GYGO Labor: Tango Gameworks Bought, AI Troubles with SAG-AFTRA

Hey, Labor Day is this week—what a great time for another games roundup. Unless, of course, you live anywhere besides the US and Canada, where the rest of the world celebrates Labor Day on May 1st. Know your history, kids! In any case, we’ve got three headline stories this month, with the news of Tango Gameworks being revived, SAG-AFTRA waffling on their fight for video game actors, and a spotlight on the increasingly stressful working conditions at Bungie.

Because there are just too many layoff stories to count, GYGO Labor is also including the Games Industry Layoffs tracker maintained by Farkhan Noor at the top of each of these reports going forward to make sure we’re doing our due diligence on any stories not covered in larger detail here.

Here is your reminder of the ongoing genocide Israel is carrying out in Palestine. Now more than ever, as much of the Western world is attempting to move on from the genocide, we need to keep speaking about Palestine and fighting for a permanent ceasefire. If you’re in the United States and unsure where to start, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights has a great toolkit to help get you involved. Sidequest colleague Zainabb Hull’s weekly Crips for Palestine newsletter collects actions that disabled folks can take in solidarity with Palestine every week if you’re looking for another incredible resource.

Krafton Buys Hi-Fi RUSH Developers Tango Gameworks

While it can’t all be good news around here, it’s nice to have another positive story for a change. The previously shuttered Tango Gameworks has been purchased by PUBG and The Callisto Protocol publisher Krafton. It almost sounds too good to be true, but the Hi-Fi RUSH developers have indeed found a new home after Microsoft’s closure of Tango this past May. In their initial press release, Krafton mentions their intent to “to collaborate with Xbox and ZeniMax to ensure a smooth transition and maintain continuity at Tango Gameworks, allowing the talented team to continue developing the Hi-Fi RUSH IP and explore future projects.”

And by all accounts so far, Krafton is keeping true to that promise! Following this news, GameRanx (via Genki and Stephen Totilo) have confirmed that 50 workers of the 100 person team from Tango Gameworks have been re-hired, with the rest of the team likely having found new jobs elsewhere. Considering the ongoing stories of studios shuttering sometimes days after a game’s release, it’s nice to see some actual attempts to recognize the success of a development studio in a material way. Krafton’s acquisition may not save Tango’s other work, with The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo seemingly stuck under the Microsoft umbrella, but this certainly wouldn’t be the first time a studio created a “spiritual successor” in everything but name to their beloved games.

SAG-AFTRA Signs Another AI Licensing Deal, Members Aren’t Happy

Unfortunately, we turn back to a much less positive development. The SAG-AFTRA video game actors strike has not shown much sign of progress, according to a recent Deadline interview with union management. The new wrinkle that complicates this month without action comes with SAG-AFTRA announcing a deal with AI voice startup Narrativ, which licenses voices for AI replicas for digital advertisers—the deal is opt-in, meaning union members would have to choose to use the service, and would receive pension and health contributions for use of their AI-generated voice. To top it all off, executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has come under fire for remarks in a now-deleted video from the SAG-AFTRA Twitter account for suggesting that non-union workers are “of lesser quality” in discussion of the Narrativ partnership.

We’ve seen how these management deals can cause a lot of backlash from union members explicitly fighting to not have anything to do with generative AI in voice work. But the back-to-back moves within a few days by SAG-AFTRA management here have sparked considerable outrage by voice actors in and out of video games over whether their interests are protected in this most recent strike. At a time when Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann is claiming that their games “don’t really have acting,” it’s understandable that voice actors might feel frustrated with their union not taking a stronger stance.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland has since posted a follow-up statement on his personal Twitter account, but one look at the replies will tell you that this is not being received as an actual apology. While some voice actors like Jennifer Hale appear to have a stance of wanting to opt in to digital replicas like the Narrativ deal if they can get paid for their work, the sticking point of whether AI should even be a consideration when hiring union talent is an ongoing discussion unlikely to see a resolution to anytime soon.

What Is Going on at Bungie?

Between multiple scandals and layoffs in the last year, you may be wondering what exactly is happening at Destiny developer Bungie’s offices. In the last month alone, we have news of game directors being fired for repeated harassment, reports of CEO Pete Parsons spending over $2 million on vintage cars over two years, and 220 developers being fired just after releasing a new expansion for Destiny 2. While recent reports suggest that layoffs were already planned regardless of Destiny 2: The Final Shape‘s success, the reports from developers about entire teams being let go raise some serious eyebrows about how much the studio can afford to keep functioning with multiple projects in the pipeline.

Layoffs at Bungie have been somewhat of an undercurrent for our stories the last year, without much to highlight other than the frustration of hundreds of developers being fired after a $3.6 billion dollar company purchase from Sony. Especially when $1.2 million of that purchase was allegedly part of the deal to prevent any layoffs!

I know I just mentioned Bungie having multiple projects in the works, but a Kotaku article has confirmed that more Destiny 2 expansions and a spinoff game in the world of Destiny referred to as “Payback” have all been cancelled for the foreseeable future. When you’ve collectively laid off over 300 people in the last two years and have a CEO who spends money like Pete Parsons, I can see how that would happen.

In other news…

Red Thread Games, developers of the recently-released Dustborn, have taken a hard stance against hate and abuse being thrown at the developer in response to the game’s explicit leftist narrative and POC/queer cast. This argument doesn’t deserve any more attention other than to say that the culture war nonsense being thrown at Red Thread Games is, in fact, nonsense, and shouldn’t be entertained.

Workers at French game studio Spiders, developers behind The Technomancer and Steelrising, among other projects, are currently on strike to demand better wages, combat gender imbalance and pay gap, and improve working conditions for in-person and remote workers. Spiders management has since met with workers to discuss said issues but the strike is still moving forward.

Veteran games journalist Brendan Sinclair has published a new edition of his annual write-up on the use of conflict minerals in the games industry, I can’t recommend this piece enough if you have any interest in the forced labor often responsible for most of the gaming electronics we use today.

The Stop Killing Games initiative aimed at preventing online multiplayer games from being rendered unplayable by their developers may actually have a chance at becoming law,. The petition requests one million signatures from European Union citizens as part of the “European Citizens Initiative.”

In an interview that feels tailor-made for this segment, Valve’s former economist in residence (what a title) Yanis Varoufakis spoke to Aftermath about how “technofeudalism” has largely replaced capitalism, reflected in the work he made possible at Valve.

And finally, we have an update from last month’s news of publisher Humble Games effectively closing, with indie developers Squid Shock Studios turning to crowdfunding for support after losing access to multiple critical systems days after releasing Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus. At the time of writing this, Squid Shock has 57 paid members on their Patreon, and we wish them the best of luck on supporting their game after launch!