00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome back to Cortex. Today, I'm joined by Jason Schreier. Jason is the lead video game reporter at Bloomberg, and he's also the author of three books, Blood, Sweat & Pixels, Press Reset, and most recently, Play Nice, the inside story of Blizzard. As you can tell, Jason writes all about video games.
00:00:17 ◼ ► If you follow the games industry at all, you will have certainly read his reporting. Jason has broken some of the biggest stories of the last decade about crunch culture, studio closures, canceled games, and what is really happening inside the companies that make the games we play. Jason's work has had real, lasting consequences, and his books have changed how a lot of people think about the industry.
00:00:41 ◼ ► Jason has these two very different writing lives running in parallel, both the daily rhythm of reporting, one of the biggest financial news organizations, and the much longer, deeper work of writing books. I want to talk about how he manages them both separately and how they intertwine. Like, how do you do these things side by side? How do you juggle them? Do the processes differ? And where? We're going to get into all of that on this episode. Please enjoy.
00:01:08 ◼ ► So, Jason, I want to get started by asking, what is the piece of equipment in your life, the device in your life that is the most important for you for getting your work done?
00:01:17 ◼ ► I would say it's my MacBook. This is probably a cliche answer, probably one you get a lot, but yeah, my MacBook Air, I started using a MacBook Air like around 2013 or so. And before that, I had been using just kind of bulkier PC laptops. And once I switched to a MacBook, and especially the MacBook Air, it was very hard to go back.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Everything about it is just very convenient for a writer. It's very light, very easy to take anywhere I need it. Keyboard is great. Trackpad is great. There has not been a better laptop form factor. And it's got 16 gigabytes of RAM. So like, more than enough or anything I could possibly need.
00:01:56 ◼ ► And yeah, it's a winner of a machine and has been. And I'm not like a big Mac person. I'm recording this on my desktop PC. But the MacBook Air has just always been it for me.
00:02:10 ◼ ► Yeah, it's just the best. And it's kind of like the iPhone in that. Although, well, no, actually, I take that back because like, I think there are some competitors to the iPhone that are just as good in a lot of different ways. But no, it's just really the standard to which everything is held. I don't know. It's like a Honda CRV or something like that. But yeah, I mean, MacBook Air is really the way to go.
00:02:32 ◼ ► So you mentioned you're a writer. For people that are maybe unfamiliar, how would you describe the core of what you do on a daily basis?
00:02:39 ◼ ► Sure. I mean, I'm a reporter and I cover the video game industry, which is a weird and wild and never not interesting industry to cover. And so my day to day is typically a lot of reporting, a lot of phone calls and a lot of writing stories and just working on ongoing projects.
00:02:58 ◼ ► And then I have a couple of side gigs. I write books on the side as well and do a podcast, which is less writing and more talking, I suppose. But it's all kind of the same skill set, I think.
00:03:09 ◼ ► I think for people who follow video game news, they're very familiar with you. What do you think people know you for primarily?
00:03:17 ◼ ► I don't know. I mean, it depends, right? I mean, some people, I think, know me from my books. Other people know me from just kind of breaking news about the industry or just kind of doing stories about what's going on behind the scenes at game companies and behind the scenes in game development.
00:03:35 ◼ ► Hopefully helping clarify for people a little bit about what it's like to make games, why it's so difficult, why it's so expensive, and answering some of the questions that hopefully help explain what's going on in the video game industry today.
00:03:54 ◼ ► It's funny. I'll tell you the story, a quick origin story, which is I always knew I wanted to be a writer and kind of fell in love with journalism in high school and was on my high school paper and whatnot.
00:04:04 ◼ ► And then after I graduated from college, I was doing some freelancing, moved back in with my parents for a little bit while I was trying to find my feet, figure out what I want to do.
00:04:13 ◼ ► I was doing some freelance journalism and I wound up covering this local zoning board meeting.
00:04:19 ◼ ► And I remember sitting in this room in this big kind of cavernous town hall type room where a bunch of old dudes on a stage with a podium were arguing over whether a fence is allowed to be 30 feet or 25 feet.
00:04:33 ◼ ► And I was just like, I can't do this anymore. I got to find something more interesting to write about.
00:04:39 ◼ ► And then just kind of fell into games thinking I would just try writing about games for a little while, see if that was interesting, maybe, and then use that as a springboard to just write about other stuff.
00:04:48 ◼ ► And then just kind of accidentally wound up turning that into a career totally with zero intentions whatsoever.
00:04:54 ◼ ► I thought that I would be doing other things, but just kind of wound up sticking with this for a lot of inexplicable reasons.
00:05:13 ◼ ► Yeah. So what happened was I was working at Kotaku for a long time, really enjoyed it, really enjoyed working for Stephen Totillo, who is the editor-in-chief and my boss and remains a very good friend of mine.
00:05:24 ◼ ► And working with a lot of the people that I worked with at Kotaku, it was a really fun place to work.
00:05:29 ◼ ► But it's been very public that Gawker Media was dissolved, smashed apart by Hulk Hogan, and then we were kind of sold.
00:05:37 ◼ ► We were owned by Univision for a few years, and then we got sold to a private equity company.
00:05:41 ◼ ► And that private equity company installed a new CEO who really just ruined the company for everybody.
00:05:48 ◼ ► He wound up destroying Deadspin, and that led a lot of people to want to leave, myself included.
00:05:54 ◼ ► And so that was the fall of 2019 is when I started looking and trying to figure out what I was going to do next.
00:06:06 ◼ ► And yeah, it seemed like an interesting place to go for a lot of reasons, but it also seemed like a new challenge.
00:06:11 ◼ ► And something that I always try to do is find new skill sets to work on or find new things to do.
00:06:21 ◼ ► And so going from a hardcore gaming enthusiast site where everybody who's reading it knows who Reggie Fils-Aimé is
00:06:29 ◼ ► and knows what the PlayStation 4 is, going to a mainstream news website where maybe your average reader
00:06:35 ◼ ► doesn't know much about the video game industry, that seemed like a really interesting challenge to me.
00:06:44 ◼ ► but one of those is that I have a weekly column or newsletter where I can kind of write about the video game industry in a more granular way
00:07:02 ◼ ► So I found a nice balance of being able to write for more of an enthusiast audience through that column
00:07:18 ◼ ► I've been here for six years now and really enjoyed it, almost as long as I was at Kotaku at this point.
00:07:24 ◼ ► Does Bloomberg, being kind of the institution that it is, give you access to more resources than you would
00:07:33 ◼ ► I mean, I see anything like legal support and stuff like that is definitely available to you.
00:07:53 ◼ ► I have a lot of editors and a lot of very talented colleagues who I can learn a lot from,
00:08:01 ◼ ► I'm part of this great team, this entertainment slash media team with a lot of really cool people,
00:08:23 ◼ ► I mean, all the areas that I care about, basically, my favorite writers are at Bloomberg,
00:08:27 ◼ ► which is between you, Lucas Shaw, and Mark Gurman, of like the people who are most connected
00:08:54 ◼ ► It's not a coincidence that like Bloomberg really looks for people who, especially people who can
00:08:58 ◼ ► break news, that's something that is very highly valued at Bloomberg is being able to get scoops,
00:09:37 ◼ ► But like, you never know if you're going to get a text from someone being like, hey, our
00:09:41 ◼ ► company just laid off 500 people or like, hey, this big new game is getting delayed or hey,
00:10:04 ◼ ► So as I'm working on bigger features, just by nature, I'm going to be talking to people.
00:10:09 ◼ ► And when I'm talking to people, I mean, I might be calling up someone for a feature about
00:10:29 ◼ ► a tip or they've heard something about another company and they just give me a tip while I'm
00:10:33 ◼ ► So the two can kind of be intertwined in that most of my job is just talking to people.
00:10:43 ◼ ► Which, by the way, this is my favorite part of being a reporter is just getting to ask people
00:10:59 ◼ ► I think that like maybe younger reporters or people are just coming up don't realize this,
00:11:04 ◼ ► but like it is impossible to do this job in a good way if you're just sending emails to
00:11:15 ◼ ► People who are a generation above me, people who are in their 50s or 60s, they would say like
00:11:32 ◼ ► There's so many different people in so many different parts of the world who are making
00:11:37 ◼ ► And I mean, sometimes I'll be on my phone, on signal, on text, like talking to people about,
00:11:44 ◼ ► But most of the time when someone reaches out to me with a tip, the first thing I'll try to
00:11:51 ◼ ► I think just having conversations out loud is so much more valuable and you get so much
00:11:59 ◼ ► And sometimes companies will come to me and be like, hey, we want to do an email interview.
00:12:07 ◼ ► With the exception of like a quick fact-checking questionnaire there, something that's a little
00:12:11 ◼ ► bit more kind of granular or very easily answerable with a yes or no, something like that, that's
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00:12:49 ◼ ► These are all stored in your FitBod gym profile, and it's going to be tracking your muscle recovery
00:13:01 ◼ ► They've analyzed billions of data points that have been fine-tuned by certified personal
00:13:09 ◼ ► They have over a thousand, and they make me feel very confident when I'm learning a new
00:13:14 ◼ ► FitBod tracks your muscle fatigue and recovery to design a well-balanced workout routine.
00:13:18 ◼ ► You're also not going to get bored because the app mixes up your workouts with new exercises,
00:13:26 ◼ ► The app is super easy to use, and it integrates with your Apple Watch, Wear OS, Smart Watch,
00:14:36 ◼ ► I had this one, since you're interested in kind of the granular details of this, I'll tell you.
00:15:26 ◼ ► I mean, I wouldn't trust that an app wouldn't be storing that file in the cloud somewhere.
00:15:33 ◼ ► So I try to take OPSEC very seriously when I'm talking to people who, like, have to stay anonymous
00:15:38 ◼ ► and are worried about their careers getting affected if they're found talking to me or something like that.
00:15:43 ◼ ► And there's something about a physical recorder that I've always just kind of relied on.
00:15:53 ◼ ► And then sometimes, especially after this recent experience of my recorder dying on me,
00:15:58 ◼ ► especially for a really important, like, once-in-a-lifetime interviews, that sort of thing,
00:16:01 ◼ ► I'll use the phone voice recorder app and then also the physical recorder at the same time.
00:16:24 ◼ ► One of the things I'm fortunate about at Bloomberg is that we're a newsroom that's global,
00:16:32 ◼ ► And so if something crazy happens over a weekend or at night, there would be someone online to handle it at all times.
00:16:42 ◼ ► If it's something related to my beat and it's really crazy, I might get looped in and they might call me and see if I'm available.
00:16:58 ◼ ► And there was a massive leak at Rockstar where like all this footage of Grand Theft Auto 6 came out.
00:17:05 ◼ ► And I got called in to help with some reporting and like verify that it was real and do a story and whatnot, even though I was on leave.
00:17:11 ◼ ► Which I was totally fine with because they called me and they said, hey, do you have a couple hours?
00:17:18 ◼ ► But it wasn't like they expected me to drop everything I was doing and just like get to a computer and write up a story.
00:17:47 ◼ ► But nobody has ever demanded me to drop everything I'm doing and like jump to a computer and break some news or anything like that.
00:17:53 ◼ ► And I guess that is a benefit than, you know, like a lot of people are starting independent sites now.
00:17:58 ◼ ► And that was kind of one of the things that I was mentioning earlier about kind of like the resources available.
00:18:04 ◼ ► Like if you were on your own, you would be the one writing it up at any time of the day.
00:18:12 ◼ ► Yeah, although counterpoint to that is if I were doing something on my own, like if I did a sub stack or something, or if I decided I'm going to get three people together, we're going to start an independent gaming news website.
00:18:21 ◼ ► I don't think there would be much purpose to being such a generalized like all purpose website that we'd have to jump on something the moment it hits.
00:18:33 ◼ ► I think if you're starting something new in 2026, you need to be able to provide value that only you can provide, which means not just doing the same stories as everybody else.
00:18:42 ◼ ► So like just to use that GTA story as an example, let's say I had a sub stack or I had an independent news site and that hit and I was on paternity leave or something, or I was on vacation, whatever.
00:18:54 ◼ ► To me, it would not be useful for me to drop everything I'm doing just to aggregate the same news that everybody else is aggregating.
00:19:04 ◼ ► I'm going to give it a beat and maybe the next day or something, I can make some calls and see what new value I can bring to the table and then do a story based on that, which doesn't have to be incredibly time sensitive and will give readers value, even if they're reading it the day after the news happened.
00:19:23 ◼ ► I think for an institution like Bloomberg that is expected by its millions of readers to have news as soon as it happens, it's kind of a different stakes.
00:19:35 ◼ ► But again, if I were starting something new, like there's no use in trying to compete with the big outlets that are hitting every news as soon as it happens.
00:19:47 ◼ ► The stories that you write, whether they be breaking or they're like longer features where you're building stuff over time, how much of this work comes from you reaching out to people to try and think of a story or people kind of reaching out to you and saying, I have something you might be interested in?
00:20:10 ◼ ► So often I will get tips from people being like, hey, this company sucks for X, Y, and Z reasons.
00:20:20 ◼ ► What often happens, a kind of typical breakdown is that someone will reach out to me and say, hey, here's a story.
00:20:25 ◼ ► I will corroborate that by then reaching out to more people who work there or connected there or who would know parts of the story or whatever it is.
00:20:36 ◼ ► And sometimes the original tip server will be like, hey, here's a list of names of people who it might be helpful to reach out to.
00:20:52 ◼ ► And so those stories can just be triggered by like something that everybody knows about and is wondering what the answer is to the question of what happened here exactly.
00:21:30 ◼ ► And I think it definitely helps that I have a long history and I've been doing this for a long time and have a long extensive body of work at this point.
00:21:37 ◼ ► And also a history of protecting sources and making sure that they can stay anonymous if they do choose to chat with me.
00:21:55 ◼ ► and I guess it just begins somehow and then just the process of you doing things properly just enforces that in others.
00:22:04 ◼ ► They have a piece of information they want to get out and they're like, I know I can trust Jason because he's so good at what he does.
00:22:17 ◼ ► All I know is like when people reach out to me with stories, I want to talk to them about their stories.
00:22:25 ◼ ► But yeah, I mean, I'm very fortunate to have that position and hopefully take the responsibility seriously.
00:22:32 ◼ ► I mean, you mentioned aggregation, like pieces of news just being the same essentially everywhere.
00:22:39 ◼ ► And it seems like over time, I think maybe social media has made this even worse, I guess.
00:23:00 ◼ ► Do you feel the need to be reserved in certain places or do you just kind of roll the punches?
00:23:08 ◼ ► I still make the mistake of saying things that get totally taken out of context and extrapolated and turned into headlines all over the internet.
00:23:24 ◼ ► It's kind of a unique internet culture problem that is just getting worse all the time because now there are also websites that are just kind of AI bots that are scraping things said by people like me and just turning them into headlines.
00:23:44 ◼ ► Part of me feels like I'm very lucky to have that problem because in the new internet era in 2026 and the kind of the current landscape, attention is a very vital part of how you do just about anything.
00:23:59 ◼ ► How you get people to read your work or listen to your work and ideally pay you money for your work.
00:24:06 ◼ ► And I'm very fortunate in that I don't really have a hard time getting attention from people because I've become a little bit of a high profile figure in this industry among certain nerdy crowds.
00:24:19 ◼ ► And so I'd rather have the problem of being taken out of context and misinterpreted than the problem of not being paid attention to at all.
00:24:33 ◼ ► Yeah, because like ultimately it's like if Jason has an opinion, we can state it as fact if we say he said it, right?
00:24:41 ◼ ► Like I think it's like that is the way that a lot of people like Jason could just say something, which is what he thinks.
00:24:47 ◼ ► But your name now carries a weight that if people just say Jason Schreier says, maybe there is no Grand Theft Auto.
00:25:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I think that like all I can do is just keep trying to do good work and like hopefully correct people when I can.
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00:27:00 ◼ ► My personal favorite being Play Nice, because I just like the continuous story, which is like, it's almost like a biography of Blizzard.
00:27:15 ◼ ► Do you have a feeling like, oh, I want to write a book about this, or do you feel like I want to write a book, what will it be about?
00:27:23 ◼ ► So, that's a very timely question, because after Play Nice was published in October of 2024, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.
00:27:33 ◼ ► And I spent, like, all of last year trying to figure out, am I going to do a story about this?
00:27:37 ◼ ► And none of the ideas really excited me, even though they might have been good stories.
00:27:43 ◼ ► And then I landed on something that I've started to get really excited about, and I think it's going to wind up being my next thing.
00:27:49 ◼ ► It won't be for a while, so I'll hold off on saying exactly what it is, but it's going to get me excited.
00:27:54 ◼ ► And I think that fundamentally is it for me, is like, you have to be really excited about an idea in order to be willing to commit the three plus years it takes to write a book about it.
00:28:10 ◼ ► I mean, for these projects, like, the way that I do books is that they're almost entirely based on firsthand reporting and interviews directly with the subjects, which means that there's a huge amount of research and interviewing that goes into them.
00:28:24 ◼ ► The writing itself, I knock out in a few months, but it's the reporting and the research that takes years potentially to do.
00:28:32 ◼ ► Just lining up interviews and scheduling them and doing them and piecing them together and then doing follow-ups and figuring out what info you need to tell your story and outlining, et cetera, et cetera.
00:28:47 ◼ ► So, yeah, for me to want to do that, it's really just about how excited I am about the idea.
00:28:54 ◼ ► I like the single-story approach better than the anthology approach, and I've enjoyed that more.
00:29:00 ◼ ► My first book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, was just a collection of 10 independent game dev stories.
00:29:07 ◼ ► And I was joking that, like, that was me writing a book on easy mode because it was just 10 mega articles instead of, like, one big coherent book.
00:29:19 ◼ ► And, well, so the reason I did that, by the way, is not necessarily because it was like, this is what I want to do as an easy on-ramp for my first book.
00:29:26 ◼ ► It was more that back then in 2016, when I sold that book, it was very difficult to get anyone to care about the idea of a video game book
00:29:36 ◼ ► because traditionally, books about gaming history and video games had not sold well, and there was very little appetite for them.
00:29:43 ◼ ► And so I figured that the way to sell it was to be like, this is going to be a book that we can just appeal to all these people by being like,
00:29:52 ◼ ► it's about Dragon Age and Uncharted and Star Wars and all these high-profile franchises.
00:30:01 ◼ ► And I think things have changed, especially for me, things have changed a lot since then.
00:30:09 ◼ ► And so I have some leeway to just be able to essentially pick what story I want to write about.
00:30:14 ◼ ► And I still have to convince my editor and my agent and be like, hey, this is why it's worth taking a stab at this.
00:30:20 ◼ ► But back then, I didn't have quite as much flexibility in what I could choose to write about.
00:30:28 ◼ ► For that book, which is essentially the history of Blizzard from its kind of beginnings to the point where the book was published,
00:30:37 ◼ ► It's kind of like the history of that company as an independent entity for as much as it was.
00:31:00 ◼ ► So originally, my plan with Play Nice was to really just kind of focus on the modern era of Blizzard
00:31:08 ◼ ► and spend a lot more time just dealing with the Blizzard Activision drama, which was kind of the crux of the story.
00:31:15 ◼ ► I mean, the way I pitched this book originally was like, hey, here's this company, Blizzard, that was beloved.
00:31:31 ◼ ► And then what happened was, well, first of all, after I sold the book, three months later, there was a massive lawsuit.
00:31:43 ◼ ► But also what happened was, I started interviewing more and more people who were there in the early days of Blizzard and just hearing their stories.
00:31:50 ◼ ► And it was so fascinating and so relevant to the story that I felt like, oh, man, I'm going to have to expand the earlier section even more than I thought I would.
00:32:05 ◼ ► One is just it was just so many good anecdotes that had never been told before that were worth sharing.
00:32:10 ◼ ► All these stories about like Blizzard getting banned from a hotel because they were drunkenly flooded a hallway and brawls in the office and smash controllers and strip clubs and all this wild stuff.
00:32:22 ◼ ► And also really good stuff, too, like stuff about the creativity and how they made these decisions for Warcraft and Starcraft, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:29 ◼ ► So that's reason number one for why I wanted to delve more into the early days of Blizzard.
00:32:33 ◼ ► But then reason number two, and this is even more important, is that narratively, I found that so much of what happened in the later days with the scandals and with the Activision takeover could be traced back to the very beginning of it all.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And so, for example, I mean, with the sexual harassment stuff and the lawsuits and the scandals and women talking about how they were mistreated at the company, a lot of that just goes back to the original culture of Blizzard, which was all dudes and some of the kind of people who grew up in that culture and how it influenced them and how it influenced the entire company.
00:33:11 ◼ ► So you really can't understand what happened in 2021 without going all the way back to 1991 and starting from there.
00:33:17 ◼ ► So the book changed a lot as I was going in ways that I didn't expect, which is part of the fun.
00:33:23 ◼ ► So you mentioned that the majority of kind of the we'll call it the book writing process is the interviewing.
00:33:29 ◼ ► Do you or are you able to use information you've previously gotten from sources or reported on or do you have to go back and speak to everybody again for the book?
00:33:42 ◼ ► So like for the Blizzard book, I had a lot of notes from just previous interviews I've done with Blizzard people.
00:33:53 ◼ ► And so I could certainly use that, but I wasn't going to quote people in a book without getting their permission to quote them.
00:33:59 ◼ ► So if I ever wanted to quote someone by name, I always got their permission before doing it in the book and had to review that with them.
00:34:09 ◼ ► So most of the interviews, well, all of the interviews that are like quoted directly in Play Nice are fresh interviews that I did for the book.
00:34:20 ◼ ► But most of the time what I did was like, let's say I talked to someone in 2018 because like I did some Kotaku reporting about Activision taking over at Blizzard and like some of the issues Blizzard was going through.
00:34:31 ◼ ► So I reached back out to some of those people and then re-interviewed some of those people for the book.
00:34:40 ◼ ► How are you arranging and organizing, like categorizing this research so you can actually use it when you write?
00:35:00 ◼ ► And I keep them in a folder that is just a bunch of names of people and each of them is a TextEdit file.
00:35:10 ◼ ► And then I open new TextEdit files and sometimes we'll cut and paste little pieces to try to connect them.
00:35:16 ◼ ► Sometimes I'll have another TextEdit file that is like a loose outline and I'll be like, oh, okay, this person will go in this chapter.
00:35:26 ◼ ► And then when I'm writing, a lot of times what I'll do is just kind of loosely arrange events in chronological order.
00:35:32 ◼ ► And then I'll pull some of the quotes that I want to use, like some of the best quotes, build around those.
00:35:39 ◼ ► It's just a very messy process that I think anyone, if they watched me do it, would just be truly horrified.
00:35:44 ◼ ► I know a lot of writers use like all these fancy programs like Scrivener and all these other kind of productivity tools, organizational tools.
00:36:04 ◼ ► Usually I'll start new Google Drive files for each chapter and then consolidate them all at the end.
00:36:45 ◼ ► Something I do a lot is I'll reread every single transcript and every single kind of interview notes file multiple times and be like, okay.
00:36:53 ◼ ► Because as I'm going through the process and as I'm writing the story, sometimes having written parts of the story and then rereading an interview, I'll be like, oh, I forgot that person told me this.
00:37:09 ◼ ► So that, I find, is a good way to do it and to just be writing and then kind of incorporating notes as I go.
00:37:16 ◼ ► Yeah, I can imagine that, you know, someone tells you something in interview one and then somebody tells you something in interview five and you didn't know that in interview one they were referencing something from here and you can kind of start pasting it together that way.
00:37:28 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a very complicated process because then also from a fact-checking point of view, I generally don't want to include anything in a story unless I've corroborated it with multiple.
00:37:39 ◼ ► And in fact, I have had to cut out giant chunks of stories and anecdotes because like I heard it from one person, but nobody else remembers it or nobody else can corroborate it.
00:37:52 ◼ ► And so throughout this process, something I'll also do is just note to myself like, okay, this piece of information was corroborated by this person, this person, and this person.
00:38:02 ◼ ► So that's the other kind of complication of it all, which again, is all part of the fun.
00:38:19 ◼ ► Just the sheer amount of storytelling you have to do and sinew you have to build and dot connecting you have to do.
00:38:28 ◼ ► The way I do these books and the way I write books in general is I don't fictionalize anything.
00:38:33 ◼ ► I think that there's a lot of nonfiction out there that is a little bit more creative, I would say.
00:38:40 ◼ ► And sometimes it's like rigorously fact-based, but sometimes it's kind of author's interpretation of stuff.
00:38:47 ◼ ► My books are a little bit more straightforward, and then I'm not trying to make it seem like I was there.
00:38:53 ◼ ► I want it to be very clear what's true and what's not, and I don't make up old dialogue.
00:38:59 ◼ ► Every quote in all of my books is something that someone actually said to me, not something that I'm pretending I heard someone say in 1995 or whatever.
00:39:08 ◼ ► You're inferring the kind of things someone might say in an experience of which they're having.
00:39:20 ◼ ► And so as a result of that, it can be very laborious and grueling to go through the whole story and realize that, oh man, I'm missing this key piece of info.
00:39:36 ◼ ► How am I going to make sure that people remember who the characters are, who the people are, and keep track of them all?
00:39:53 ◼ ► People have suggested to me over the years that I should do another Blood, Sweat, and Pixel style book where it's like a compilation of 10 development stories.
00:40:00 ◼ ► And I don't think I would ever do that again just because I wouldn't find it as challenging as doing another book that's just like a single story.
00:40:13 ◼ ► I'm glad Play Nice was your favorite of my books because it's the one I'm most proud of.
00:40:26 ◼ ► I don't know why, but I enjoy reading stories about people running businesses and like what can happen in those environments.
00:40:50 ◼ ► I mean, one of the reasons that I struggled last year to figure out what I wanted to do next is because there aren't any other companies really as fascinating as Blizzard.
00:41:01 ◼ ► So like doing another story about like another big game company just seemed like it would be less interesting than the Blizzard story.
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00:43:08 ◼ ► When you write a book, do you take time off your day job or do you try to do them concurrently?
00:43:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, so I'm very fortunate in that Bloomberg for this last book, I was able to get book leave and take off for, I believe it was three months total, although I split it up over the course of a year.
00:43:35 ◼ ► The reporting process, I mean, that's like, it might be an hour here, an hour there over the course of years.
00:43:42 ◼ ► And then I also, I had to like definitely do some nights and weekends writing as well, but I don't mind doing it.
00:43:57 ◼ ► And I'm very grateful to work for a company that is so supportive of writers and allows us to do that sort of thing.
00:44:03 ◼ ► I can imagine, you know, from their perspective, it's the kind of thing that you offer to people which keeps them around, right?
00:44:11 ◼ ► It's also beneficial, I think, for like a news organization to have writers who are doing these big prestigious projects.
00:44:20 ◼ ► So, for example, we did a big excerpt from the book in, it's like a big Bloomberg feature in Business Week magazine.
00:44:34 ◼ ► So the reporting that you do and the stories that you cover, they have sometimes pretty big consequences, right?
00:44:42 ◼ ► So it can lead to big changes in the industry, whether that being personnel changes or things like crunch, right?
00:44:48 ◼ ► I know it's a thing that you've spoken about a lot in your time, and I think you've helped kind of change the narrative on that.
00:45:13 ◼ ► I mean, something I've seen a lot on the internet, which I appreciate, is like people being like,
00:45:17 ◼ ► after I've read Blood, Sweat and Pixels, I'll never call game developers lazy again, like that sort of thing.
00:45:23 ◼ ► People understanding a little bit more about what goes into these games and what it's like to work on games.
00:45:32 ◼ ► And at the end of the day, if a company like Rockstar is changing its practices and trying to get better about mitigating crunch and overtime and trying to fix its bro culture and that sort of stuff, that is because the workers there demanded it.
00:45:48 ◼ ► And sometimes in cases like that, it's like workers will come to a reporter like me and talk about it publicly or talk about it anonymously to me and I'll share their stories and help make sure people know about it in the public.
00:46:00 ◼ ► But at the end of the day, it's the workers, it's the people who work at a company that are transforming it and speaking up and kind of talking about it internally and waging those wars internally.
00:46:16 ◼ ► Like the most effective thing that public pressure can do is just kind of bring attention to something and get people talking about it more and certainly can provide pressure on a company to want to change their ways to avoid bad headlines
00:46:29 ◼ ► But to me, what I do is more about bringing people information and telling them stories and helping them understand this world a little bit more.
00:46:43 ◼ ► The way I see my job is not like telling stories and writing articles and doing books to push for change.
00:46:52 ◼ ► My job is to do those things in order to bring information to readers and shine a light on problems for readers.
00:47:20 ◼ ► Like at the moment, one of the big stories in video games is the amount of layoffs that are occurring.
00:47:26 ◼ ► And I'm sure that you're hearing from lots of people who have just been laid off and it's how you find out that layoffs are happening.
00:47:32 ◼ ► Do you have to maintain some level of distance to be able to report that stuff efficiently?
00:47:37 ◼ ► I feel like I've had to like inure myself, had to kill my emotions in order to be able to do it.
00:47:51 ◼ ► It's the stories from people who are just like have been looking for jobs for months or years and just haven't been able to find anything.
00:48:00 ◼ ► And now have to go and like work in retail or drive Ubers or like do something that they're really well overqualified for and have no experience doing.
00:48:10 ◼ ► And they're just like totally switch careers or totally just kind of, yeah, man, it's really rough.
00:48:18 ◼ ► I've been doing this for so long and heard so many sad and horrifying stories that I do think I've become a little bit numb to it.
00:48:25 ◼ ► Which I guess you have to be if you're just kind of trying to tell these stories, but it's rough.
00:48:40 ◼ ► I don't know if that is different to how things have been in the past, but it just feels like broader pressures are just pushing in every direction.
00:48:52 ◼ ► Like the games industry, I mean, my second book, Press Reset, was all about volatility in the games industry and layoffs and studio shutdowns.
00:49:00 ◼ ► It's just that the numbers are much bigger now than they ever were, which is a little scary.
00:49:10 ◼ ► I think at that point, like when we're recording this, I mean, Epic just laid off like a thousand people.
00:49:18 ◼ ► The estimates that I've seen are some like 45,000 job cuts over the last three years or so.
00:49:31 ◼ ► And then for the people who don't get laid off, there's survivor's guilt and having to do more with less.
00:49:40 ◼ ► I mean, if there's good news, it's that the games are better than ever and there are more games, more cool games every single year.
00:49:50 ◼ ► It's like games are bigger than ever, which is why the bad stuff and the good stuff is bigger than ever.
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00:52:08 ◼ ► It really depends on the company and my history with them and the individual people who are working there.
00:52:21 ◼ ► I guess there are some people who can take the licks and understand the importance of the outlet where maybe others can't.
00:52:33 ◼ ► Like, sometimes, some years I'll be on bad terms with the company and then the next year I'll reach out to them and be like,
00:52:45 ◼ ► Something I found also is that, like, I think that comes people, one thing that hopefully they appreciate about me is that I'm never going to surprise them.
00:52:56 ◼ ► So, I'm always going to tell them exactly what I'm going to write about their company and their people.
00:53:02 ◼ ► And I always try to give them as much time as possible to respond and to provide comment and maybe get me an interview or maybe give me background information and context that I didn't have before.
00:53:16 ◼ ► And I think the comms people who are, like, willing to work with me there, I think they appreciate that.
00:53:24 ◼ ► In a previous interview I did with Casey Newton at Platformer, Casey mentioned this, too.
00:53:33 ◼ ► But you can imagine a scenario where that is making a marketing or communications person's life so much easier because they now can start planning for the thing that's about to happen to them, whether they want it to happen or not.
00:53:47 ◼ ► Like, I now know that this story is going to be in Bloomberg rather than me waking up to my boss saying, how the hell did this story get in Bloomberg?
00:53:54 ◼ ► Yeah, and nobody at Bloomberg would ever publish a story without having the company involved at the time.
00:54:01 ◼ ► Every reputable journalism outlet will always give people their writing about ample opportunity to respond and comment.
00:54:16 ◼ ► Also, the worst comes people that I've dealt with, I'll send them a request for comment and they'll just ignore it.
00:54:20 ◼ ► The best people, they'll say, hey, let me give you a call and then they'll talk it through with me and I'll explain to them exactly what I'm writing.
00:54:26 ◼ ► And maybe they won't be able to give me a comment, but maybe they'll be like, look, this thing is wrong and this thing you shouldn't do because this is YNC and we'll go back and forth.
00:54:36 ◼ ► And maybe not everything I print will be exactly what they like, but it'll help us both for it to be accurate.
00:54:48 ◼ ► And then sometimes, I mean, to this day, we publish things that like comms people disagree with the accuracy on and we stand by them and there's just still back and forth.
00:55:00 ◼ ► And yeah, like at given times, like, I don't want to get into specific companies, but like, if you had asked me this time last year, there's one company that I had a much more adversarial relationship with.
00:55:11 ◼ ► But over the last year, I've been like repairing that and talking to them and hopefully building it back up.
00:55:22 ◼ ► And the important thing for me is that like, I'm never going to let these relationships affect how I cover the companies and what I choose to cover or not.
00:55:35 ◼ ► Is that like, I might have a good relationship with the PR people at company X, but that's not going to stop me from writing something that is really going to pit them off.
00:55:44 ◼ ► And then they'll be mad at me for another few months until I reach back out and be like, hey, like, can you get over this?
00:55:52 ◼ ► Also, what I'm trying to do, like you mentioned before, despite a lot of what I do being kind of negative aspects of the industry, I'm also always reaching out to these companies and be like, hey, I want to interview your developer about their cool new game.
00:56:08 ◼ ► And a lot of them I wind up putting in my weekly column that just might be like, hey, this developer has a new game coming out from Take-Two or EA or Ubisoft or whatever.
00:56:19 ◼ ► And it doesn't necessarily have to be this like doom and gloom story for me to find it intriguing and want to write about it.
00:56:44 ◼ ► I think I would struggle with, say, somebody that I get on with pretty well, making their life harder.
00:56:57 ◼ ► I mean, like I see all of these as more professional relationships than personal relationships, which I think helps me keep a healthy distance.
00:57:07 ◼ ► Like in my personal life, most of the people that I see on a regular basis and hang out with a regular basis are not really related to the video game world.
00:57:24 ◼ ► And yeah, I mean, I think that like the best PR people understand the job and they understand that like a good reporter is not going to be just kind of holding things back just because it makes their lives harder.
00:57:40 ◼ ► I often call someone up and be like, I'm sorry that this is making your life harder, but like this is what I got to do.
00:57:52 ◼ ► There are times where you will be writing about massive successes that they're having and call them and they'll give you quotes, huge sales numbers and everyone loves it.
00:58:06 ◼ ► And like sometimes, I mean, there have been times over the last decade and a half that I've been covering the video game industry where like I've had to completely like burn a relationship and lose somebody because I wrote something that they didn't like, which is always sad and always bums me out.
00:58:21 ◼ ► But to me, as long as it's for the right reasons, it's something that I'm willing to do.
00:58:32 ◼ ► Like, I mean, just in a hypothetical situation, if you're friends with someone and they're accused on the internet of like sexual harassment or something, like it's credible accusations.
00:58:42 ◼ ► And then for someone like me or a journalist, it's taken one step further where it's like, what if you're friends with someone or friendly with someone or have like an ongoing like personal relationship with someone and they're accused of something and then you have to write about it.
00:58:54 ◼ ► So then you have to reach out to them and be like, look, like I need comment on this, et cetera, et cetera.
00:59:09 ◼ ► If it was someone I was really close to, I just would recuse myself and be like, I can't write about this person.
00:59:14 ◼ ► If it's someone who I've just been friendly with, maybe had a couple of dinners with them here or there, or like seeing them at events and stuff like that, then I would probably be like, hey, sorry, I have to write this about you.
00:59:33 ◼ ► And oftentimes, if that were to happen, it would almost certainly torture a relationship, but it is what it is.
00:59:40 ◼ ► And I mean, like, then there's the moral aspect of the complicated feelings of being like, this person was accused of something horrible.
01:00:01 ◼ ► Well, if you enjoy listening to my voice, you will enjoy it even more when my two much smarter co-hosts, Kurt Campbellton and Maddie Myers, are talking with me on the TripleClick podcast.
01:00:16 ◼ ► There's a paywall on Bloomberg, but I always post gift links to my articles to bypass the paywall on my Blue Sky and on my LinkedIn account.