Let’s not pretend like Blizz or Bethesda will see the end of this decade anyway. Their fate was sealed when they got bought. Still, unionizing was the best thing employees could hope for. Good for them!
Let’s not pretend like Blizz or Bethesda will see the end of this decade anyway.
So if you’re management, you face a choice: try to dump everyone now in a reorganization on a moment’s notice, while it’s still Biden’s NLRB, or negotiate a CBA that probably bakes in substantial severance and job protections that will be expensive when they do try to reorganize for business reasons?
If it’s true that the workers were likely to get dumped within the decade, then negotiating protections now actually protects them, or forces management to pay a high cost.
Amazing, I love seeing the ripple of Bethesda’s own ‘Wall-to-Wall’ union and other studios making the effort is taking shape in other places in game development. Corpo scum needs to be forced to play nice, unions are so useful in the pursuit of that goal.
I wonder where a union draws its power from in an industry where there are so many people desperate for work right now.
Trade unions make sense because there’s such a shortage of skilled workers in total, much less scabs. How does a union for such a well known legacy game developer sustain itself in an environment where I bet scabs would be in abundance?
Maybe for Bethesda specifically, there’s also a shortage of skilled work? I mean, they often hire modders and Creation Engine STILL uses flash (Starfield’s menus are .swf files),
I don’t know about the details, but I found that out while browsing the menu mods, as the Undelayed Menus, which removes the pointless delay in opening and closing of menus, comes with a bunch of .swf and that was when I thought to myself “You have to be fucking kidding”
Yea, they probably have that one guy still there from the days creation engine was made that is required to be on staff for any future games to fix whatever archaic code they break. Get him on board with the union and Bethesda is probably held by the short hairs to do whatever they say.
I think it might be more subtle than that, unions exist so that when negotiations happen they can fuck back, but we know Microsoft can strategise longer term than that. They pioneered “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Embracing a union then trying to infiltrate and turn it into a corporatised union is another version of that exact same play.
It’s more likely a cost benefit analysis. Fighting the Unions is lawyer expensive and PR expensive. Gamers are noisy after all, when riled up. Microsoft is evil, but also like Trump, they understand optics.
Companies can leverage CBAs to “fix” pay scales well below CPI or other metrics by forcing extensive negotiation as a way to sell down an agreement. Similarly, they can use agreements to create separate classes, for example: the SAG/AFTRA agreement for voice actors with all the Gen AI exemptions.
Thank fuck for that. With any luck the better conditions will even give them the power to push back on management if management demands something stupid be added to a game.
In an industry as notoriously dreadful as game development, every bit of quality of life counts.
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