, senior economist and research manager at Lightcast., quality assurance coordinator at CD Projekt Red, where she works on games like"Cyberpunk 2077." Member of the Polish Gamedev Workers Union.MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Video games. You probably play them, right? If not you, I will bet that someone very close to you does, because more than 3 billion people around the world do, according to the Amsterdam based data firm Newzoo. And the games vary wonderfully and wildly.
Star Wars Hunters, I should say. That's the full name. And that was at the company Zynga. Dianna, welcome to you.CHAKRABARTI: I'm not really an intense gamer, but I have been watching in awe as the industry has been growing since those early Mario days, which I don't want to date myself by saying that, I, in fact, played that game.
LORA: Oh, I just love it. It really comes from, I think, the gem of being in theater, a bunch of creative weirdos coming together and making awesome things and putting it out into the world. It really depends on what you're making. You have the concept of these blockbuster games that need many studios, that need a lot of people and need a lot of expertise to put it out, to make the cool things that we're playing and that we're seeing and makes that, make the water shimmer and makes the character's hair flow. That all, that takes a group of people to make.
I played; I have a cycle of games that I go through cause my backlog is ridiculous. There are too many games coming out right now. So it's always a good time. Always something to do.CHAKRABARTI: What happened? I got laid off, which is the part of the industry, right? And the next thing you know, like a week later, you're being brought into a room with HR and they're like,"Hey, thanks, you've been let go for redundancy." And you're like,"Wait a minute, hold on a second. I thought we were struggling. How am I redundant?"Was it done when you got laid off or not?CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. Okay. So help me understand something. We're going to talk with a reporter who covers the gaming industry extensively in just a minute here.
So that's where you have like this, you have this sort of this disconnect of we have, where they're saying,"Record profits, lots of money is being made, lots of money being made.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Again, it seems to me that there's a relationship to the entertainment industry as a whole, right? Because we just experienced months long strikes, right? In Hollywood. Yeah. For people just trying to put their foot down and say,"Enough is enough." So looking at how that's playing out at the, in the video game industry is what we're doing this hour.