100 Slaps: The Breaking News The Games Industry Ignored in 2024

Hi patrons,

Thanks for bearing with us on this one. It probably won't take long for you to realize why we were a little concerned about publishing this during the middle of the holiday break.

To give you some context for what you're about to watch, this is a follow-up to a story we first published in 2021 in which we investigated the working conditions at two outsourcing studios in SE Asia. In short, we discovered that while there was some real progress being made to address the long stretches of mandatory overtime (also known as crunch) that was expected of employees at games studios in the Global North, those same discussions were not inclusive of outsourcing studios based in lower income countries.

I spoke to artists working at Lemon Sky Studios in Malaysia and Brandoville Studios in Indonesia and found a similar story unfolding at both: artists were routinely working late into the night, or over weekends, in order to complete totally unrealistic deadlines. And this overtime was, of course, also unpaid.

Anyway, we published our documentary and there was some limited discussion within the industry in response. But in the end, nothing much changed. Both Lemon Sky and Brandoville continued to secure contracts from big video game clients without any attempts to improve the working conditions of the artists doing that work.

Business as usual, then?

That was until last year, when Brandoville Studios shut down and the aftermath of that having happened, several employees came forwards with the most shocking allegations about the way in which they'd been treated behind closed doors.

One of those employees, a game artist called Christa Sydney, sent me a video in which she could be seen slapping her own face one hundred times. She told me this had originally been recorded at the request of her boss and as a punishment for having underperformed at work.

We would spend the next three months investigating Brandoville once again and what we uncovered here is, in my opinion, one of the worst examples of workplace abuse in the games industry to date.

This is, at times, a violent story and an upsetting one. But it's also a story in which a group of people realize that through their solidarity they possess much greater strength than the person who abused them. My hope is that by sharing this documentary with you today, that solidarity can be extended across the globe.

Because here's the other thing about this story! It should have already been one of the biggest scandals of 2024. This has already gone viral in Indonesia and there have been attempts to get this in front of the wider games industry too. But so far, almost nobody outside of SE Asia seems to realize that anything has even happened.

Why is that exactly? And if this story had unfolded within an American games studio, or a British one, would it have received such a muted response? We'll want to talk about that as well.

Anyway, this is another big investigation for us and as is always the case in these moments, we simply couldn't have managed it without the support of you, our patrons. So thanks for that and I hope you find some value in the work we've been up to here.

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