Image by Rafael Juárez from Pixabay
'Institutional knowledge.' It’s a phrase that frequently rears its head when there’s talk of layoffs—and the conversation has been deafening in recent years. Big studios. Small studios. Studios that just launched games. All have been impacted by the onslaught of layoffs that has come to define the modern video game industry. The largest of these recent cuts was announced in early July, when Microsoft laid off 1,600 workers across its games business and vowed to eliminate another 1,600 employees by the end of the current fiscal year. Layoffs, as we know, are devastating for those impacted. More than a thousand people, in an instant, have their lives upended. Job loss disrupts so many aspects of life—the ability to pay rent or a mortgage, to keep life-saving insurance, a sense of stability.
But those workers being kicked to the curb aren't the only people who feel the impact. Layoffs often end up expensive and demoralizing for those who stay. Then, there's that phrase again: Institutional knowledge.
Institutional knowledge is fundamental to how video game companies operate. Yes, it includes materials documented in databases and internal files, but also the subconscious wisdom and information passed from colleague to colleague. It's the 20-year employee who knows how one finicky system works and that one person with an impossibly deep knowledge of animation systems. It can be as small as a little trick to more efficiently fix something or as big as the inner workings of key procedures. The video game industry is built on institutional knowledge in so many, often imperceptible, ways. Companies might develop their own methods and processes to run video games and multiplayer servers, manage lore, and create efficient pipelines, but it is the people within studios that internalise, improve, and become the custodians of those workflows.
"Institutional knowledge is the collective information you pick up while you’re the member of a team," senior technical producer Shayna Moon told Game Developer. "It can be something as simple as a piece of vocabulary, but also includes the 'why' behind the systems and workflows that exist on a team. It can be best practices in naming conventions, it can be a philosophy of prioritizing performance. It can be knowing the people on the team and how they work and interact together."
For example, Moon said they experienced a massive loss of institutional knowledge when shifting from production on God of War to God of War Ragnarok. Sony Interactive Entertainment laid off a team of animators from God of War during that shift, leaving those who remained facing an uphill struggle. "The animators we let go had institutional knowledge about how animation in the engine worked, how to work with the world serpent’s rig, they had a great rapport and a solid process for live action previz," Moon said. "And then the studio threw that all away and we had to reinvent the wheel for Ragnarok. Obviously Ragnarok ended up being a great game, but they crunched like crazy on it, and if they hadn’t had such severe turnover it wouldn’t have been as bad."
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If you fire the one person who knows how an important piece of your engine works, that's losing institutional knowledge. Multiply that by 1,600, and the knowledge gap becomes a yearning chasm. Video game corporations seemingly do not value institutional knowledge. Even before the past several years' of devastating waves of layoffs, studios were known to hire and fire in tandem with development cycles. Bring people in to work on a game, then cut them loose when it's done. Rinse and repeat. The layoffs over the past several years are an extension of that—but there are so few roles to hire back into nowadays.
"Studios need to invest in technical writers and archivists to preserve this kind of thing, but that doesn't directly contribute to a product so you rarely see anyone doing it"
One id Software worker told Game Developer earlier this month that Microsoft cut a big portion of the id Tech team. "The institutional knowledge [that has been lost] on the id Tech side is immense," the person said. "I cannot imagine a path forward where they make another game in id Tech."
The id Tech team works on id Software's proprietary game engine of the same name—the one that supports the likes of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. It's a foundational piece of technology that multiple ZeniMax studios have come to rely on. Now, there are far fewer people who understand how to make it purr. A current id Software employee told Aftermath in July they weren't even sure whether id Software would have the know-how to effectively patch the DLC for Doom: The Dark Ages, which was released shortly after Xbox gutted the studio.
"What was supposed to be a celebratory day after a long effort including significant crunch is now largely a day of mourning," the employee told Aftermath. "Entire teams have been gutted or even outright eliminated, with institutional knowledge lost that can't be replaced. I don't even know our ability to put out fixes for today's launch if they are needed, let alone new projects.”
Institutional knowledge means people across massive studios speaking the same language and working in synchronicity. "It’s important because the bigger a team gets, the more impossible it is for everyone on it to know everyone else," Moon said. "Institutional knowledge means that two devs who haven’t worked together before will know how to work together because they’re coming out of the same work culture and the same set of understandings and assumptions about how development should look."
This sort of sentiment was expressed with ZeniMax Online Studio’s Elder Scrolls Online: A QA worker told MassivelyOp after the layoffs that "a third of the studio's institutional knowledge keeping [ZeniMax Online Studios] running smoothly has been eliminated," according to the publication. "Absolutely crucial" and "critical" employees to Elder Scrolls Online were laid off, another employee told MassivelyOp. Elder Scrolls Online has been running since April 2014.
When teams are given the ability to learn and grow together, good things happen. Shayna Moon told Polygon in 2023 that you can see how Nintendo prioritized institutional knowledge in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
They expanded on that to Game Developer: "Studios need to invest in technical writers and archivists to preserve this kind of thing, but that doesn't directly contribute to a product so you rarely see anyone doing it," Moon added. "But just look at Nintendo, they have devs who have been working on the same franchise and in the same teams for decades."
Institutional knowledge, developers said, is key to making games. Valuing it is critical.
About the Author
Columnist, Game Developer
Nicole Carpenter is a veteran reporter who has been covering the video game industry for over a decade.
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