Last Friday, Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steve Allison took the stand in the Epic v. Apple court trial, walking listeners through his resume. In the late 1990s to early 2000s, he worked for video games giant Atari. Later, he spent eight years at Telltale Games before landing at Epic.

Despite storied histories of launching successful games, both Atari and Telltale are now shut down (for the most part). It’s telling that Allison, an executive with decades of experience in the games industry, witnessed multiple notable studio closures. It’s a common refrain in the video games industry that “you might have to suddenly pack your things and move across the country without notice,” as Jason Schreier, video game reporter for Bloomberg, writes in his newest book “Press Reset,” which comes out on May 11. The video games industry may be worth billions, but game studios shutter more often than you’d think.

“Press Reset” is Schreier’s second book, after “Blood Sweat and Pixels,” which published in 2017 and detailed the challenges and unpredictability of working on hit games like “Stardew Valley,” “Destiny” and “The Witcher 3.” Rather than focusing on famous games people know and love, “Press Reset” expounds on closures of video game studios like Irrational Games, the makers of “BioShock,” and 38 Studios, created by baseball player Curt Schilling, that took out a huge loan guaranteed by the state of Rhode Island.

We sat down with Schreier over Zoom to discuss layoffs, volatility in gaming and media and much more.

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you decide to write about studio closures rather than focusing on layoffs or crunch (a common industry term for working overtime in evenings and weekends) or other issues that you’ve written about before?

Jason Schreier: For all the attention we pay to crunch (which is a good thing, and excessive overtime is definitely a problem) in the games industry, it’s the volatility that drives people out. It’s the thought of having to take a new job every two years, having to move across the world, that is, first and foremost, on top of the list of issues that have driven people out of the video game industry.

What were some of the throughlines that you kept hearing when you were talking to sources for this book?

JS: The idea of burnout was one of them. I spoke to a lot of people who just left the video game industry completely burned out and move to other fields and find them more lucrative and more stable and more accommodating.

It’s not just the failures that lead to this volatility, it’s not just, “We made a bad game, all right, we’re getting shut down.” I explore a lot of these cases in the book where people are making successful games, people are swimming in money, they should be able to create a sustainable environment.

Whether it’s corporate shenanigans, or mismanagement with a CEO who loves lavish spending, there could be all sorts of reasons. These studios just shut down all the time. And it’s just a bummer to see. And I’m hoping that the publication of this book will lead to some more conversations about it. Most people I talk to feel change is necessary, something needs to be done. The question is, what is that going to look like? When is it going to happen?

When you’re describing the video game industry in your book, I couldn’t help but think about the journalism industry. Do you think there are some similarities there in terms of work conditions or volatility?

JS: Definitely.Although I will say that the thing about media journalism in general is that there’s a lot of failing business models in journalism. The ad model has just been devoured by Facebook and Google.We’ve seen a lot of media companies suffer as a result, there are a lot of media companies that just have struggled because they aren’t able to make enough money.

Whereas in video games, the revenue has just gone up and up and up and up. The latest figure I saw is [it’s a] $180 billion dollar industry. So this is an industry where a lot of people are making a lot of money, unlike media, where it’s a little more understandable when companies struggle. In games, the fact that there’s this volatility, and people are left wondering like how they’re going to feed their kids, while the industry as a whole is making obscene amounts of money, that to me is really the biggest difference between this and media or any other field that is maybe a little less lucrative.

Toward the end of your book, you talked about Zach Mumbach, a loyal Electronic Arts employee who joined straight out of high school and crunched long hours at the now defunct Visceral Games, rationalizing that hard workers like Kobe Bryant were obsessive in their pursuit of greatness. But Kobe Bryant, like the top gaming executives that Mumbach and other crunching employees were enriching, made $25 million a year and Mumbach didn’t. I thought that was a very strong anecdote.

JS: I wanted readers to come away from this book knowing the names of at least a few people and remembering at least a few of the people who are showcased in the book. For example, the chapter you mentioned tells the story of Visceral and a lot of people know what Visceral is, a lot of people know their games and the canceled Star Wars game, but not a lot of people will know who Zach Mumbach is. And I hope that they leave this book knowing exactly who he is and knowing that this is one of the many fascinating people whose life was kind of upended by the closure of Visceral. These are the people behind these closures.

You worked at Kotaku from 2012 to 2020. Has your approach to covering video games changed as you went from Kotaku to Bloomberg?

JS: What we were doing in Kotaku is very different than what I’m doing now at Bloomberg. Just because our audience is so much different, and our goals are so much different. You just write and report in a very different way. Ideally I want my parents to be able to read the article, even at Kotaku, but like at a certain point if you’re defining First Person Shooter every time you write something, then it can be a drag for the savvy gamer reader.

At Bloomberg, we’re doing a lot more contextualizing a lot more, where does this fit into the larger scheme of the video game business? Why does this matter? That sort of stuff. And so certain things that like might be a story that I would have done at Kotaku might take a very different form while I’m at Bloomberg. I’m sure you’ve experienced this from CNN to now Launcher.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s more of a focus on numbers and business when it comes to talking to a mainstream audience. I wondered if that seeped into the way that you approached your book? And is your book targeted to the baby boomer audience now?

JS: My first reader is always my wife, who is not a huge gamer, by any means. And so just making sure that it resonates with her is always a good test bed. And sometimes, I’m sure, she’ll just be nice because she wants to say nice things, but she’s generally pretty honest and can be blunt with me if I’m writing something and she’ll highlight, and then in Word, track changes, and be like, I don’t understand this, question mark, question mark, question mark. So, yeah, that’s definitely a good way of making sure that I’m writing in a way that actually is approachable to everybody.

Since you wrote this book while you were at Kotaku, were you thinking about what happened with folks resigning from Deadspin and Kotaku en masse after private equity firm Great Hill Partners bought G/O Media in 2019? Was that in the back of your mind as you were working on this book?

JS: Not really, I don’t see a ton of parallels between that stuff. Although I did add a footnote somewhere in there about G/O media.

[Editor’s note: The footnote reads “At Gawker Media, we organized in 2015, which helped protect us from potential problems when our company went bankrupt in 2016 thanks to a vengeful billionaire and we were purchased by a corporation. … In 2019, when we were sold to a private equity firm called Great Hill Partners, our union contract again ensured that we were able to keep solid health insurance and competitive salary minimums. Of course, the union couldn’t protect us from Great Hill’s other catastrophic decisions … but that’s a story for another book.”]

But no, there wasn’t a ton of parallels between that stuff and any of the stuff I was writing about, at least that I actively thought about. Maybe subconsciously, something was happening.

I wrote most of the book before that stuff happened. And then I put the finishing touches on it January, February of last year, just before the pandemic started. So not a ton of parallels there, influence there, as sad as that situation was. If anything, after that happened, I knew I wanted to go find another job, and so I had that in the back of my mind as I was finishing off the book. But no, I don’t think it’s super influential on the text itself.

Do you think the working conditions studios adopted around the pandemic have had an effect for better or worse on crunch culture and may lead to changes (again for better or worse) when people return to offices?

JS: This is what makes crunch culture so complicated. Crunch is very different when you’re at home and when you can put your kids to bed and see your family. But it can also be brutal, because you don’t have that kind of natural buffer of the commute to be like, okay, I’m leaving work now. This is my time from now on. So [working from home has] got its pros and cons. It’s very difficult to have work-life balance and separate yourself when you’re at home.

I saw a great tweet a while back, that was like, now that I’ve been in my medium screen all day, I can reward myself by watching the big screen while looking at my little screen. And that to me is like the perfect distillation of our lives and during covid. I don’t think there’s any easy answer to the question of is this better or worse for crunch culture because it’s just different. It’s like, easier to blur those boundaries, but also easier to step away for an hour and cook your own meals instead of just like relying on office Chinese food and gaining 40 pounds. Although I’m sure we’ve all gained a ton of weight during quarantine. But yeah, no, it’s tough. It’s an interesting dilemma. And I’m very curious to see how game companies treat this moving forward. I do think that more flexibility is always a really good thing for everybody. Just being able to accommodate more people’s lifestyles without having everyone have to be in the same place can only be beneficial.

When you were starting your second book, were there some things that were easier for you the second time around, like lessons that you learned?

JS: Once you finish one book, it definitely makes it feel more achievable.

I wanted to do some things that were very different in this one. For example, in the first book [“Blood, Sweat and Pixels"], the idea was for each chapter to be a self contained story. So like, you could flip to any chapter in the book that you were interested in and be like, okay, I’m gonna go read about “Diablo III.” In [“Press Reset"], I wanted them all to be more connected. And I wanted to have more of a narrative arc across the whole book and more of a story that’s like, this is one big story that is told through different vignettes.

The other common criticism that I got on the first book was that I stayed out of it too much. My approach for that book was very much fly on the wall.

The second book might have a little more edge to it. It’s a little bit clearer, where I stand on certain things. One of the funny things about “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” is that I would get all kinds of reactions. Some people were like, “Oh, my God, I will never work in the video game industry after reading this.” And then other people are like, “This makes me really want to work in the video game industry.”

That was something I wish I had done a little bit differently with the first book was make it a little bit clear that this is rough. And this is not to be glamorized. And I hope I was able to do that with the with the second one.

You hint at a way forward for game developers in the epilogue. But what do you think needs to happen for developers to be able to find stable, financially secure jobs while not crunching to the max? Is that even possible?

JS: Crunch is one issue. Stability is another issue. If you ask most people who work in games, I think most of them would say stability is a way bigger issue, because crunch is very complicated and nuanced and can take all sorts of different forms. And it’s a lot tougher to wrangle than something like stability.

The one [solution to volatility] that I think is going to be the most important and the most pressing, and most effective is people organizing and creating unions within the video game industry. It’s kind of weird that it still hasn’t happened. But the idea that workers should have a seat at the table and be able to have some sort of influence and say as to how the company that they operate moves forward, is one that is really essential. And especially when it comes to some of the mismanagement we’ve seen, and some of the problems we’ve seen, and being able to communicate to your workers.

Do you feel like Blood, Sweat and Pixels is due for an update or a sequel? Because it ends on “The Witcher 3,” from Polish games studio CD Projekt Red, which put out “Cyberpunk 2077” last year. “Cyberpunk” wasn’t very well received thanks to the massive amount of bugs and glitches it launched with on console. There’s so much to that story to document. What do you think?

JS: A lot of people ask me to just do like another book with 10 more games. And that is very uninteresting to me. I always want to be doing new things. And I’m probably going to do another book after “Press Reset,” but it’s not going to be similar to the last few. And it’s not going to be an update or continuation or anything like that. I like “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” to exist as just a snapshot in time.

Now I was actually worried when I wrote it. Not about “Cyberpunk,” but about “Destiny,” because I was telling the story of “Destiny” while “Destiny 2” was about to be released. There were all sorts of ongoing questions at the time. I wrote in the book, there are questions about Bungie and Activision’s relationship moving forward, and how long will it survive. (Which turned out to be prescient, because in 2019, that relationship came to an end.) But for that, I felt like oh, man, I’m in the middle of the story.

But I’ve actually come to appreciate it as capturing that moment in time, and that specific part of “Destiny’s” life, and it doesn’t feel to me necessary to tell the full story.

Let’s talk about the epilogue. The beginning of it mentions all the layoffs that have occurred since you started working on the book. Was it hard to stay up to date while working on this book, as the news cycle kept going and more layoffs happened?

JS: That’s something that always happens because there’s so much lead time. I mean, like I mentioned, I finished the rough draft of the book [around] last March. So we definitely had time to be editing.

The part that was extremely relevant to the pandemic is the question of remote work. One of the things that I kept hearing from people is that the worst part of a studio shutdown or getting laid off isn’t just that you lost your job. It’s that, depending where you are, you might have to move somewhere else for your new job and that can be brutal for people, especially people who have families that can’t just uproot, who have connections in whatever area they’re in. I was talking to a lot of people in Boston who worked in Irrational and a bunch of people who were at Irrational wound up just taking jobs elsewhere and in other industries, because it was too difficult to find other game studios in Boston. So that’s pretty much all they could do.

As the pandemic started, it suddenly became clear that more and more people would have to be remote, it became more of a question what are companies going to do moving forward?

That is the sort of thing where I almost wish that I could wait another year and see what happens.

Read more:

Epic vs. Apple trial documents detail Xbox’s console sale losses, Sony’s cross play deal

A year into the pandemic, game developers reflect on burnout, mental health and avoiding crunch

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