How convenient this decision was supposedly made prior to the decision to unionize and is related to only financial issues.
I bet they are always discussing what studios to cut or downsize in case of “economic downturns” or “failing to meet quarterly projections” so they can’t be accused of union-busting or retaliation.
I think we need to learn more about the union movement in Canada and US. People fought and died over these rights. Companies and governments forgot unions were the agreement we made to not drag their asses out in the streets and beat their asses.
It would be good for those in power to remember this compromise, because we are getting ripe for another wave of work reform.
Part of the problem is, back in the day you had company towns. And everyone knew where the boss lived. In the big ass house just outside of that shit hole town. So it was pretty convenient to go grab your pitchforks and rifles and walk half a mile while your rage built up.
Today you probably don’t know where your boss lives. Say you managed to find out. Supposing he doesn’t live in a different state, you get your guns and pitchforks and start marching. The cops will stop you before you get to that nice neighborhood.
Right… They closed it as a “cost-cutting measure” and “not because the studio unionized”. This is where the lawmakers are just letting everyone know that they are garbage to be walked all over. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that “cost-cutting” a studio that just unionized is because they unionized, because a union means they have to start paying their workers their fair share, which means “higher costs” to them, when it should’ve been like that from the start.
A lot of the reasons unions form in the USA are mitigated by Canadian labour laws. So you generally only see them in large work forces such as government employees, school teachers, and trades. People already get severance pay based on length of employment for getting fired without cause. If you’re laid off you can get EI (60% wages from gov’t).
So to answer your question… nothing probably -though I am speculating. Unless they did something egregious they likely broke no laws.
When the butchers at a single Walmart successfully formed a tiny union, Walmart responded by firing every butcher in every store in the company and switching to pre-packaged meats only.
Capital would rather burn everything down than lose a penny to the working class. Yes in this example, highly paid developers are considered working class relative to billionaire owners
Yes in reality, like 90% of people are working class, but I just wanted to make that designation for anyone reading it and going “software engineers aren’t working class”. I mean it in the more general working class vs capital owners.
Anyone who cannot stop working and live off their own wealth (and not rely on the working income of others) for the rest of their lives is, by definition, working class.
That’s a mistake. If you treat them as your equal then you can make then see they aren’t special or “middle class” and then you have another pair of hands to help the working class.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m talking about not treating then as special but just as anyone else and reply as you would with anyone else, not as if they are superior.
Noooo, not even close. There may be some senior devs in AAA studios making bank, but the vast majority of people doing the day-to-day art and development work on games typically get much worse pay and benefits than similar roles in other parts of the tech sphere.
A lot of people are very passionate about making games, and the games industry heavily exploits that passion to short change its workers. A lot of (mostly young) devs are willing to accept less pay to work on games because they feel like it will be more fulfilling than working on other mindless corporate crap, and those who do get jobs in the industry are afraid to ask for more money or try to unionize because they know there are a dozen equally passionate candidates waiting to replace them for less money if they make too many waves.
The result is that wages stay lower than other tech jobs and hours worked are much higher. With AI on the rise the problem will no doubt get even worse as execs use it as an excuse to shrink teams and “do more with less”.
That’s interesting. Because writing code for 3D graphics is way more complicated than writing an SQL query or some input form UI. I assumed those devs are super skilled and hence paid accordingly.
Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.
However in addition to that there is also the supply-demand effect: in demand specialists for which there are few available experts get paid more than people doing the kind of work for which there are a lot more experiences professionals around.
3D graphics programmers would benefit from the second effect but generally not from the first.
As a comparison, for example Quants (who program complex mathematical models used in asset valuation software for complex assets such as derivatives) in Investment Banking in London - thus who gain from both effects - about a decade ago had salaries of around £300k per year as they’re both working on critical software elements in systems used for managing billions of dollars of assets and have a very rare expertise (they’re usually people with Mathematics or Physics Masters or Doctorates who are also developers and who also have quite a lot of specific knowledge of the business of investment banking, which all adds up to a very rare combination of skillsets)
Gaming industry relies on game devs being super passionate about it, so they can pay them less.
My game dev friends almost all got out of it because they weren’t paid well and had to crunch all the time.
In corporate software you get paid well and just hate the work you do.
It’s not by chance that for example the Investment Banking industry pays a lot more money to developers than the wider IT industry - a system breaking down for an hour or two there can cost millions because, for example, trader’s can’t actually trade certain assets.
Generally the more money that depends on their systems being functional without errors or interruptions, the more an industry is willing to pay for devs.
Not to mention generally enterprise devs aren’t beholden to public launch dates set externally by publishers and therefore end up burning out really fast trying to make a deliverable happen. Not saying that doesn’t happen elsewhere in software, but it’s really common in the games industry
Everyone wants to work in games. Few want to work on accounting software and client messaging organization programs. Who do you think gets paid more despite doing basically the same thing?
Doing matrix operations in C++ is super annoying and difficult coompared to writing SQL queries wrapped in Java jdbc, or creating some REST APIs in python/ruby for some js react UI. Another comment response acknowledges this.
But I get that probably most people want to write games. Having the skills to do 3D graphics programming is another thing. (I remember this kid in my undergrad linear algebra class, who was complaining he failed the class like three times, and that he was going to go to the department head and get the professor fired lol. I think that guy wanted to do game programming. I’m betting he’s writing unit tests now.)
Just making the distinction that both blue and white collar workers are all still the working class generally. Colloquially, “working class” can be used more to mean blue collar workers, but in my context I mean anyone not in the capital ownership class.
it’s not even just about the money really. it’s just as much about control. you have to make an example of any uppity unionizing peasants right at the start, lest you end up with your entire corral of cubicle drones strutting around thinking they have some kind of say in any aspect of their work environment
Because they actually work on products literally, they’re the base of their profession with pretty much nobody under them bar a few juniors if any
I fear the day when being a dev like me becomes so normal I make minimum wage and can’t afford anything anymore… It’s seriously terrifying to realize I worked and learned all this time and it may be for nothing in like 10 years…
lol that day is coming sooner than you’d think, I think 10 years is being generous tbh
You should learn a highly niche specialization within SWE if you don’t already have one (that’s what I have). That will be overtaken by AI too, but it’ll give you more runway at least.
If I were in your shoes (and I am), I would start trying to blindly use AI to do various aspects of my job (and I have).
The results are laughable.
There are things that I do that AI can do. Stupid, boring, uninteresting things. In particular, AI excels at doing things I already wrote a simple Bash script to do for me a decade ago.
Seriously, I encourage everyone to give it a try.
Let’s all build that passion project we’ve been dreaming of and host it for the world to enjoy.
In the best case, the world has a happy little passion project chugging away being useful.
In the worst case, we learn what AI cannot do yet, and realize we can still keep charging people for our labor for a few more years (and decades and centuries).
I mean, at least you always have those supple wrists to fall back on.
I hope more people do follow this advice, though. It’s always a joy to discover people’s little passion projects. They make life richer for the rest of us.
Currently working on an Ubi-style game set in Middle-Earth. Maybe my niece and I will be the only ones to enjoy it, but I’m ok with that.
Higher wage working class is working class. If your income doesn’t come from owning things, if you put in work to get your income, you are working class. Division among ourselves only weakens us.
how highly paid are we talking? I doubt they’re making 200k
keep in mind that Canadian tech sector wages are not on par with american - as a rough rule, just keep the dollar value and change the currency (i.e. 100k USD salary is 100k CAD salary)
100%. I always ask people to look at their tax return. Does your money come from your labour/work, or from the things you own? If you aren’t living off of the things you own, then you are working class.
If your income comes mainly from your work, you’re Working Class (even if you own you own business), if your income comes mainly from the money made by the money you have (in assets or even “investments”) you’re Owner Class.
Certainly, modern politics only ever divides people in those two classes, with mainstream parties generaly only working for the good of the Owner Class which is how you end up with falling salaries in real terms and growing Asset valuations in the form of bubbles on all kinds of assets, most notably stocks and realestate (notice how most mainstream politicians see the rising of both stockmarkets and house prices - tough of late, they don’t say it about the latter quite as openly - as being good things).
The single greatest scam of modern Neoliberal Capitalism was making people who own their means of production - sometimes only partially or not really because they’re in debt for it - but still have to work for a living think they’re not Working Class and hence Neoliberal Capitalism is actually working for their benefit.
If there is one thing that around a decade working for the Finance Industry has taught me, is that almost all government policies are directed to help those who make money from having money make even more money, which is why, for example, plenty of countries have lower taxes on income from “investments” than on income from “work”, when the fair thing would be the other way around since the former is parasitical so lower taxes on it just induces more economic actors to engage in non-productive, extractive economic activities.
Yeah, that’s another fun aspect of our culture. Jobs that many people actually want due to what they are passionate about lead to abuse.
It’s the reason I never seriously considered getting into game development or becoming a teacher.
I am the rare father involved in the PTO (parent-teacher organization) along with my wife at our kid’s elementary school. We were handing out basic cheap supplies to the teachers last month as a Christmas thing. We’d interrupt the class to give the teacher a SINGLE roll of paper towels and then a small box of tissues or some glue sticks or whatever, and they were excited and grateful every time!
i’ll bet you anything the higher ups crunched the numbers and realized that was the case. your boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t give a shit about any of you and ONLY cares about maximizing the bottom line, regardless of who gets hurt
“hey know how we cut a few developers loose and they created an iconic video game without our oversight? Should we do that again and forsake all profits and consumer goodwill a second time??”
Wow, a whole unionized and competent studio now free to pursue internally chosen productions? I sure hope they don’t get some of those “Canadian Heritage” media subsidies. Seriously though this is the shit the state should be funding, it’d be a shame to have this kind of resource squandered.
Ubisoft asked the Rayman team (who have produced some of the best platformers) to develop Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, regarded as the best metroidvania of 2024.
It failed to meet sales expectations, so they disbanded the teams and cancelled the sequel.
Turns out gamers™️ do vote with their wallets, and they vote for churned out sequels.
It amazes me that anyone played any far cry or assassins creed game in the last 10 years and went “yes this is a good game”. All they make is bare minimum surface level crap and it’s been that way for a loooooong time.
I’m not touching any civ game until it got it’s two DLCs. 5 and 6 had only a really good game loop after them and it’s cheaper that way. I’m not alone in this I think which might be half of the reason for the struggle.
Meh my biggest complaint about Civ 7 was around unique districts being placed randomly by the AI, making captured cities a lot worse than cities you create yourself.
They’ve made changes to the age system so that more carries over between ages now, but the age system never really bothered me. It’s a more explicit rubber banding mechanic. It’s not for everyone though, and there are a couple things I don’t like about it, but it’s different than previous Civs, and a nice change from the snowballing in Civ 6.
I think their biggest mistake with this game was just changing too much at once. It’s a lot different than Civs 5 and 6, and I’m wondering if people were just expecting more of that instead.
I have not played Civ 7 but i’ve seen a lot of it played. As someone who has only dipped my toe into Civ over the years, Civ 7 actually seems pretty interesting to me. Just the core concept of changing cultures as the game goes on, and ending up with a sort of hybrid of all the cultures that came before, is really compelling to me. It’s interesting to here your take as someone that seems to have played more of it.
To me, the biggest issue with the game right now seems to be the lack of a space age, as that just makes the endgame seem very abridged. What is the biggest issue with the game for you specifically? I know you said changing too much at once was a mistake, but you seemed to be speaking to their overall strategy more than anything.
There’s a few issues I have with it, but the age transitions isn’t one of them. The modern age, when I last played, felt far too short. I also found that it’s more fun to play with longer age lengths and no crisis.
I already have a few hundred hours into it. If the game interests you, I’d recommend it. They’ve done a lot the past few months to improve the balance.
Not sure why people are acting surprised about this. The generations usually have been between 5-7 years. It will already have been five years this upcoming November. So 2027 sounds about right.
What the fuck we’re 5 years into this console gen? They didn’t even start releasing the real games yet. I can’t think of a single Xbox exclusive titles and ps5 has what, astro bot and the friggin 17th FF7 remake?
Did Mario Galaxy use gyroscopic controls? I thought it just used the IR sensor. If I’m correct, these are two different things. If you’ve played Splatoon with the gyro controls, you might see the benefit. Alternately, you can do this with Steam input on just about anything if you have a controller with the feature.
Gotcha. It still might not be the best sample set for getting a feel for what the controls have to offer, if you have the means to give it a try in other games. I think it’s better at aiming/shooting than the right analog stick has ever been.
Not even a competitive edge, as I don’t really play multiplayer shooters anymore. It just feels more intuitive (though some additional bothersome setup is often required to tune it right). You can also move it via your elbows rather than wrists. But in any case, gyro would be nice to have in Xbox controllers. I found playing something like Returnal on an analog stick to be a huge pain, and it’s great when you can get that extra oomph out of your input device.
The Nintendo Wii used gyroscopic controls (first gen original controllers only had accelerometers. The Wii Motion Plus add-on added gyroscopes, but later controllers integrated both into a single unit). The IR bar was just for the Wii controller to figure out which detection was towards the TV.
Gyroscope and back buttons would be nice. Maybe even a touch sensitive stick like the steam deck has. I like the shape and layout of the Xbox controllers, but they really lag behind feature wise.
If we got a Gyroscope on Xbox, then all major controllers would have it - allowing for the possibility of cross platform games where people can use gyro ironsights to aim. That would be awesome.
That’s an impressive ability to ignore an extremely widely known issue. Hey by the way just as a heads up there’s also this thing going on called climate change.
A windows PC with a custom shell is surprisingly good for gaming. I modified my gaming machine to skip sign in, windows explorer, and a multitude of other services so it boots straight into steam big picture. My Epic, EA, and gamepass games are automatically added to Steam with proper artwork. Feels like SteamOS but with some nice things from windows like working anricheat and lossless scaling support.
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