Many of the issues involved in the union’s 11-week film and TV strike are common to those in the video game contract, including wages and artificial intelligence.
The 10 companies facing a possible strike are:
Activision Productions Inc., Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices Inc., Electronic Arts Productions Inc., Epic Games, Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Take 2 Productions Inc., VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and WB Games Inc.
I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.
Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.
Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes responsible for half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?
It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.
Interesting! There isn’t much of a story to Slime Rancher, so I could see a standalone film, free to do its own thing and set it that universe being fun.
There’s enough plot hooks to work off of though. Beatrix LeBeau signs up to go to the Far Far Range to take over a ranch in disrepair, left behind by Hobson who has mysteriously disappeared. Beatrix leaves behind their lover Casey, the two experiencing a long-distance relationship and the struggles that come from being so far apart from each other. Whilst striving to rebuild the ranch back up to its former glory, Beatrix slowly uncovers what happened to the elusive Hobson and revealing the mysteries of the Ancient Ruins, The Glass Desert, the reality-changing Quantum Slimes who seem to indicate more than one reality can exist, and ancient portals between worlds.
I mean, how could that not make for a great movie!
deadline.com
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