Highlights
- Jesse Schell believes layoffs can be avoided by prioritizing stability and not putting jobs at risk.
- Schell Games has maintained a strong workforce by balancing work-for-hire projects with their own IPs.
- Schell emphasizes the importance of not living in fear of layoffs, which can negatively impact team morale.
You won’t need me to tell you how terrible 2023 and this year have been for video game industry layoffs. It seems like it’s almost a daily occurrence that a studio is being shut down somewhere, regardless, apparently, of how well their game has done. The latest victim of these mass layoffs has been Surgent Studios, creators of Tales of Kenzera: Zau, who we had the pleasure of interviewing not too long ago, who had to let over a dozen of its developers go.
It certainly feels like an inevitable tsunami, one that gushes in monstrous waves through the industry with no care or thought pattern – only mere destruction and chaos behind its driving force. But it doesn’t need to be this way, according to veteran game designer and CEO of Schell Games, Jesse Schell.
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“If You Care About Minimizing Layoffs, You Can Make It Work.”
Talking to Vikki Blake at Gamesindustry.biz, Jesse Schell has some sound advice to combat industry layoffs. Schell, who established Schell Games in 2002, hasn’t had to lay off a single employee in over 20 years and believes that layoffs don’t have to be an inevitable part of the process. Schell also thinks that the dark cloak that is blanketing many studios right now only breeds “distrust and fear” whilst also lowering team morale.
When asked how his studio has gone through over two decades without falling pray to the dreaded layoff monster, Schell said “The reason I think a lot of folks end up having layoffs is they put jobs at risk as part of the nature of doing business,” he continues, “[Studio executives] go into it saying, ‘Look, we’re gonna get this money, we’re gonna make this game. If the game is a success, then great – if the game’s not, then we’re gonna have to lay people off’. That’s just how it is.”
Schell further explains that he has seen firsthand how the prospect of layouts affects employees’ morale and the day-to-day environment, “I’ve always found it to be really toxic. I’ve been at companies where I’ve seen it happen. And you see how everybody lives in fear of what will happen next.” Going into this further, Schell passionately believes in putting people first and maintaining a strong and happy workforce, regardless of how many are at the studio.
“When somebody from the team leaves, not only have you lost that talent, but all of the experience that people have built up working with that person. But when people stay together, they get stronger over time,” says Schell. “For us, a big part of it has been prioritizing stability, and the way that we have chosen to prioritize stability is to have a mixture of work-for-hire projects combined with our own IP. This way, if one [project] isn’t going so well, we can lean more into the other.
“At the heart of it all is choosing not to put jobs at risk. We’ll put cash at risk when we make a game, but we don’t put jobs at risk. Even if our own IP brings in zero dollars, we still haven’t put any jobs at risk – we still have a path forward where we’ll be able to keep people on. So, in a lot of ways, it’s a choice.”
That’s not to say that Schell Games hasn’t experienced hard times throughout its tenure, but the CEO states that the studio made sure to use the profits accumulated by work-for-hire contracts and would reinvest in its own people to develop their own IPs. “They were not always profitable games,” but that’s okay – “we kept going.” expressed Schell. “So that’s my main advice. If you care about prioritizing [minimizing layoffs], you can make it work.”
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