Latoya Peterson: "Studios are at the mercy of this house of cards that is the funding system that we've built"

15.04.2024 - 13:31 / gamesindustry.biz

At the Game Developer Conference last month, Glow Up Games co-founder and CXO Latoya Peterson contributed to a series of micro-talks around sustainability, calling out the fundamental flaws of games funding.

Peterson was talking alongside Cornerstone Interactive Studios' Lisette Titre-Montgomery, ProbablyMonsters' JC Lau, Oculus Publishing's Shana T Bryant, and Outerloop Games' Chandana Ekanayake, in a collective presentation called "The Way We Work: Embracing Human Sustainability in Game Development."

Peterson has had three careers, as she put it during her talk. She started as a writer, blogger, and radio/TV host, then transitioned into newsroom management and sports news, along the way working for the likes of Al Jazeera, ESPN, Disney, and many more, in a career spanning 20+ years. She co-founded Glow Up Games back in 2019 with Mitu Khandaker, with the studio being one of the first all-women-of-colour companies to have raised over $1.5 million in funding.

"We are seeing layoffs as the solution to cash flow problems... But in the games industry, funding is that invisible hand that is controlling labour"

She started her talk by pointing to a Mother Jones article from Hannah Levintova called 'The Smash-and-Grab Economy', looking at the real-life impact of private equity investment, how it exploits organisations, and turns them into another commodity.

"As you think about that and about the ways in which games funding is structured, you start seeing a lot of similarities," she explained. "I came from journalism, and a lot of journalism over the last ten years has been managing through downturns [and] layoffs, over and over again. I was at ESPN [for] three years and there were five distinct rounds of layoffs."

She similarly went through layoffs at Al Jazeera in 2014, coming into work one day only to realise her entire team was laid off and no one had told them.

"Of the team of 50, I was one of nine left," she recalled. "Those kinds of experiences change you. A layoff is not something that happens just on a balance sheet. It's not just numbers. It also impacts people, both those who have to leave and those who stay. And so after that, I took my career as an executive a lot more seriously, figuring that if I was going to do this, I could do this differently, that people wouldn't have to suffer the way that I saw my team suffer that day."

When she got into the games industry, she realised things were "eerily familiar," especially considering the layoffs waves over the past couple of years.

"You can see all of these different headlines coming through, where time and time again, we are seeing layoffs as the solution to cash flow problems," she said. "The argument that I'm making today is that, you know, we have this