People Make Games

People Make Games
YouTube information
Channel	PeopleMakeGames
Years active	2018—present
Subscribers	525 thousand[1]
Total views	35.9 million[1]
Last updated: 3 September 2024

People Make Games (PMG) is a British investigative video game journalism YouTube channel. The channel focuses on the developers and people who make video games. People Make Games has reported on topics such as video game crunch,^[2][3] outsourcing,^[4] and worker exploitation.

The group was created by the couple^[5] Chris Bratt and Anni Sayers in 2018. They were previously both journalists working for Eurogamer. Sayers creates the graphics. Quintin Smith, a journalist from Rock Paper Shotgun, joined in 2020.^[6] The channel is viewer-funded with Patreon;^[7] in June 2022, the Patreon made US$17,409 per month.^[6] Additional funding comes from Loading Bar, a chain of bars in London and Brighton.^[8]

In a video published in August 2021, Smith accused Roblox's parent company, Roblox Corporation, of exploiting the platform's young game developers.^[9][10] Smith argues the revenue split is significantly less favourable toward developers than other video game marketplaces,^[11][12][13] and players are incentivized to keep all ingame currency, which Smith likened to scrip, on Roblox through high minimum withdrawal amounts and unfavourable exchange rates.^[14][15] In a followup video released in December 2021 titled "Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.", he further accused the platform of having child safety issues^[16][17][18] and criticized its "collectibles stock market" by likening it to gambling.^[19]

In March 2022, the channel reported on three video game studios publishing under Annapurna Interactive — Mountains, Fullbright, and Funomena. In all three cases, employees reportedly reached out to Annapurna Interactive, addressing concerns regarding abuse and a toxic work environment being created by the studio founders. In hopes of getting Annapurna Interactive to mediate, employees stated that the publisher was siding mostly with the founders in question. According to one former studio employee, representatives of Annapurna Interactive had been quoted responding that "without strong personalities, games don't get made." Bratt described these incidents as part of a greater pattern of auteur culture that can be found across the independent film and video game industry.^[20][21] Following the video, Robin Hunicke, one of the heads of Funomena, issued a Twitter apology, before stating to staff alongside Funomena co-founder Martin Middleton that there would be layoffs at Funomena and that the studio would likely close due to the video and its impact on the studio's ability to secure outside funding.^[22]

In their video titled "Making Sense of VRChat, the 'Metaverse' People Actually Like" released May 2022, PMG praised VRChat's ability to provide a social space for transgender and disabled people as well as furries, while criticising the approach of Meta Platforms to virtual reality, and its "sexless, Zuckerbergian, brand-friendly presentation".^[23][24]

In November 2022, PMG reported on skin gambling in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and argued that Valve generally avoided taking action on gambling websites using their game, thus "facilitating unregulated gambling by children".^[25]

• Game Maker's Toolkit