Deprofessionalization could foster toxic behavior at indie devs

As smaller teams see bigger success, how will the game industry protect professional standards of conduct?

I regret to inform you dear readers that this week I must resurrect the cursed industry word of 2025: "deprofessionalization." As I wrote about last year, deprofessionalization refers to a phenomenon of reduced general employment in the game industry, driving out career professionals from specialized jobs as small or even solo developers show they can compete with or outperform major companies.

The phrase was coined by my former boss Simon Carless, popularized by marketing expert Ryan Rigney, and inflicted upon the masses by yours truly. It's a frustrating word. My spellchecker hates it. It's a mouthful to say. And its ambiguity creates a haziness of positive or negative impact on the industry. Some see freedom from the complications of making games in thousand-person teams. I see jobs slashed while publishers and investors hunt for the next Balatro.

But this cursed phrase crept back into my mind over the last month as I finished my reporting on sexual harassment allegations levied three indie horror publishers. As I noticed in my piece, whether or not the alleged conduct rose to the level of harassment, it all took place in a group of work environments with porous boundaries between personal and professional conduct. And it all took place in one of the biggest deprofessionalized sectors of game development: the world of indie horror games.

Why is indie horror already deprofessionalized? As companies like EA and Warner Bros. Games retreated from big-budget horror titles developers like Airdorf and David Szymanski—sometimes with support from indie publishers—have raced to satisfy the market's need for chills and thrills, blood and guts, and terrifying tales. The genre's ability to thrive without a need for high-fidelity graphics means you don't need a small army of specialized workers to make an amazing game.

That's a fantastic phenomenon. But the hairs on the back of my neck aren't rising because of creepy monsters or trips through the Backrooms. It's because even if the publishers I reported on made changes in their workplaces, there are hundreds of other teams with relaxed professional standards where inappropriate conduct could be taking place.

Why? Because of another phrase that's wormed around my mind while finishing this story: "All of this has happened before. All of it will happen again."

Sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct can occur at companies big and small. We've spent many years reporting on accusations levied against major employers like Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Riot Games. But the history of harassment at smaller studios—or even large studios before they grew to become industry juggernauts—is relevant to today's changing industry. Developers have struck out on their own for years to run their own studios with more casual work environments and escape the restrictions of corporate life.

But it's in these casual work environments where leaders need to be even more vigilant about innapropriate behavior.

Let's travel backward through time for a few noteworthy examples. In 2020, I reported on accusations of sexual harassment and racism levied at Lab Zero Games CEO Mike Zaimont. Zaimont went so far as to defend his conduct in court, with a now-settled lawsuit against some of his former employees arguing that his behavior was in line with conduct in the workplace, and inappropriate jokes were part and parcel.

Once again, let's step back from the specific accusations against Zaimont. Lab Zero was indeed a small team with a casual work environment, making games like Skullgirls that featured scantily-clad characters who occasionally sported since-removed Nazi-inspired imagery. This does not justify Zaimont's alleged behavior. But if these unprofessional jokes were tolerated in the workplace (Zaimont was the company CEO, and the one doing the tolerating), it would have seemed commonplace, and harassment might not be recognized as harassment until it's too late.

Let's dial back the clock even further to 2014. That year, game writer Jennifer Allaway published the results of a study she conducted based on interviews with game industry professionals showed that 60 percent of women in the game industry have experienced sexism, backed by anecdotes from men and women about conduct in the workplace. Several developers speaking to Allaway described how unprofessional standards in their work environments led to inappropriate conduct—like leaving porn magazines around the office—being commonplace, and often driving women from the game industry.

One developer who spoke to Allaway explicitly spotlighted her office's workplace culture as a major driver in sexism, as male colleagues excluded her from conversations to "spare" her from their inappropriate jokes. She was one of several developers speaking to Allaway who felt excluded in the workplace because of the tolerance for sexist and offensive behavior.

These comments reminded me of the story of Stevie Case, a former Ion Storm level designer whose journey through the game industry reads like a roller coaster of harassment and abuse. As she broke barriers and became a rare publicly-visible woman in the video game world, she experienced workplace harassment and exploitation from her male colleagues, many of whom were apparently comfortable groping her at industry events or loudly commenting on women's bodies.

Writer David Kushner noted that as Case rose through the ranks at Ion Storm, a report from the Dallas Observer showed the public how unprofessional and toxic the 100-person company had become. "The place where the 'designer's vision is king' has turned into a toxic mix of prima donnas and personality cults," the Observer noted at the time.

Let's make one final time jump—to the 1990s. In the early days of Blizzard Entertainment, employees forced to crunch shipping games like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Diablo turned the company offices into something of a second home. This was before the company would grow into the modern corporate juggernaut behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch. That's according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier's book Play Nice : The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. Employees bonded over beers in the workplace and soon began asking colleagues out on dates. Some of these were consensual. Others crossed the line into sexual harassment.

This all grew from a workplace culture where in its earliest days, according to Schreier, design meetings would devolve into fist-fights and shouting matches. As the company grew larger and (slightly) more corporate, it never truly evaporated.

The California lawsuit that unearthed mass accusations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Activision Blizzard that showed how unprofessional and allegedly abusive conduct persisted long past when the company established a dedicated human resources department.

There were the cubicle crawls, where women would be harassed while colleagues drank their way across the office. The abuse of lactation rooms used by working mothers at the company. The hard partying at the Cosby Suite during BlizzCon (which was named before allegations of Cosby's own sexual abuse became public).

Many of the high-profile tales surfaced after Blizzard got big—but the seeds were sown while the company was scrappy and small.

Let us not talk falsely now. Large corporate employers are not a guarunteed solution to unprofessionalism. If we need one glaring example, the 2020 allegations against Ubisoft showed how individuals at a large company could avoid accountability by being shuffled around the globe like Catholic priests accused of molestation, and that saga ended with the criminal conviction of two former executives.

On paper these larger organizations have the resources to cultivate healthy working environments and uphold professional standards. When they fail to do so, they risk inviting lawsuits from state regulators, investors, and employees. Plenty of companies have also shown they can retain respectful and professional work environments. But the brutality of the current game industry landscape shows that even when these companies release decently-successful games, their employers will still execute mass layoffs.

All that is true. But I have seen warning signs that the indie publishers I investigated are not an isolated incident. There are young Roblox developers grinding away on games while bandying edgy racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted jokes suddenly discovering the huge responsibility that comes with a hit game. There are indie developers slipping these kinds of jokes into their viral game trailers. There are college students coming out of school into a terrible job market banding together to make games who've never had any guidance on balancing professional behavior with creative freedom.

Those who become the target of these jokes will not enjoy the same creative freedom as the freewheeling creatives who let them proliferate in the workplace. They will experience increased stress, be pitted against their colleagues, and feel less able to contribute to the art of game development. Many of them will just leave, and the ones driving the toxicity will be heralded as industry-saving geniuses.

This is a dire consequence of deprofessionalization, something you can't handwave away by alluding to economics or abstract theories of labor. All of this has happened before. Does all of this have to happen again?

Bryant Francis is a writer, journalist, and narrative designer based in Boston, MA. He currently writes for Game Developer, a leading B2B publication for the video game industry. His credits include Proxy Studios' 4X strategy game Zephon, Iron Anchor Studios' Down With The Ship, and Amplitude Studio's 2017 game Endless Space 2.

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