to further elaborate on a post i made on my old blog, i talked about how i think it is fundamentally unserious to focus on AI as a unique evil in the games industry especially since people mostly only care about AI use when they fear losing their cushy jobs in an american gaming company.
people make games did a whole report on this outsourcing shit btw, including info such as people overseas working 70 hours and only being paid 40, so even if you take basic yearly wages into account they're probably getting criminally underpaid in other ways.
this report includes case studies about companies Lemonsky and Brandoville, both of which engage in some serious labour violations and abuse of its workers. these are both companies that triple A game companies hire regularly.
entry level game devs in the Philippines make about 500 to 700 a month, with many of these jobs listed on this website specifically mentioning AAA outsourcing, pennies compared to what american game devs make (estimates im seeing online are about 5k a month)
here's a quote from the book Games of Empire, talking about how EA is significantly underpaying workers in vietnam for game dev jobs. it also mentions slightly above this screenshot how outsourcing can cut game dev costs from 20 to 40% -- where do you think that money is going if outsourcing is paying people competitive wages?
here's a quote about the same video game company:
Glass Egg's project work is priced at roughly 30 percent below comparable developers in the US, Europe, and Australia, however its developers earn salaries 1/10th to 1/20th their US counterparts.
this entire linked article above is pretty damning:
Many of the firm's potential recruits are initially paid just $50 a month as they complete a six- month training program. Those who are eventually hired are paid roughly $4,000 a year, where comparable US talent would earn $70,000-$100,000 (Knecht 2001). Initially only 2 in 10 trainees are offered full- time work at Glass Egg.
so these companies are not only using underpaid labour, but underpaying people even more and then not even offering them full contracts.
if you want to talk about how you don't like AI and how it relates to labour, awesome, go for it. i think ai is very easy to be used by capitalists for capitalist gain - as with everything else. HOWEVER, if you do not care about these issues in which overseas workers are being paid pennies on the dollar for your video games, i don't want to hear you fucking slobbering over the newest video game just because some western dev promised to not use ai in it!
care less about anti-ai buzzwords and care more about seriously interrogating where your video games come from. just because your favorite game company says they don't use ai doesn't mean they aren't exploiting and abusing people. ai is not a unique capitalist evil. it is a result of a system that has been abusing people.
