Through its first seven months, the Trump Administration has made massive cuts to public spending that have affected nearly every area of American life, from weather reporting and disaster response to arts funding. Video games are no exception.
The administration’s sweeping cuts have halted game preservation programs, virtual reality projects, and even game-related public health research. A report from Game Developer details some of the efforts affected by the lost funding, from the University of Washington’s Game Research Group, which launched in 2024 to “improve the accessibility of critical video games in cultural heritage institutions for educational purposes,” to a grant for a program at Arizona State University helping latinx students develop games about climate change.
Some projects had their funding removed just as they were about to complete. Rabindra Ratan, an associate professor at Michigan State, was developing a program to “reduce issues of Zoom fatigue and other types of gender and race inequities in the games industry related to virtual meetings.” A $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Future of Work program enabled Ratan’s work, but the Trump administration rescinded the grant earlier this year, preventing Ratan and his team from accessing the $200,000 they needed to complete the project.
Ratan and his crew had built a virtual meeting space, designed to be an effective alternative to Zoom. The platform is still accessible by the public, and Ratan intends to publicize more of the program’s findings, but it will remain unfinished for the foreseeable future.
Other multi-media projects, like the virtual reality game Paccha, have been affected on multiple fronts. Paccha lets players explore the Peruvian Andes as a student archeologist. The loss of funding has halted collaborations with the San Antonio Museum of Art and with inhabitants and workers in the village of Hualcayan, where the game is set. The developers are now hunting for new places to get funding.
The video game industry helps drive technological development, exploration, and experimentation, Ratan said, so the cuts could have an impact that reaches beyond the games industry.
“By limiting research in this industry, it is limiting science as a whole,” Ratan said. “There’s a slightly more direct negative consequence here in hindering progress in the games industry, namely being that progress in the games industry leads to other industries.”
You can read the full report at Game Developer, which goes into more detail about affected projects.
In other federal government news, the FBI has seized a Nintendo Switch piracy site, underlining the company’s efforts against piracy.
Image: Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York
