Nightdive VP of business development, Larry Kuperman, has announced his retirement from full-time work in the games industry. Kuperman's 25-year career in games took him from publisher Stardock to retailer GameStop, but his most defining work was with the preservation specialists at Nightdive. I had the chance to speak with Kuperman about his career and decision to retire earlier this month at the Game Developers Conference.

The technical challenge of making an old game work on new hardware is one part of the story. The other, infamously, is untangling the tightly-wound knot of IP rights restricting access to some of the classics⁠—spy shooter No One Lives Forever has proven a bit of a white whale for Nightdive, for example.

A big part of Nightdive's origin was founder Stephen Kick discovering that the rights to System Shock were held by a Midwestern insurance firm of all things. Kuperman joined the company early in its life as a specialist in this part of the process.

"There were two things that I felt were obligations that we really owed to the fans," Kuperman said of the timing for his retirement. One of them was Sin: The cult classic, deliciously '90s, Quake 2 engine shooter is getting a full remaster in Sin Reloaded.

Like with System Shock, Nightdive now owns the full rights to Sin. That meant timing was fully under Nightdive's control, but also that it went on the back burner whenever the studio had an obligation to someone else, "Because when Bethesda asks you if you want to remaster Doom, you don't have to think about that one," said Kuperman.

The other thing Kuperman wanted to see through to the end was last summer's System Shock 2 remaster⁠—which I highly recommend, by the way. The remaster was promised as a reward for Kickstarter backers of the 'Shock 1 remake⁠—also excellent⁠—all the way back in 2016, and Nightdive honored those commitments nearly a decade later.

"There were financial sacrifices," Kuperman said of this and other decisions by Nightdive. "Things that would have been more profitable had we said, 'Yeah, we said we're going to do this, but we have to charge you for it.' But we didn't do that."

The games industry was already a second act for Kuperman when he joined Stardock in 2001, so the move to Nightdive after leaving what he assumed to be a "forever job" at GameStop might constitute Act Three. "I find myself unemployed at the tender age of 57, which is a great age to make new strides in the gaming industry," Kuperman quipped.

But the recently-formed Nightdive was the second company he called when weighing a cross-country move. It turned out he and Kick shared fundamental values when it came to the medium. "We never looked at games as products," said Kuperman, attributing this to their backgrounds in the arts. "If games are art and the people that make them are artists, artwork deserves to be preserved."

One of Nightdive's innovations in recent years has been the inclusion of DVD extras-style development material with its remastered games: Trailers, concept art, documentary footage, even cut content like a lost level for Star Wars: Dark Forces. But Kuperman also touched on a melancholic note for the human history of the industry.

"If you need a whole lot from my generation, you better get it now," said Kuperman "This has been a tough year. The loss of [programmer Rebecca Heineman] really, really hurt me. It was so sudden, and she was a person so full of life.

"And then not long after, Vince [Zampella] of course⁠—I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but everybody in the industry knew him, so it impacted all of us. My friend Paul Crockett passed January 1."

Kuperman intimated that these losses partially motivated his decision to retire. But he won't be leaving the industry entirely⁠—Kuperman indicated that he still plans to be active with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), "trying to make things a little bit easier for the people that are entering [the industry]."

"If I have one parting lesson to give to the industry, it's never say die. Our industry is very forgiving, and even an old man with limited talents and a background in theater can make it," said Kuperman. "The industry has been really, really good, certainly to me, to a lot of people. I found myself without a job, in my late 50s, and things somehow managed to work out a whole lot better than I had any right to expect."

Josh Sawyer has been making games professionally for 26 years. What started as a hobby, making and playing tabletop RPGs, has grown into a storied career. Sawyer had his first position in 1999 working at Black Isle Studios, and now serves as studio design director at Obsidian, where he led development on games like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2.

And yet, Sawyer believes job security for himself as well as other devs is worse than ever before despite his current position, as well as shipping so many well-respected titles over the years,

"In 26 years, I’ve never really felt secure in a job. Even now. Less so now, actually", he tells the audience during a keynote at GCAP, a game development conference in Melbourne, Australia. "That’s actually pretty messed up" he adds, almost as though he’s realising it upon saying it out loud.

The games industry is a vastly different space than it was 26 years ago when Sawyer began. Back then, teams of developers for AAA games were usually between 15-40 people, with almost everyone branching out across different skills and, more often than not, undergoing constant crunch to deliver. Halo: Combat Evolved, for example was a team of 40, and GTA 3 was put together by a 23-person team.

Now we see games made by teams that range from one person up to potentially thousands, if modern GTAs are to be believed. But according to Sawyer, these larger teams haven’t lead to greater job security, nor even necessarily better conditions. Instead, we see more contracts and short-term work for specialists, while crunch has been replaced by mass burnout.

As Sawyer says, "Games are bigger than ever (again), baby!" And this is a huge part of the problem. Development cycles have gone from an average of between 10 months to three years in the 2000s to 5-8 years now. While not every member of the dev team will be on board for the entire cycle, those that are often wind up feeling incredibly drained by the long process.

Wages for game developers also aren’t necessarily any better than before. With remote work becoming easier, some studios are outsourcing to the cheapest bidder. This has lead to devs looking for a living wage—or healthcare when it comes to living in countries like the USA—going hungry.

But remote work hasn’t been all bad. One area Sawyer has seen change for the better is diversity, which has been improved not only by changing times but by remote accommodations.

"I didn’t work with any women developers for my first five years", he says, adding that while queer and trans folk were definitely present, finding those that had the safety and comfort to be open about it was a rarity. Even other nationalities were uncommon, which is in stark contrast to the wonderfully diverse landscape we see now.

Overall, this videogame vet painted a picture of a precarious industry, which is baffling when you consider the money it brings in. If someone like Sawyer feels less job security than he did when he first start decades ago, despite games only continuing to grow, it’s hard to imagine many developers feel particularly safe in their employment.

Current and former devs at Build A Rocket Boy (BARB)—the studio founded by former GTA producer Leslie Benzies and responsible for the disastrous MindsEye, released earlier this year—have published a scathing open letter to its leadership.

Via the Game Workers' Branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), 93 staff and ex-staff allege "systemic mistreatment, mismanagement, and mishandling of the redundancy process" by studio bosses Mark Gerhard and Leslie Benzies.

Third-person action game MindsEye was BARB's first release, and its reception was so disastrous that the actor for its protagonist thought he might never work in games again. Its failure was followed by layoffs at the studio, which the IWGB now says hit over 250 devs at the (formerly) 500-dev studio.

BARB's handling of that process is a key point of contention here. At the same time as publishing the open letter, the IWGB announced that it is filing legal charges against BARB for mishandled redundancies.

"Employees have received misinformation, been handed dismissal notices with the wrong notice periods, and been put in the wrong teams so that their performances were scored by the wrong people", reads the letter. "These and other errors have potentially resulted in the wrongful dismissal of dozens of staff members."

In addition to bungled redundancies, BARB-ers former and current allege a spate of mistreatment by studio heads. "In the four months leading up to the launch of MindsEye, [BARB execs] implemented a mandatory eight hours of overtime per week for every single employee."

In theory, this overtime was meant to be compensated to the tune of seven hours of Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) for every eight hours worked. "Many have still not been able to take this time off due to [leadership's] continued requests for extra 'high-priority' work, even after launch."

Staff also say the studio's internal communications are a shambles, and that "radical changes to the way we worked" are often made "with little or no input from those affected."

Indeed, the letter's signatories suggest that MindsEye's awful release is the culmination of this sort of mismanagement, and not—as was suggested by Benzies himself—the result of "internal and external saboteurs."

"Even before the disastrous launch of MindsEye," reads a statement from MindsEye lead analyst (now laid-off) Ben Newbon, "staff had suffered months of crunch, resulting in some horrific mental and even physical illnesses, beyond the typical widespread burnout. Studio leadership have chosen not to take responsibility for the game's failure and instead blamed saboteurs, as if individual employees or online influencers could have caused this."

In addition to the just-filed legal action, the open letter to BARB leadership demands:

1. A public apology for this mistreatment of employees and proper compensation for laid-off employees;
2. The option for remaining employees on redundancy notice to either work their notice period or take Payment in Lieu of Notice (PILON);
3. A concerted, meaningful, and documented effort to improve conditions and processes within the company, including the acknowledgement of the IWGB as a trade union;
4. A commitment to use official external partners to action any future redundancies and prevent unfair treatment.

"[BARB devs] have been routinely belittled, cheated, and manipulated by the company they dedicated years of their lives to," wrote IWGB chair Spring McparlinJones. "Through the union, these workers have been able to force the executives at BARB to respect their rights. Let this serve as a notice to other executives like Mark and Leslie: the games industry is not the Wild West anymore. You don’t get to pretend that employment laws don't apply to your company because if you do, then the union will be there to stop you."

Cards Against Humanity is a party game where the humour revolves around fill-in-the-blank statements on cards, which players then complete with taboo or offensive terms. It's a very fun game, if you get the right kind of group together, and frankly a little bit of a tonic in a world where censoriousness feels like a passion project for some.

The company behind the game has now announced Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke, a special edition where every card explains why it is funny. The reason? This makes it an "informational product" rather than a game, meaning it is "100% EXEMPT FROM DONALD TRUMP’S STUPID TARIFFS!"

I'm going to warn you in advance, in case it's not clear, that the people behind this really don't like Donald Trump. So read on at your own risk.

"Trump is Going to Fuck Christmas" opens the announcement, before going on to explain that "like a teen girl at a beauty pageant, Christmas is in grave danger because of Donald Trump.

"In stores across America, the price of toys, games, clothes, and food are skyrocketing, all thanks to our demented president and his dumbass tariffs. But what if you didn’t have to surrender a chunk of your Christmas budget to Trump and his cabinet of ass-kissers and ball-fondlers?"

Well now you can avoid that by buying Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke for Christmas. Pre-orders are live now for $25 until October 15, after which they won't make any more, and 100% of the profits go to the American Library Association in order to help fight censorship.

So for example, one card in Cards Against Humanity says "This week's mass shooting." This now comes accompanied by the following explanation: "America experiences so many mass shootings and so normalizes them that the non-specificity of this joke heightens its comedic realism. Sad fact: this card was once 'This year's mass shooting.'"

Every joke is now accompanied by an explanation of "why it's funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context." You can't play Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke, but being a "historico-philosophical analysis that is very serious and definitely not a game" gets that all-important classification of "information material" and thus means no tariffs (the cards are printed overseas). Brilliantly, the company has already obtained a ruling to this effect from US Customs and Border Patrol.

Then there's an FAQ, which contains some gems such as: "What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" Yes, Noem actually did kill her 14 month-old dog Cricket.

Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."

The only bum note is that this is not available for overseas customers: "This is an American promotion for freedom-loving, tariff-hating Americans."

This is not the first time that the Cards Against Humanity lot have picked a fight with the Trump administration. In 2017 it bought land in Texas on the Mexican border, purely to make it more difficult for Trump to build his beloved wall. Last year it sued Elon Musk for $15 million for encroaching on that same land. Like the game, it's maybe not big or clever. Sure is funny though.