Why Aren’t There Any Major Video Game Studios In NYC?

New York City has it all: glitz, glamor, trash, rats. Walk down the street and you might see a major movie set—or 9/11. People in other countries know our mayor’s name. So why is one of the biggest entertainment mediums on Earth relatively underrepresented here? On a very special LIVE AND IN PERSON episode of Aftermath Hours, we convened a panel to find out. 

This time around, we come to you from Town Hall in NYC, alongside two NYC-based gaming luminaries: NYU Game Center director Naomi Clark and Half-Mermaid (Her Story, Immortality) director Sam Barlow. As part of the inaugural New York Games Week, we decided to sit down for a long-form discussion of the grimy and inhospitably expensive but also perfect city where most of us (sorry, Luke) live. 

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Austin are generally considered to be the country’s video game capitals, but NYC—the main character of Earth—doesn’t loom quite so large. Why is that, especially as a thriving NYC indie scene pumps out more and more GOTY contenders? Further, what keeps triple-A studios from establishing a foothold in the city that gave us Broadway, a place where other art and entertainment mediums thrive? In lieu of that, what kinds of freaks and weirdos (complimentary) domake and play games in New York? And is NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani one of them? 

We answer all those questions and more while still finding time to digress wildly onto topics like rival black mold subreddits and the video game of everyone’s dreams, as generated by Unity AI: Space Corridor.   

You can find this week’s episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, leave a review so that we someday can do more live events at even bigger venues! (Also, please subscribe to our burgeoning but scrappy YouTube channel.)

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Sam:New York has movies, and all the other art forms are kind of represented here. But then you look at the film industry in New York, and it is scrappy and punk, and if you work in the film industry, you’re a freelancer, and you might get a gig on a movie in New Jersey. You’re able to eke out a living and look out for those hits.

Whereas to make a video game, there’s this weird combo of, yes, it’s like making a movie and it involves being creative, but it’s also an office job for three to five years. Office jobs require infrastructure and consistent funding.

I’ve seen various Hollywood companies try to get into games over the last five or ten years—even to the point where I had a meeting at GDC with a very prestigious movie company that was like “[We’re gonna make] games.” In the time it took them to book the meeting and have me show up for the meeting, the guy that was consulting for them explained to them how video games work on a funding level, and they were like “What the fuck? This doesn’t make any sense.”

They were like “We buy a movie, we shoot it. Within a year, you have a movie. We’ll make our money back through DVD sales, planes, TV—whatever.” This [consultant] just said, “Yeah, a game can take three or more years, can cost this much money, and it might sell zero copies.” 

The kind of paradox of New York is that there’s all this punk energy and tradition, but it’s fucking expensive to live in. People just get by and can be scrappy about it. But I think it’s hard beyond the indie level to do video games in a scrappy way. That is where you need an Avalanche [the Just Cause studio that closed its NYC location] or someone to make it work. 

Gita: You look at where major video game companies are, and they have set themselves up in the traditional Silicon Valley area—the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco. 

Nathan: Which is not cheap. Those cities are also very expensive. 

Gita: But those cities want those companies there so bad. They’re champing at the bit for this. New York just doesn’t economically need this as much. Even though I want it to be here, there’s so much art here that it does not feel as necessary.

Sam:I also think it’s too late. You could have done that 10 or 20 years ago, but now we’re in a very strange place economically. We’re working on a project, and it’s our biggest thing, and it’s an Unreal game. We would love to hire people in New York, but we’re looking for people who have shipped two or three Unreal games. They just don’t exist here. 

When you do find them, they’re working at BioWare or they’re over [somewhere else], and they have families and partners. You’re like “Hey, do you want to relocate to New York—to a more expensive city?” And we can’t afford to do that. But now we can just give them a remote gig. It’s not the best time to be like “We’re gonna show up now and make this happen,” because everything sucks. 

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