This blog was originally going to be an overlong twitter thread in response to People Make Games' video "The Games Industry Is Failing the Working Class", and some of the discussions that ensued. The more i talked about it with friends and the more i felt like i needed to add more tweets, and that's just a really annoying format to read anything in, so i'm blogging it instead.

Link to People Make Games' video 'The Games Industry has a Class Problem'

People Make Games, The Games Industry has a Class Problem

The PMG video sets out to address "the class problem" of the games industry, focusing on the UK games industry specifically. It defines class via wealth, and the working class as "people who are part of a lower income bracket".

This definition of class, while oftentimes taken for granted in mainstream discourse, is distorted and leads to major shortcomings.
The video points to important issues relating to wealth as a huge barrier to entry in the games industry, but people were quick to point out that it is not actually talking about class, and even interviews a low income entrepreneur as one of its "working class" case studies while advancing that workers with comfortable incomes aren't working class.
Under capitalism, class is a framework that looks at one's relationship to capital. The working class includes any worker, ie. anyone who is hired by an employer for a non-management role. Conversely, employers have a fundamentally different relation to capital and are therefore not working class - this includes struggling solo entrepreneurs, no matter their income bracket. Instead, the framework of class deployed in the video is based around only wealth, and occasionally mentions markers like accent, clothing, cultural background, aesthetics, etc. - all dangerous tropes for reasons that i'll get into below. While class and "socio-economic background" (itself a fuzzy definition) are strongly correlated, they are not reducible to each other.

This critique was met with a defensive reaction online, and after some private discussions on the topic with friends, i'll give a stab at explaining why i agree that the class framework as outlined in this video is incorrect, and why it is an important point to raise. I'm also taking the occasion to broach some topics that came up tangentially during these discussions.

This blog is less organized than my previous ones, more of a patchwork of twitter thread drafts and repurposed text convos, bear with me.

The Critique, or "this would have been such an annoying twitter thread"

The framework of class is concerned with relationship to capital. It draws the line there, because this relationship to capital is what shapes each class' interest, and puts the working class' interest at odds with that of the owning class: the bourgeoisie.

If someone is a business owner or an entrepreneur, whether rich or not, their self-interest is automatically different from that of a worker. A worker's self interest is in confronting the employer in the wage relation to reappropriate the product of their labour. A boss' self interest is in finding an edge against the competition to make more profit, even for "small craftsperson artisan" types.
That edge can come in the form of banding up in a lobby with other entrepreneurs & employers, or finding productivity-saving tricks, like underpaying employees - including oneself in the case of small companies where the employer also works.

This is crucial because that tells us what solutions are going to be proposed to the issue. If by "fixing the class problem in the industry" we mean "entrepreneurs who are poor", the solution will be another financial scheme for small business (and/or skirting labour standards).

(Employers also frequently use the fact that they're short on money as an excuse to further lower wages (or the fee that they're paying their "freelancer friend collaborators" ie employees, since misclassification plagues the industry))

The PMG video pingpongs between the two vantage points. It talks about self-employed people seeking publishing deals, and then discusses employee pay gaps (it mentions that asking for a raise is risky for poor employees but makes no mention of collective action as a solution).
Meanwhile, the video leans heavily on the current UK labour movement and strikes, with no insight on what theory of power this movement relies on (worker power and class struggle).

It's important to "discuss" class in the industry - and in the context of UK's imperialism and labour aristocracy things do get weird. But what is the call here? Begging publishers for an extra "i'm poor" box in their diversity funding charity stunts? Their sympathy??

The video rightfully points at wealth as a huge barrier to entry in the industry. It's a starting point, and i do hope this opens the door to more analysis of how poverty is created to begin with, of the astute brainworms of the indie scene & of the trashfire that is gamedev education. However, i think the superficial framework of class used in this video doesn't provide the answers we need.

None of this is an attack at the character of the people interviewed, or to deny the reality of their experience of poverty. It's about our relationship to capital, and what we end up building in response.

Supplemental material, or "my friends said i needed to explain more of the terminology"

What is the working class? Why is it a class? What's class struggle?

In a capitalist system, the working class is the largest and most diverse segment of the population, and includes anyone who sells their labour to an employer in exchange for a wage. Being part of the working class is not an inherited identity (though people born in working class families are more likely to find themselves in a working class position) and it is a transient status - you can leave and join the working class as your employment status shifts. There are also huge differences in living standards between members of the working class, which can be an obstacle to solidarity and cause issues in organizing, but they are not a primary contradiction of economic interests.
The only other "true class" under capitalism is the bourgeoisie. Under capitalism, they have opposing interests, due to their opposite relationships to capital: the working class creates value through labour, the bourgeois class extracts that value from the working class.
The middle class is not a class "in and of itself" - it is a grey area that includes both the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners, entrepreneurs, artisans - who are bourgeois but always at the edge of losing their status to competition, and constantly getting shafted by bigger finance capitalists) and workers who represent the interests of the bourgeois class in exchange for bribes like higher pay or special benefits (management positions, cops, etc).
The limits of the middle class are fuzzy, doubly so in the imperial core (see labour aristocracy below). But at the end of the day, you are working class if unions will benefit you. If union struggles do not align with your interests, you are not working class, no matter how little money is in your bank.

Class is not a moral judgement of one's character, and it is not an identity. It is a subject position, in relationship to capital.

This is not the definition of class i've heard / this is not what class means in the UK

In every single capitalist country, there have been centuries long efforts to break working class solidarity by muddying the water. Bastardizing the class framework (a tool for understanding the power and economic relations of our society) into mere "socio economic background" identity markers is one such example.
Class in the UK does have a lot of internal contradictions and mystification around the term, as in any other imperial core country, as a result of imperialism (see the point about the labour aristocracy below). But this is not a reason to accept flawed frameworks that do not help us come up with strategies for change.

Why does it matter?

This shift in understanding of class is highly detrimental to our ability to understand the fight we're having, and who our allies are. The use of identity markers (language vernacular, clothing, demeanour) as markers of class replaces an understanding based on economic relations, and the result is a false image of the working class that can be coopted easily. It is what built the contemporary imaginary of the working class as exclusively white and male, which then gets deployed for the interests of the petty bourgeoisie - a recent example of this was the truckers' convoy in Canada, where small trucking company owners posed as working class truckers; or some of the ways in which the movement of the yellow vests in france was recuperated by white reactionaries pretending to represent the working class with their racism.
To come back to the PMG video, the issue with presenting an indie entrepreneur and workers asking for pay raises in studios on the same level is that the interest of those two subject positions are in direct opposition, as a result of their class position. Legal frameworks that raise wages across the board, or that enforce labour law more strongly and ask for extra paperwork and due diligence from employers and studio owners, would be detrimental to an entrepreneur!

About the labour aristocracy

Workers who are citizens of imperial core countries (old and new colonizers) have relatively better living conditions as a direct result of the more intense exploitation of workers in the periphery or 'third world'. They come in the form of cheaper products across the board, welfare programs and public infrastructure, pensions & savings, all-powerful visas, etc. These benefits bribe the working class of imperial core countries into complicity with the local bourgeoisie, and prevent the identification of the working class with its own interest.
This set of bribes is extended more generously when business is good, but retracted as soon as capitalism enters a crisis - like we're seeing now, with decades of austerity only accelerating into a privatization craze that threatens all public welfare across the imperial core.
The result of this phenomenon is a working class in the imperial core that has conflicting interests, where some elements can easily veer into racist colonial reaction instead of international working class solidarity when shit hits the fan. It is a key part of the analysis of class struggle in the imperial core and does complicate the basic framework, but it doesn't undo the premise.

What about freelancers, contractors? The unemployed??

Most of the times these questions are asked as concern trolling rather than in good faith, and not worth getting in the weeds about. For those wondering in good faith though:

Am i EVIL if i want to make my own game and put it on Steam?

One's class position is not a commentary on their character as a human (though how long you spend in a given class position does shape your values and world outlook). The instinct to ascribe moral qualities to the analysis of classes and class position is counterproductive, and actively harmful in many cases - like the one we're discussing here. If you are in the position of a scrappy indie entrepreneur, your self-interest is in conflict with the working class. This does not make you a bad person, BUT it is something to confront with clear eyes when it comes to your participation in the struggle. When push comes to shove, you need to be ready to act against your own interest, if you really are on the side of the working class.

What about worker cooperatives?

This is more of an aside, but worker cooperatives are a compromise that puts worker-owners in an intermediary position: as workers with democratic control over their workplace, they are individually workers, but the cooperative is still in competition with other capitalist ventures and operating like a small capitalist. The crucial difference with a private company is that workers get to discuss the contradiction between the interests of the studio, and their own interests - and come to an agreement that is collectively negotiated, rather than a balance between wages and profits imposed from the top.
More contradictions of that kind can arise as well if the cooperative hires temporary collaborators as employees or contractors. The contradictions of the capitalist economic system do not magically go away in a cooperative. But as workers, being in a situation where these contradictions can be discussed and confronted with their interests taken into account is always a net positive compared to a privately owned company, so this can't be used as a blanket argument against the worker cooperative movement.

Something i didn't get the time to look into are the statistics in the video about what percentage of the games industry comes from relatively wealthier backgrounds. I wonder to which extent these stats include QA farms, which are the segment of the industry that pays people the least, and where the most labour agitation is happening at the moment. Keywords has several studios in the UK.
The 2020 Ukie census that the stats in the video come from had a sample of industry workers that represented programmers the most at 21%, while QA only represented 8% of the sample group.
It would be interesting to compare that against other stats about the breakdown of roles in the UK games industry, to check whether there might be a blind spot in the survey around QA jobs.

Assuming this 8% is representative of the UK games industry, then it means that the UK industry's reliance on outsourced foreign labour for low paying jobs like QA must be part of the conversation (as well as other frequently outsourced underpaid jobs like localisation, which only accounts for 2% of the sample in the study (!)).
This question is important even in the case of small indie entrepreneurs like the ones interviewed in the video, because small publishers also contract these big QA outsourcing farms to run QA on small indie productions - and the low wages of QA workers in these environments are the key to how these publishers can afford QA on small titles to begin with.