I’m sorry, but your reasoning is absolute nonsense. Maybe game developers should unionize, but suggesting that it should work like Hollywood is pretty ridiculous.
The huge studios would function just like in Hollywood.
Okay, so fuck the developers at big studios just like how most of the people working on movies get fucked now? You think because a deal was reached by the union that the big studios aren’t still just running to the bank with their loads of cash? The recent strike (and most strikes in Hollywood) were mostly about residuals. You know why? Because people who aren’t above the line in the credits get shit pay. At least in the games industry most people are employees, get paid up front, have a salary, and whether the game succeeds or flops they get their money. And most people don’t get laid off between games. You’re getting paid your salary even while there is downtime. In Hollywood, if the movie flops(*), you’re shit outta luck, my friend. Hope you’re happy with whatever you made during production and you’re able to find your next gig quick. Because you’re not an employee of the studio, you were working for a production company on this one movie and now you gotta fend for yourself because the movie’s done and so is this LLC.
(*) which brings us to the big fucking asterisk in how Hollywood “works”. Movies don’t make money. Not on paper anyway. It’s so bad, it even has its own name: Hollywood Accounting. The gist of it is that they use creative accounting techniques so that profit sharing agreements (like the residuals that were just fought so hard for by the unions) pay as little as possible.
And yeah they would want to pump out those blockbusters, but nothing would stop indie developers from developing.
What stops indie developers from developing now? Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution, a larger audience, and much lower cost to entry.
I would allow for consistent and fair discussions for the unions and studios as to how pay will be done.
Yeah, because that’s what Hollywood is known for…
It will also put in safeties for crunch and other abuses.
Crunch (and other abuse) still happens in Hollywood production, so… Nope, sorry.
I’m just saying [the Hollywood model] makes way more sense as a model for how modern AAA games are made.
No fucking way. As someone who was a salaried employee for 15 years in the A to AAA game industry over 7 projects, some of which failed but I still got paid, with bonuses and stock awards and job security, please fucking no. I’m glad I didn’t have to fight for a new gig every couple of years and hope for residuals.
Very well said. I think there is an argument that the gaming industry would benefit from more unionisation (there are very few sectors that wouldn’t benefit from it!), but emulating Hollywood doesn’t seem like the answer.
I think it’s fair to say they’re are some significant similarities between the two industries. They both focus on large, multi year creative projects with unknown returns. I’m not sure emulating Hollywood is the answer, but they can at least look at how existing Hollywood unions have approached addressing any similar problems
Indie game developers have it way better than indie movie makers. They have better platforms for distribution...
It kills me that there's no Steam or GOG for TV and movies. My options are either Blu Rays, when they exist, or streaming, even if I buy the movie outright.
You mean delivering an actual file/media that you can watch without streaming? I know Netflix has the ability to download stuff to watch offline later. I assume other platforms support something similar. That’s pretty close to steam or gog where you don’t own a copy of the game, you own a license to use their copy.
Edit: But yes, I do sometimes wish I could pay per title and not have to worry about subscriptions to maintain access to certain things.
It's not close enough if I want to run it from a PC or Steam Deck. They only allow it on mobile where they can enforce their DRM. Then those downloads are only good for a few days before they need to be renewed and they run into all sorts of technical problems trying to enforce the DRM.
It’s a pretty popular one but I’m currently playing through Disco Elysium and it’s a masterpiece of thriller detective with very strong RPG integration. Highly recommend even if you don’t like either of those genres as long as you like a good story.
I’m sure everyone is all over this, but Dave the diver is so much fun. Little bit of rpg, little bit a farm sim, little bit a restaurant sim, throw in some action sequences
You can refund games for being buggy, you cannot however, play them for dozens of hours and then refund them. Steam’s limit is two hours and two weeks.
I think the “2 weeks” is the line for auto-refund, but they can and will refund you after that at their discretion. And they don’t seem to be jerks about it.
Yeah. I’ve definitely gotten refunds past those limits. But I’ve had a Steam account for like 16 years at this point, lots of games, and I’ve requested a refund maybe twice.
Steam is known to be more generous about the rule if you have few refunds on your profile and a decent amount of purchases. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for updates, even if the update makes the game unplayable.
With such an attitude, I am looking forward to your next post where you whine about being fired after working so hard for these years and being so professional boo hoo why am I being fiired. Please, union, save my job. Well, that’s because one of your corporation’s projects in another country that you have zero effect on earned a negative amount of money because of your fantasy and due to refund bombing. Instead of at least covering production costs, such losses would bury company after company all around the world until all of the game development switches to hyper-casual games. All because of toxicity you just made up. Think twice. Look further down your nose. That’s even not mentioning your professional mind deformation. You are not average. You should understand this. You see what others don’t and this doesn’t help you feel positive about products. You should be okay to feel bad about every single product, including your own. In every interview, I ask QAs questions like your fantasy to find out whether the person is able to perceive different work aspects from a business perspective, not only a product perspective. This is very important to discover in an interview to filter the red flag attitude like this post of yours. Sorry for the moral speech. It’s just my day-to-day work pain. I wish you the best, OP.
Most bugs aren’t unconditionally experienced by all comers or they would have been fixed. It’s entirely possible there are 17 horrible game breaking experience ruining bugs every single one triggered by a very specific combination of factors in a given work and out of millions of players one person to hit 5 and hate their life and many hit zero.
If you had bothered to read you would note they mention concrete defects that effected their playing not nits they were picking based on depth of experience.
Given extremely misery return policies if your game’s profitability is actually materially harmed let alone destroyed by returns you might have released a broken piece of shit and need to blame yourself rather than customers who believed in you enough to at least initially put their money where their mouth is.
You see what others don’t and this doesn’t help you feel positive about products.
Its a fucking game. If it doesn’t make you forget about it being a “product” and divert your attention from the reality for a few hours its developers have wholly and completely failed.
your professional mind deformation
Did this sound like how humans talk when you said it?
I ask QAs questions like your fantasy to find out whether the person is able to perceive different work aspects from a business perspective
You try to hire people who are literal soulless robots who think about the money that can be made from convincing people to pay you to shovel shit into their brain instead of having fun.
. This is very important to discover in an interview to filter the red flag attitude
Holy shit you might actually eventually hire someone who gives a fuck
I wish you the best, OP.
I just said you were a piece of shit nobody should hire but I totally “wish you the best”. If its a person you ought to avoid hiring its a person who walks into a legit conversation, shits all over it, insults people, and talks like a fucking robot.
Can you possibly keep your negativity to yourself if you have nothing useful to contribute next time?
Most bugs aren’t unconditionally experienced by all comers or they would have been fixed.
This is not always true. I can assure you, that the game can be published with even critical bugs, and the development team has zero effect on this decision because whether to publish a game and when to publish the game - it’s the publishing department to decide, not the development. Because the development department always cares about quality, and always wants more time to polish more. If the development department made the final decision, the games would be published years later than they are and their budgets would skyrocket. This is why it is important to take the business side of game development into account.
If you had bothered to read you would note they mention concrete defects that effected their playing not nits they were picking based on depth of experience.
One can experience a major defect while keeping positivity for the game, but as soon as you start noticing hundreds of even small defects, your positivity breaks. This is the price you pay for being a professional QA.
Given extremely misery return policies if your game’s profitability is actually materially harmed let alone destroyed by returns you might have released a broken piece of shit and need to blame yourself rather than customers who believed in you enough to at least initially put their money where their mouth is.
You are right. As a consumer, you are totally right. And I agree with this when this is about something tangible and monofunctional like pliers, cutting a tree, cleaning debris, or other products and services not affected by subjectivity. When it comes to subjective products and services there’s always more to account for. Something specific to blame for faults. For you it’s a “game” that is bad, for me, you are talking about the team behind the game, and the team is not one unit. Those are people. People fuck up.
Its a fucking game. If it doesn’t make you forget about it being a “product” and divert your attention from the reality for a few hours its developers have wholly and completely failed.
This is a very powerful thought right there. This is what’s great about games. Now tell me, is the attention of those 96% of people who enjoy this game despite noticing bugs being diverted from reality for a few hours? Did the developers actually fail on this one? Or is it just the Head of the Publishing Department at Larian who said “Enough. We are publishing this NOW!”, and a few individuals with a negative attitude toward a great product?
Did this sound like how humans talk when you said it?
If you click on my profile, you will notice that I’m from Kyiv, Ukraine. I’m not a native English speaker, I have almost zero speaking practice. In Ukrainian, this is called “professional deformation”, or “profdeformation” for short. I tried translating this phrase into English. Sorry, I failed.
You try to hire people who are literal soulless robots who think about the money that can be made from convincing people to pay you to shovel shit into their brain instead of having fun.
Sorry, but you didn’t get my idea. You see, the game development teams are very sensitive to the products they make. When publishing comes and says that we are publishing the game now, the development team gets hugely frustrated, as they know not 100% of the bugs are fixed. But each person who is able to perceive this from a business side can understand that this publishing demand can be based on budgeting and made to save the jobs of these developers even with anticipated losses due to negative reviews. By putting this understanding into the heads of my subordinates I save them from frustration and develop their understanding of how business works. This is how I do this, I’m not saying this is the right way.
Can you possibly keep your negativity to yourself if you have nothing useful to contribute next time?
I’m sorry my reply frustrated you. I didn’t want anyone to be insulted. This is just how I express my feelings. I’m a little rough as a person.
Thanks for the information regarding translation that makes it far more clear. I wouldn’t phrase that as “mind deformation” because that sounds like mental illness.
I’d probably love the tedium of being a QA tester. I’d be happy to switch careers and take your job if it probably didn’t imply a pretty hefty pay cut.
If you like strategy games. This is one of my favorite games of all time. I haven’t seen anything quite like it sense. Close, but nothing hit the genre mix like this game.
Sakuna of Rice and Ruin. A fun little sides rolling action game as the main and a full 3d rice farm simulator with professional and Japanese government approved rice techniques. It’s a fun relaxing game with amusing mechanics and an interesting story to add.
The rice growing is not Harvest Moon-style “plant your crops, water them every day, and harvest after five days”. You need to monitor the water level of your field, the water temperature (and air temperature), crop spacing (it is not grid based), the nutrient ratios, the field aeration, etc. Your first couple of years are going to be a rough until you level up and unlock actual numbers for these instead of having to guestimate.
Studios actually got tired of doing this, because rehiring is expensive, and ended up on a post launch DLC pipeline to get closer to keeping everyone working.
Absolutely agreed. I think because the gaming industry is relatively new, it lags behind other sectors on unionisation, and that is definitely something that should change. Not necessarily to emulate Hollywood, but unionisation definitely.
Yeah, that would be ideal. Although whether game artists would be best fitted to a tech workers union or an artists union (which does exist in some places) is a question that would need to be answered.
How about co-op multiplayer? I’ve seen a few of those for Baldur’s Gate 3. Like Neil Newbon or Jennifer English. Neil plays with his friend Tom (whose surname I have forgotten) and Jennifer with her girlfriend Aliona Baranova. Except for Tom all of them acted in the game.
I do like let’s plays like that too sometimes - I’ll give those channels a try. Thanks! Though I may have to wait til I finish with BG3 myself, which could be a while :p
I mentioned single player games specifically partly because I personally tend to like those games best, and I like to watch let’s plays after playing the game through myself first, then seeing how different people interact with the game differently. I love watching people discover a game I enjoyed (which for me means mostly single player titles) in kind of the same way I might enjoy showing the game to a friend.
And anecdotally, I tend to feel like groups playing a single player game together tend to talk more about the game in a deep-read kind of way, or to talk about their lives, whereas groups playing multiplayer games seem more likely to talk about whatever is currently happening in the game in that instant, or it becomes mostly them joking and trolling each other. This is just my personal experience though, so it could be a function of the particular let’s players and streamers I’m familiar with. I’m sure there are exceptions to this.
I like watching Let’s Plays for the same reason as you, and while it isn’t a group channel I heartily recommend Welonz. She is very thorough and approaches every game with great respect, usually giving a summary of her overall thoughts at the end.
I found her because of her VTM: Bloodlines LP, but her Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk ones are also fantastic.
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