I cannot wrap my head around why the game industry hasn’t already unionised massively—I hear horror story after horror story and everyone working in the industry seems to have convinced themselves they’re special and it won’t happen to them
It’s not that hard to understand. The whole gaming industry is filled with people who are super passionate about games, like passionate to a fault. This makes it very, very difficult to unionize as there’s almost always some other game dev out there who would take the job for less pay and more hours.
I actually know a friend like that. He was job jumping a lot, looking for game dev roles almost exclusively. He finally landed such a role. Far as I heard, he’s working overtime a lot (voluntarily) and he earns less than half of what I earn as a “regular” software developer.
Yeah, like the music or movie industry, it’s rife with abuse because there are so many young people who dream of working in it that there’s always fresh meat for the grinder.
And selection pressure means the industry veterans in charge are people who somehow thrived in this environment, so they’re unlikely to change things.
I have a friend who worked in vfx on some very high-profile movies and shows, stuff you have definitely seen. And that industry actually seems even worse! Everyone is a contractor, so you work on one project, and then you don’t have a job anymore, and you better make the bosses happy if you want to get another contract ever again. Everything is stunningly poorly planned, with deadlines that are impossible to meet without working all night, constant last-minute changes from fickle directors and incredible amounts of nitpicking and demands of perfectionism.
This is likely exactly the type of industry they are turning game development into. Because it’s maximum profit with minimum responsibility. Hire the best in the world, squeeze the most work in the shortest time you can out of them, and then toss them to the wind when they’re spent.
AAA dev here; it’s not that. It’s that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you’re not careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker’s rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company’s unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio’s previous identity has been lost. That’s the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers’ rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there’s a “who watches the watchmen” situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don’t even need remind anybody of the deluge of “toxic company culture” Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It’s a tough nut to crack, and it’s why things seem to be moving so slowly. We’re pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.
To be in the entertainment industry you got to really really really want it. And when you want something that bad you learn to eat a lot of shit because the people with the money that can make it happen know how badly you want to be there.
I am in entertainment too and right now i pretty much work for free because that’s just how it is.
Yeah this would be completely illegal in a lot of countries.
You need to either make the position redundant and then you cant hire anyone for 9months or you show 3 separates instances where they failed to meet the job requirements and were notified. You can’t just fire people for the fuck of it.
No, they have “lore”: a bunch of inconclusive and loosely connected animation shorts, vague plot points, and character bios that give just enough of a reason for their seasonal events to occur and for fans to drool over. Just like every other live service.
While I feel sorry for her as a worker, I do not feel sorry for her as a writer.
Live Service writing for AAA studios has got to be the most disposable form of fiction. I can find old short stories from magazines that closed close to a century ago, but I can’t play the Destiny series from start to finish today?
They won’t get any kind of reckoning that we’ll understand. They’re rich, powerful, and insulated from pain. They’ve all got golden parachutes via their weaselly networks. There will be no karma, unfortunately.
I don’t think they will receive a reckoning, but their children might.
It’s especially disgusting when we realize rich people are setting their children up to inherit a world where everyone hates them for being rich from exploitation.
On the one hand it sucks that a writer lost their job. And it’ll never not suck. On the other hand I love when Apex Legends looks bad. I lost Titanfall 3 for that?
In a better universe apex and tf3 could have existed at the same time
Unfortunately we live in the universe where games as a live service is the only model that big companies run on, which means all resources must go to just that one game
It’s set in the Titanfall universe, there’s lots of lore scattered around. People work hard to integrate a narrative into the level and character designs, to imply plot in incidental dialogue or cinematics, or just literally write text entries that the majority of gamers will never read because only shooting and rare skins trigger their dopamine.
Nobody asked to have some pointless story injected into their online shooters. I’m pretty sure the people that want world-building and narrative and lore in their games aren’t playing online shooters. I know I’m not.
Ok, well, I am. It’s not “pointless story” it’s entertainment and I’m struggling to come up with a game that has zero plot or setting or characterization. Rocket League maybe.
Man, what is it about PC gamers that lets them tolerate mediocre garbage?
is it conditioning? Being raised playing games that are good ‘in theory’ over games that are good in actuality?
I dunno, it feels like a lot of PC gamers are ‘proud’ to play esoteric crap. They view it as a badge of honor, for some reason.
Glad I started recognizing these things for what they are, though. Nobody else seems to be willing to discuss it on the internet, but there are plenty of people in real life who get it immediately.
that’s why what’s good enough for you isn’t good enough for me?
No, we established that with the following comment I made: you being nothing more than an angry little incel bitch. Which is ok, you just wanna rage at whatever other people like, go for it. Well all point and laugh at you for being pathetic, we all win
My question is when workers in game studios start to make unions. It’s a massive industry and the people actually making the games are constantly fucked over.
Now can be both the second-best-time to plant a tree and the first-best-time to grab a bucket of water!
Remember everyone, the forest is on fire and there’s not many places to run. The fires of climate change affects the entire world, and this administration and the wealthy that back them will gleefully pour fuel on the flames and let your house burn.
You can stand around begging for rain, asking why the landlord didn’t fix the sprinklers or why he never checked the fire extinguishers or why he’s hiding under his desk clutching the cash register for dear life…
Funny thing about wildfires: the ashes allow a new generation of flora to take root. It will suck for us, but the children of tomorrow might have unions, vacations, and universal healthcare by default.
I can dream of a future, even if it won’t be mine to enjoy.
Yes, but there are also European developers. Such as Ubisoft, which previously had major issues with harassment, and probably still does. If they have a union, it certainly isn’t a powerful one.
The French trade union Solidaires Informatique has pursued both criminal and civil charges. Not sure how much that accomplished, but at the very least a bunch of assholes were fired or resigned, so they weren’t completely ineffective.
in my head its because its an industry where going solo is viable and if they arent working at a company thats their goal so they have full contol over the vision and make all the money and one day they want to exert the same creative control over others and get overtime/overwork out of them
The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.
That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don’t have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.
I was gonna get snooty about being an indie game buyer, then I remembered that I bought a Larian game developed in partnership with Hasbro, so my snootiness will have to wait for another day.
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