‘We’ve Been A Little Bit Too Romantic About The Idea That We Should Have Employees And Give People Long-term Job Security’ Is An Extraordinary Thing For A Video Games CEO To Say On Record

While we all know deep down that CEOs are monsters who would fire all of you in a heartbeat just to keep a line going up, there’s a charade most of them feel compelled to take part in where they pretend publicly to care about their workers and the lives those workers lead.

Or, at least that’s how it used to be. The last few years of turbo-charged capitalistic decline and mass layoffs in the video game industry seem to have brought that status quo into question for some. In an interview with Game Developer, Ustwo Games CEO Maria Sayans has decided that quite frankly she doesn’t need to bother with it at all anymore.

While discussing game budgets and staffing costs at Ustwo–best known as the developers of the Monument Valley series, and also as union-busters–Sayans laments the fact that her company will “never be able to achieve” the more nimble operating costs of some of their competitors “because we’re based in London and have employees with pensions and so on”.

She then goes on to say:

We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.

I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.

Ah, yes, she had it very good, but now you cannot, because that is simply the way it must be. She hates it, to be clear, but as CEO of the company the way they hire and pay people is totally out of her control, alas!