Oh my goodness, the exact same thing happened with me and Guild Wars 2!!! 😱
I was a teenager at the time and my family burned logs to keep the house warm in winter. My Dad upgraded the smoke detectors so that they were all linked. In other words, if one alarm went off in the basement (where the wood burner was) then every detector in the house would go off.
This sounds great in theory, but in reality it turns out that the detectors would go off on a near weekly basis. Whenever someone tossed logs in the burner and smoke escaped. We got desensitized to the beeping and it became second nature to just cancel the alarm when it happened.
Fast forward to the closed beta for Guild Wars 2 and I was up late, trying to play every possible minute that I could before the weekend was over. My door was closed, headphones on, and I was REALLY immersed.
The smoke detector started beeping. And it kept beeping over and over and over. Normally, at this point my parents would’ve cancelled it. That kind of struck me as odd, so I opened my door.
Ruh roah, raggy.
A wall of smoke was on the other side of the door. And the smell was NOTHING like the usual wood burner smell. It really hurt to breathe and my eyes were not having a good time either.
After shaking my Dad awake, we called the fire department, got all the animals out, and nobody got hurt. The damage was serious, but the entire house didn’t go up. The upstairs needed rebuilt and there was a fair bit of smoke damage.
I don’t want to think about what would’ve happened if I wasn’t up playing that closed beta 😅
Not even to mention the Star Wars games, any Marvel games, the new indie game, the Avatar game from Ubi. They might not have any active in-house studios but they are quite active in giving the rights to studios for their franchises.
🤷♂️I’ve made multiple million-dollar titles and haven’t gotten more than a paycheck from them. I really don’t think VAs should get much if any in the way of residuals. Engineers, artists, and designers should get a huge portion of the profits. Giving VAs even a 1% residual is a slap in the face of the rest of the team who build those games. Not to mention the whole team of LA Noire was laid off later that year.
Someone else made an interesting point how a lot of people don’t get residuals. That residuals don’t make sense for some jobs. For a VA in the background of a small indie games, do you think it’s okay for them to require residuals for their work? This lawsuit focuses on large AAA studios but it will set a dangerous precedent. There any many actors who have to find loop holes to build smaller movie projects. “We technically paid ourselves then invested it into the movie” sort of thing.
That said giving everyone residuals is better than giving no one residuals.
I will just say I think everyone involved in a project should be paid a fraction of the proceeds roughly in proportion to the work and sweat they contribute
Absolutely agree. But I think if we are going to start doing that we’ll have to start with the designers, engineers, and artists. Not the voice actors that spend weeks on the project and never think about it again.
What people might not catch is that this isn’t artists, designers or engineers. It’s voice actors only. I’m all for people getting what they deserve but as I see voice actors in the games industry demand profit sharing and more rights, I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Voice actors are among “those who actually make the games.” Voice acting in particular also is strenuous work that can and does cause physical injury when workers are compelled to work long hours doing rough voices and so on. People end up having to have surgery on their vocal cords.
We don’t need to devalue voice actors to value other game industry workers. The only difference is the voice actors organized first, probably because of the injury risk, and when you form a union you have to define a group that you can reach and coordinate. It shouldn’t be an us vs them among works.
Don’t forget mocap. A lot of actors are doing mocap for games now, which also potentially results in injury.
This also includes stunt workers (who do the more intensive motion capture work) and stunt coordinators, many of whom are in the Screen Actors Guild already.
Oh, great, trade unions. That never caused any issues for worker’s unity. If you can’t organise everyone, from tech lead to cleaning staff, in the same industrial union you’re playing right into the capitalists’ divide and conquer game.
Not so. It makes sense to organise in trade unions. The heads of those unions are on the same side most of the time, as it would be in this case, and they can easily coordinate their actions. But in some cases the interests of one trade have no bearing on another, or are even in opposition, in which case it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to organise a balloted action across the entire union. Thus nullifying the strength of the union and playing right into the capitalist’s hands.
So instead of coming to terms with your fellow workers you rather have them fight capitalists by themselves? Leave them to the scraps the bosses deem sufficient while you’re wheeling away a wagonload of concessions won through your unique bargaining power?
You’re limiting the strength of worker’s. If train conductors don’t strike for train toilet cleaners noone will.
And any opposition between worker’s interests is negligible compared to that between workers and capital, who have no interests in common at all.
They need to unionize too. Also count actors are included in the "actually make the games" group. Everyone should be paid well, don't drag a group trying to fix that down because the rest aren't doing anything.
I’m reminded that those who actually make the games don’t get that. They have overtime without pay.
Yes, capitalism fucks everyone every day unless you fight for what you deserve, usually for decades, and even then only getting half of it. It's surprising that keeping this in mind requires reminders.
I think they asked for that in the last strike, but I haven't seen it mentioned in this one. And some speculated it was only included for something they could drop in the eventual resolution as a form of compromise.
The Bayonetta lady was asking for profits and took to Twitter to boycott the game when she didn’t get what she wanted. Claiming that she made those games what they are.
I never said it was about this strike directly but instead overall how VAs have been pushing to get more than those on the front line of game creation.
The shift in mobile gaming in how developers / publishers could nickel & dime different features seeped into paid content. The separation was most of these games were free-to-play or at least ad-supported.
Now, it’s just a double-dip. The filthy casuals will wait while the dedicated fans will pony up their wallets if they want a better product. The one that infuriates me most is exclusive or pre-order content that becomes available to everyone a few months after launch.
So the game is done and could be released earlier. But just let people give some FOMO and pay extra so they can play “sooner”.
Sometimes I just wish games were like in the past. They released a full game, get some patches to improve. Throw in some extras for free if you’re lucky. And DLC were actual expansion packs that could practically be a whole new game.
A Starfield player has credited the sci-fi game with saving their life after they stayed up late to play it and was awake when their apartment complex caught fire.
u/Tidyckilla took to Starfield’s subreddit over the weekend to report their amazing escape, saying that if they hadn’t been awake “bingeing” the game when the fire broke out, the player and their wife would likely have “died to smoke inhalation”.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne