If you follow the gaming industry at all, you know that the last few years have been rough. "Survive to 2025" was a phrase going around last year due to the various layoffs, and the year before that was similar as waves of layoffs hit different companies across the industry. All that gets put under the microscope of satire in AAA Simulator.
While small studios have closed or had layoffs, more persistent has been the ongoing waves of layoffs and cancellations from AAA developers and publishers, and it is from this that the two-person team at Whitelocke Media was inspired to create a game satirizing the corporate gaming environment and industry.
Lead designer Nic Vasudeva-Barkdull was one of those people working on a game that an AAA publisher cancelled, killing the studio and leading to him being laid off at the start of 2024. This prompted plenty of job searching for him, including interviews – many of which had red flags such as requiring spec work or other problems.
“At first, I had plenty of interviews, but each with a thousand red flags. Techland made me create a quest from scratch, unpaid, just to interview for a quest designer (and apparently coder and 3D artist) position. Another studio wouldn't stop going on about how they're free of all the corporate BS and I later saw them in the headlines laying people off. And a third was an Embracer studio, enough said about that.”
It wasn’t his own search that served as the final impetus for him to make AAA Simulator. That would come from the wreckage he was seeing around the industry as a whole, though his own frustration inevitably helped fuel it, too.
“If I were to pinpoint an exact moment that compelled me to make AAA Simulator, it was when I found myself so sickened by multi-decade game veterans begging for jobs on LinkedIn, Microsoft's own corporate social media, that I couldn't even bring myself to continue my job search," he said. "I had to make a game, whether someone hired me to make one or not, and I had to do it in a way that ran opposite to everything I was seeing in the industry.”
Unlike most similar simulation games about the games industry, in AAA Simulator you aren’t picking how to make a game or what the game will do. In fact, the only direct thing you really do about the game is naming it, and your primary means of interaction is hiring or firing workers.
It started from a comment Rod Fergusson made: “These people aren't knobs and dials," he said in reference to developers. That had Vasudeva-Barkdull ponder that to the company executives, employees are in fact knobs and dials. The culture in the companies had evolved to treat the employees in these major companies that way, all to feed the goals of higher profits and share prices.
Design started with a simple slider to hire and fire people, as well as a crude profit bar that got bigger or smaller based on cost and income. Due to its status as a ubiquitous word, "hype" was quickly added as another metric that impacted sales of games.
“But that mechanic isn't any fun without something to react to, and that reaction needs consequences," Vasudeva-Barkdull said. "It was pretty natural to come to the conclusion that random events should be thrown at the player who can only solve them by hiring or firing people. It simulates a point of view where employees are knobs and dials that you can tweak for profit.”
Many of those random events are inspired by things we’ve seen happen over the past few years, as Whitelocke drew upon their experience and perspective with events over that time frame.
“As I finish up the game, I’m already going further back to EA Spouse and things like that. I’ve thought about doing #GamerGate, maybe it’s even mandatory, but it might not fit in a satisfying way. Plus, my dissertation started with #GamerGate, and I’m kind of tired of it," Vasudeva-Barkdull said.
Said dissertation is of relevance, as Vasudeva-Barkdull has a Ph.D in cultural studies, which helped inform how the team has tackled matters. His expertise, knowledge, and interest in how companies perceive the people in them all resonated with ideas he encountered like Fergusson's comment about workers being treated as knobs and levers.
It’s impacted the design process as well, as the Whitelocke team, consider things like paying contractors in other countries rather than going on Fiverr for the cheapest possible option. As Vasudeva-Barkdull shared, with a new studio, that has often meant hiring no one, and he has done most of the asset creation himself.
'The Game Industry Is a Roguelite'
One other aspect of AAA Simulator that is easy to miss at first glance is that it’s actually a roguelite, as eventually, as seems to fit the current state of capitalism, you will fail to make the line of profit go up enough to satisfy your investors. When that happens, your family bails you out, and you get to start again. When I asked Vasudeva-Barkdull about it, he had a fair bit to share with me regarding the design and how it reflects the games industry.
“I realized the game industry is a roguelite. Just look at the Wikipedia for someone like Lars Wingefors. It tells the story of someone failing up in cycles, rebuying, rebranding, resurrecting the name Nordic as it goes bust over and over. He's out at Embracer now, but they're already calling themselves something else and he just keeps getting richer," he said.
"In AAA Simulator, you're a nepobaby because the parent company, some water corporation in Europe, has just bought not one but dozens of AAA studios in an acquisition. Sound familiar? Well, any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental, I insist."
Capturing this comes with the fact that the meta progression is represented in the connections you made in the form of experts. It captures the idea of failing up, in part because every time you fail you get to start over, with no consequences other than the loss of what you built.
A satirical game like AAA Simulator has plenty of opportunities to punch up, tip hats, and toss in jokes or easter eggs. Vasudeva-Barkdull's favorite of it is the Press Release card because of how it captures corporate sentiment around things like diversity. It has poor grammar, obvious insincerity, a pride flag heart, and a bit of text saying, “We support diverse!”
As our discussion was often as much about the industry as a whole as about AAA Simulator, as any discussion of this game is likely to be, I asked him about how the industry should evolve.
“That's a difficult question because it's not only up to me alone to decide that. But I think there are several viable solutions for studios depending on where they are and their particular situation. I've heard in Japan they have legal protections from mass layoffs, and that's a start. Or to cure the sickness rather than the symptoms, changes to the system can be made. Different corporate rules, or if the problem is that C-Level is acting only in the interest of shareholders, make the employees into shareholders," he said.
"It's our art, so we should own it. I can't tell anyone what to do, but I hope as we add developers to our own team, we can do it in some kind of equal partnership or co-op structure. It's not that hard to imagine a business structured less like a feudal kingdom and more like a democracy.”
AAA Simulator is currently in development with a demo available on Steam. A release date has yet to be announced.
A longtime lover of speculative fiction, in almost all its forms, Don joined TechRaptor in 2014 on a whim sending in an application as he was looking for… More about Don
