Now I'm not a very big player of video games, but I am interested in them, and seeing what the games industry has been going through recently has been fascinating, if a bit saddening. Major issues of systematic harassment, exploitation of staff, corruption, and still making utterly obscene profits on top of predatory business practices. With recent legal interventions on some of these points occurring, as well as a few other recent things which I'll mention in a moment, it suddenly hit me that where the Triple-AAA games publishers are these days is very similar to where The Big Five Studios used to be before a slow-motion trainwreck of their own creation mangled them across the 1940s and 50s. So it's time to also dust off my "Lessons Not Learned" title, for not a look at a film going wrong, but close to the entire US film industry going wrong, and how we can see a few parallels with things happening in the games industry today.
Best way I could think of illustrating old cinema and modern video games at the same time.
The Fall of Golden Age Hollywood
It's safe to say that, whilst the term "Hollywood" is still generally applied to talking about big films these days, you tend to think of Hollywood in terms of the US motion picture industry in the first half of the twentieth century. That was when the glamour, the prestige, the excess, all was on display, and where/when many titles that still influence whole genres to this day were made. Now most of the output of this time was controlled by what's now referred to as the Studio System, and most of that was by the Big Five Studios: 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Bros. If you're wondering, Universal, Columbia, and United Artists were sort of the "next rung down". The Big Five obviously got on top by making all the best films, right? Well, whilst good flicks were made under them, actually no; they got big thanks to some very unscrupulous business tactics.
It was appropriate that Warner Bros. were making a lot of gangster pictures at this time; it's practically how Jack Warner was running the place!
Firstly, there was Block Booking. So a studio has a big film to sell for cinema exhibition; the thing was the cinemas couldn't just get that one, they had to get a package of material to go with it; filler material, short comedies, animations, serials, and even whole other movies. This is incidentally where the term B-Movies comes from; the big glossy productions that the studio went all out on producing were the A-Pictures, the B-Movies were the quick and nasty (for the most part; some gems were still made under these conditions!) stuff that was really there to pad out the package, so that cinemas would have to pay more. That's like going into HMV to buy a copy of the latest Marvel Film, only to be told that to do so, you had to also pay an extra twenty quid for a box full of random DVDs, and you don't even get to know what DVDs they are first.
Wanna buy the probable Oscar winner? Gotta buy this too, see!
Why did cinemas agree to it? Well partially it was down to the fact that it was the only way to get the films they wanted, but also because of the second big unscrupulous tactic; the Big Five studios all owned various cinemas. So not only did that mean that these cinemas had to go along with this since it was literally the bosses telling them to buy their own products, the studios also got another cut of the money from the ticket sales, and it meant lots of exclusivity for big name films to those cinemas that would be most profitable for the studios. At their height, the Big Five owned about one in six cinemas in America, and through this earned almost HALF of all the takings from films nationwide.
Dunno why I thought of this clip
Behind the cameras, there was even more shadiness; studios owned various creators under contract, working especially for them. What few of them realised though was that it was habit for the studios to interpret the time these contracts lasted for as not calendar time, but time working. So if you signed a seven year contract with Warner Bros. at the start of 1934, you weren't done when 1941 came to a close, you owed them a total of seven years work, which could take about a decade to actually achieve! And as for what you could say or do in films, the whole industry was heavily shackled by the studio's own method of internal censorship, Motion Picture Production Code, commonly called the Hays Code. Because of an earlier court ruling that cinema was a commercial venture, not an art, and therefore not protected by the First Amendment, this meant that studios could strictly dictate what subject matter could or could not be included, preventing any offence... which meant that quite a lot of filmmakers were handcuffed about discussions about real world issues like race, sexuality, religious corruption, or similar matters. All this meant that whilst the distributors and filmmakers were ruled over by an iron fist, the higher ups were raking it in.
Weird effects of the Hays Code include Tarzan and Jane having to adopt a kid, because they couldn't have one outside an official marriage. Really.
But across the 40s began a chain of dominos falling that would bring most of this crashing down. Firstly, one of the things that inspired this article was that yesterday, veteran actress Olivia De Havilland had passed away; a legendary performer, but also an important part of this story. In 1943, fed up with how Warner Bros. were using that whole thing of "the contract is for time you work" ploy to keep her away from other studios offering her more interesting roles, she, with the support of the Screen Actors' Guild, sued Warner Bros. and won. It was officially ruled that from then on, contracts were for real, calendar time only, so a major piece of leverage the film industry had over its workforce was gone overnight. This has affected contract disputes for years since, giving a lot of creators freedom, and is now known as "De Havilland's Law".
Maid Marian is done with the studio's shit!
Worse was to come for the Big Five though, with the case of United States vs. Paramount. So someone noticed how ridiculously monopolistic (oligarchic really!) the whole Block Booking and owning cinemas thing was, and a full on antitrust case was brought against them, with, as you can guess by the name of the case, Paramount getting most of the heat. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled against the studios, so block booking was dead, and they were ordered to sell of their cinemas. They did actually argue against that for a bit... until Howard Hughes, who had bought RKO right before the Supreme Court decision, went ahead and sold RKO's, which ruined all the excuses the other studios had. A further knock on effect was that now there were more independent cinemas, who understandably weren't keen on continuing to do business with the Big Five, they started importing a lot of world cinema, which of course wasn't made under the Hays Code. In 1952, there was another big Supreme Court ruling, Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson; this was in regard to the importing of the film The Miracle (part of the anthology L'Amore), and overturned that old ruling I mentioned earlier. With that, film was officially an artistic medium protected by the First Amendment, and therefore the Hays Code had no real power backing it up any more. It kept going for a while, but a decade later, that last big holdover from the Studio System was dead too.
Now by the way, this has all been a large simplification of the matter; if you want some more details on parts of this story, I recommend The Secret History of Hollywood podcast, where their seasons Bullets & Blood (all about the rise of Warner Bros. studios) and Shadows (about the works of Val Lewton) both go into some of these key shake-ups in more detail in a few episodes. There's a lot more to this story of course; more shady studio stuff, and other big impacts on the industry; for example, look up some time what Howard Hughes' running of RKO was like. Also, the fact that all of this kneecapped Hollywood just as the rise of television and the development of teenagers as a separate market were both right around the corner couldn't have helped either! But these were the big things; these rulings dismantled cornerstones of the industry as the Big Five wanted it, and within a few years the studios were shells of themselves, with some never recovering at all. It wouldn't be until the 1970s, until the birth of the Blockbuster era, that the studios would get their strength back in full.
The Lessons Not Learned
Now, what you may wonder does all of this have to do with the video games industry? Well quite frankly, I'm seeing a lot of parallels; big publishers getting a tonne of money through unsavoury practices. The main difference is that whilst with films it was extorting the exhibitors, in the games industry the practices target the consumers directly, namely matters such as microtransactions, pre-order bonuses, the $10 rule they had for a while, and the really big one, Loot Boxes. In fact with numerous countries worldwide either suggesting, or actively making legislation against loot boxes, treating them as gambling (since let's face it, that's what they are!), I think we're close to the fall point in this analogy; all it takes is for one country to really start going heavily after these tactics, and it will be the Triple-AAA games industry's US v. Paramount.
I could have filled this with Jimquisition videos, but I had to limit myself to two. Check out their videos for more on what's going on the Games Industry.
What's more, with more stories coming out about systematic sexual harassment in the industry, and the overuse of "crunch culture", I can see a case similar to The De Havilland law coming soon too, something to give games employees more protection, maybe even allowing them to fully unionise. There's an additional factor too; with today's internet, we're more aware of this going on now then the public of 1948 was aware of what was happening in the courts to the studios. That extra edge of public knowledge is going to be a major factor too. Finally, having a look at how old many of these companies (EA, Ubisoft, etc.) are, compared to how old the Big Five were when all of this happened, I'm more convinced than ever that they are about to find themselves in the same predicament. Even with the hype of a new console generation on the horizon, I look at many Triple-AAA developers, and all that comes to mind is the tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; "Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left Of Them?". I might add to that "Do they deserve to survive?" though...
One last little note, a related anecdote of mine. Many years ago I showed some friends of mine my videotape (yes, it was that long ago!) of the original The Thing From Another World. My overwhelming memory of that was at the very start, the logo appears, and one of the people in the room went "Wait; RKO was real?". Ah, to have gone from one of the Big Five, to being something people assume that Rocky Horror made up...
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