Nintendo has IP lawyers. They have to, at their scale, because they will constantly be bombarded by patent trolls, licensing companies etc. trying to extract profit out of Nintendo. So, like any other large business, they hire IP lawyers to protect themselves.
Most patent disagreements are resolved by cross-licensing. That’s where one business says, in response to a law suit, “oh, but you’re actually using 6 of our patents, so maybe we can come to an agreement”. A patent is both a shield and a sword. Even against trolls they can be useful, as they can be used to argue against troll arguments, if it gets to court, or pull in other business to the defense, if helpful.
IP lawyers know this. So they extract every patent they can out of everything a company does, as a way to build up the IP bank.
So, I highly doubt “Nintendo wants to prevent others” bla bla. It’s just IP lawyers doing their job.
I’ve sat in MANY discovery sessions with IP lawyers where they push and prod at software I, or my team, have written. “So, what you’ve effectively done is written a unique data structure to connect elements in memory?!”, “no, it’s a linked list, next question please”.
Hmm, notorious bastard company obviously fires a bunch of employees for wanting to unionise to protect themselves from notorious bastard management, gets backlash, and then says “no, they were actually a bunch of very naughty employees! if you’re not a naughty employee, you’ve got nothing to fear” yeah fuckin right.
I’d ask if they think everyone in the world is stupid but they made billions off of GTA online and this won’t affect their reputation (or bottom line) one iota so… I mean yes, we’re all stupid.
Nah, I played it 2-3 years ago and it was totally fine. The only bug I recall was at the end with the helicopter sequence, and it was really frustrating. Basically, I had to set a framerate cap to 30 FPS to progress the game (60 might work too, but I needed a cap).
There’s one impactful decision soon after and then a cutscene that’s based on that decision, but otherwise that’s the end. So if you run into the bug and don’t want to fix it, just watch the ending on YouTube or something.
Rockstar patched out a bunch of radio music they had time-limited licenses for. I don’t think you would notice that, though there are mods to bring them back. Performance-wise it only had problems with integrated graphic cards under Windows in my expirience. Haven’t tried it on Linux.
We already know the affected workers were using Discord to organise. My guess is they were discussing work issues there, and Rockstar jumped on that as an excuse to fire them (as it would constitute a breach of NDA).
That was really clumsy on the side of the workers. Discord is the last App I would use to organize a union. What were they even thinking?
On the other hand that probably means they use discord for literally everything including communication within Rockstar, albeit unofficially. So yeah if their employer had any consistency in firing people over NDAs they would probably have to fire most of the staff.
Official internal chat will be either Slack or MS Teams. Using any unauthorised app to discuss matters relating to the business would be a contract violation.
Realistically, game devs do this all the time in private chats with colleagues that happen outside work, both online and in person. But of course R* either never knows about those or chooses to overlook it.
In this case, I suspect the fact they were unionising was the reason they actually took action on it. It’s not about consistency, it’s about having an excuse to fire these people.
Yeah. I’ve never worked anywhere that the staff didn’t have side channels for socializing out of work that inevitably ended up getting kinda borderline with some discussions. It’s against company policy and it is a problem but it is mostly ignored because good employees know where to draw the line and the orgs that own those third party chats tend to not be competitors.
And it leaves people open to stuff like this. “Well, you probably talked about your work schedule or compensation which we consider Office Use Only so you violated corporate policy and are eligible to be fired”
As for “Well, they should have used matrix or signal!”: Maybe. But if you’ve ever tried to convince a friend group to install another client then you know that is a much bigger struggle than convincing people to engage in collective bargaining.
But also? While it is possible rockstar/take2 just guessed, the more likely outcome is that someone narced. At which point it doesn’t actually matter if everyone was on Discord or Matrix or Signal or whatever.
I’ve formed a union within the industry. The trick is a balance between meeting with workers and security for the OC. In my campaign, we used discord as well to be a space to connect with as many people as possible outside of work. We also used signal for the OC to discuss the actual organizing. NDAs are limited only to the direct work. You can legally talk about workplace issues though. IWGB (UK equivalent to CODE-CWA) aren’t amateurs, they very likely trained the OC on all of this.
“The CEO said in a meeting that they want to use AI to replace QA”
This sounds like it would be on the edge if the company is publicly traded and there’s a chance that information wasn’t communicated to investors, especially for something like video games where launch bugs could make or break initial impression and thus sales.
“Wanna hear about this cool bug I found today?”
This is probably fine if it’s unreleased and has been fixed. It’s probably not fine if it’s in a released product and hasn’t been fixed.
For sure, definitely be extra careful when organizing outside of the ways sanctioned by the company. In fact, I recommend not keeping any records about anything that goes on in the company, and keep union discussions about the union itself. If you want to recruit people, talk about how you’d like the relationship between the union and company to be, not about things the company is doing that you don’t like, because there’s a huge risk of giving the company a valid reason to fire you.
I’m more talking about what’s generally protected legally and what’s not. Again, if you’re looking to form a union, don’t get anywhere near that line.
That is exactly what happened. All corporations operate like this. They know what they are doing is illegal, so they just use words to warp reality however they like. It’s the Republican strategy.
I dont see it. Mario is a forever brand that is handled well. Sonic is a forever brand that is handled a little less well, but its hanging on. Ubisoft had a forever brand, possibility with rayman, but handled it like shit. Forever brand is a mascot and something that associates with the company. AC is an open world action game with little relatability between each title. What is AC’s character? What distinguishes it from FarCry?
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