The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist

Understanding the precarious reality of videogame production beyond the corporate blockbuster studios of North America—with insights from 400+ game developers.

The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists. Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice.

Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Brendan Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production.

A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist.Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 From Videogame Industry to Videogame Fields 17
2 Videogame Production in Australia 49
3 Getting by in the Videogame Gig Economy 75
4 Enrolling Students into the Field 103
5 Embedding Gamemaking Skills 133
6 Scenes and Communities 155
7 From Videogame Field to Videogame Industries 185
Conclusion: Centering the Field of Videogame Production 209
Notes 219
References 225
Index 243“Provocative but not polemic, humorous yet deadly serious, Keogh convincingly challenges the way we talk and think about ‘the game industry.’ Anyone invested in making gams owes it to themselves to read this book.”
—David Nieborg, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Toronto
 
“Keogh asks us to rethink who makes games and why, deftly illustrating the consequences of myopically substituting ‘the industry’ for a much broader and diverse cultural field of contractors, artists, and hobbyists.”
—Jennifer R. Whitson, Associate Professor, Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada
 
“Keogh has written an empirically rich, theoretically ambitious, and altogether incredibly useful book for anyone who wants to understand videogame production as a cultural, social, and economic phenomenon.”
—Olli Sotamaa, Professor, Tampere University; coeditor of Game Production StudiesBrendan Keogh is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and a chief investigator of the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology. His books include of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames and, as coauthor, The Unity Game Engine and The Circuits of Cultural Software.