Netflix's Patriot Act Addresses Video Game Industry Labor Problems

Netflix’s Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj had its fourth season’s premiere recently with the [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

Netflix's Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj had its fourth season's premiere recently with the latest episode revolving around the video game industry. More specifically, it focused on "The Dark Side of the Video Game Industry" as the title of the episode said and touched on labor practices, working conditions, and company culture within massive game studios like Telltale Games, Epic Games, and Riot Games. Hasan interviewed people who either used to work with some of these studios or did their own reporting on them to shed some light on this part of the industry that's not talked about nearly as much as the massive revenues covered at the start of the above video.

After setting the stage for viewers who might not know as much about the industry by talking about how Fortnite is a threat to Netflix and how Red Dead Redemption 2 made an obscene amount of money, Minhaj showed an interview conducted with a former Telltale employee. He said many employees chose not to speak on-camera about the closure of the company and the layoffs that preceded it for fear of getting blacklisted, but former narrative designer Emily Grace Buck did speak on the Patriot Act and gave some insights into what it was like at Telltale the day of the layoffs.

Buck said the CEO of Telltale started off the layoff announcement meeting by making jokes to the employees and trying to make them laugh. He then told them the news and elaborated on the details of the layoffs.

"He then sat down and said 'Our journey has ended,'" Buck said. "We were getting no severance. Our health insurance was only lasting until the end of the week. They told us that we only had 30 minutes to leave the building. We were expected to leave very quickly."

Minhaj joked that Telltale sounded like a bad boyfriend, and Buck responded by saying that all games were kind of like that.

"One of the things that's scary about games though is that they're all kind of bad boyfriends and you just need to pick which kind of bad you can live with."

Minhaj also interviewed Kotaku senior reporter Cecilia D'Anastasio who worked to expose some of the inappropriate working culture within Riot Games. D'Anastasio's reports led to responses from Riot Games about its plans to change company culture.

This episode from Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and all others after it can be seen on Netflix.

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