https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8515496283
Always Dying, Always Growing
“The clock is always ticking and the money is always running out.” Schreier’s thesis arrives not as revelation but as the persistent background hum of an industry that has spent fifty years dying without ever actually dying.
In 1979, my father found his entrepreneurial break running Space Invaders in a mobile arcade with McKay Shows around Canada and the inland northwest. Electronic games were new and finicky, so he would use using nail files to keep the leads on the circuit boards connected and dust free. People lined up out the door and it was a gangbuster year. But after 1980, business never looked like that again. Supply caught up to demand, and arcades were one of first casualties of change in gaming.
I used to think this was just my dad’s story. After lamenting the cultural fall of my own favorites: Starcraft, Halo, Age of Empires, Press Reset showed me this wasn’t nostalgia. It’s the permanent condition. Every generation of games cannibalizes the last, and the developers are the ones left holding the check.
What makes this the best of Schreier’s trilogy ahead of Blood, Sweat and Pixels and Play Nice is its structural honesty. Each layoff or studio closure introduces the next story, and you follow these developers into their next venture only to watch it implode in turn. The book doesn’t pretend there’s a clean arc. Schreier wonders whether unions are the answer, and for the US at least, game developers are increasingly agreeing with him. But even that feels less like a resolution than another iteration: adapting just enough to keep on until the next iteration.
“The clock is always ticking and the money is always running out” works less as a thesis and more as the industry’s operating system. Press Reset shows video games as a business in constant disequilibrium. For the past half-century, video games have existed in constant disequilibrium: studios imploding, companies closing, developers crunching toward oblivion, and yet the medium has grown 30x since 1979, outpacing television at 10x, books at 4x, and leaving newspapers in the dust at 0.5x. Press Reset is the story of what that creative destruction costs the people inside it.: closures, layoffs, crunch, brief recoveries, then another collapse.
Schreier structures the book well. One studio’s failure opens into the next story, often just in time to watch the next studio implode.
I used to think that rise and decline was mainly my dad’s story, then later the story of watching favorite franchises such as StarCraft or Halo lose altitude. Press Reset makes the pattern look less personal and more structural. This is what game production has often been: an industry with a remarkable ability to grow while remaining unstable for the people inside it.
That instability is the dark side. The brighter side is that games have reinvented themselves more than almost any other medium, and they have not slowed down. For an industry that always sounds one quarter away from disaster, it has done very well. Since 1979, games have grown roughly 30x, against about 10x for TV, 4x for books, and decline for newspapers. Crisis has not prevented expansion. It may be part of the model.
Schreier asks whether unions are the answer. In the United States at least, developers increasingly seem to think so. He does not pretend there is an easy fix, which suits the subject.
I’d put this with Play Nice and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels as Schreier’s videogame trilogy. This is the best of the three. It has the clearest frame, and the most honest sense of what the industry is: volatile, inventive, and rarely at rest.