• That anyone who took a job with Zynga made a voluntary choice that was so selfish, it flat-out cannot be justified, not even by outstanding circumstances such as being unemployed and needing to support a family.

Call it selective hearing, but this point of view hits close to home. I don’t work for Zynga, but for the past year I’ve been leading a project to make precisely the sort of game Shokrizade rails against. The ethicality of that has been bothering me for a while. It ramped up a step a couple of weeks ago when we got a new producer who, although far more technically and professionally competent than the previous one, is laser-focused on making the game more profitable.

On the one hand, someone has to do that. It’s a retail product, after all. Turning a profit is the point, and there is nothing inherently wrong with making an honest and experienced attempt at predicting whether what you make will sell for more than it cost you to create. And if it looks like it won’t — if, say, almost no one is buying a certain item, is advertising it better a steaming pile of scummy marketing deception, or is it correcting the fact that you hadn’t made that thing’s benefits clear in the first place?

On the other, my kneejerk reaction to it is that it’s scummy as hell.

I don’t know how much of that might be fatigue from being on a project that’s already run for longer than double its original six-month plan (and will hit about triple before it’s done). I don’t know how much is upbringing. I don’t know how much is legitimate conscience. I don’t trust how it all feels unpleasant from a distance but that I can see legitimate reasons for every single part of it when I think about it in isolation.