371–380 of 513 posts
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Independence. People work hard in video games because it's one of the last indie friendly industries. Unions can crush that in many different ways.
Those people can sign up to carry a wealthy person from place to place and get their independence fix that way.
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> Why is it okay for a company to extract a so much more money from an employee than they pay them, but not okay for employees to band together to get paid what they're worth? Salaries are based on supply and demand, not value generated. More developers at your skill level = lower salaries for everyone. More successful companies competing for talent = higher salaries for everyone. If you want compensation based on va…
> And running a business isn't exactly easy. If it was so easy to generate $1.6M off of a $300k employee, you'd be flooded with other companies willing to pay higher and higher salaries. It's really, difficult and rare. This logic is completely flawed. In-fact reality is almost the complete opposite. The difficulty of running a business is inversely proportional to your moat, and the first to market has a much easier…
Except Facebook wasn't the first social network. And Google wasn't the first search engine.
Facebook didn't crush all other social networks by being a 1st mover. They did it by constantly developing their product and making more engaging hooks into their platform and they hired the best like crazy (at the highest industry wages) to do it. They bought Instagram (a competitor -- and not a 1st mover btw) because they feared their competition. It won't be the last to threaten them either and they'll need more billions on hand to buy that company or innovate along side them to keep growing.
I'm speaking as someone who's founded and sold a successful business, helped a bunch of 9 & 10-figure startups grow theirs and been around to see a ton of others fail completely. Unfortunately, it's not easy to make money or run a business as much as it might look that way from the outside.
In a highly competitive hiring environment like tech the day you don't treat your employees well or pay them a competitive wage, they'll leave in a heartbeat. It's not uncommon to see resumes of talented developers with a new company every 9-12 months as they rocket up the payscales.
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>The vast amounts of cash Fortnite made for Epic is being poured back into buying up indie games and supplying a better store for game sales and creating a better game engine that anyone can pick up and use for 5% of sales. For the sole reason of trying to replace Steam as the dominant store platform on PC. Epic isn't just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. This will not continue once Epic achieves their…
They don't need to replace Steam, they have 80 million active users from Fortnite alone. Steam has 90 million active users. Were they to compete with Steam properly they would crush Steam's store feature set. The Epic store is still under-developed compared to Steam by a lot. Regardless of their perceived intent the entire point is that the little guy is being rewarded and the system works even if it appears 'evil'.
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> Standardizing crediting would be one close to my heart. Oh hell yeah. I did 3+ years on a title, nearly killing myself to ship it. When I realized that doing that much OT was doing to my personal relationships, health and sanity I left with a generous transition ~8mo before ship(including tossing 2.5mo of PTO because they didn't have to pay it out and I could never take it). Listed under "special thanks" as well, i…
With less and less titles shipping as boxed-product and very few of those having anything approaching an instruction booklet crediting is almost dead already. Some in-game credit screen buried in the options menu or after completing a 50+ hour campaign is about as un-readable as the end credits on a Netflix TV show. The argument against you getting a full credit is that it would list your contribution to the game as…
Authors get credit for their books. Everyone who works on a film gets credit for their contribution. This goes into your CV, resume, IMDB, whatever. It's important.
Getting employers to care about the rising cost of healthcare benefits will get lobbying to happen to make a change.
Until employees push back on rising plan costs, not much will change.
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Do unions decrease employment? I wasn't aware of that. As I said in a different comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21982787 ), I don't think it's 100% sure that games would become more expensive. But if they do, I think it's a tradeoff we have to make in a humane society.
I didn't say that unions decrease employment. I did describe the mechanisms by which employment might be reduced due to increasing costs (regardless of the cause of the cost increases). In the referenced comment, you speak of "profit from abuse/exploitation", which presupposes that abuse or exploitation is occurring. Most game developers (programmers at least) have skills that are valuable in other kinds of SW develo…
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The key engineers who left Ferrari in '61 became the key engineers that lifted Lamborghini into existence. They didn't start a union and stepped away from deaths of Ferrari drivers and verbal abuse to start something new with Lamborghini. Both companies survived and no unions were started. https://www.gptoday.net/en/news/f1/207607/history-ferrari-an... Disgruntled employees are the birth of something new, not a call…
I was pointing out that the claim this sort of thing is new is complete and total bullshit.
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> The majority of bad sentiment has come in the past five years Literally the first 3rd party gaming company was because workers were unsatisfied with Atari.
The key engineers who left Ferrari in '61 became the key engineers that lifted Lamborghini into existence. They didn't start a union and stepped away from deaths of Ferrari drivers and verbal abuse to start something new with Lamborghini. Both companies survived and no unions were started. https://www.gptoday.net/en/news/f1/207607/history-ferrari-an... Disgruntled employees are the birth of something new, not a call…
I don't understand your point.
Why do we need to organize people making 300K+. We already have massive bargaining power. Unionization will only reduce an individual’s leverage
Glassdoor indicates a "Senior Software Engineer" at Blizzard (considered one of the better companies, afaik) makes between 63k-126k. A "Game designer" makes 33k-72k. Video game industry also works long hours with a lot of crunchtime. And this doesn't even get into EA, or the other megalithic companies that push out dozens of titles every quarter.
The video game industry gets away with working their engineers harder and for less money, because people generally like building video games.
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>Also an anecdote doesn't invalidate something that is true for a vast majority of the american workforce. You just love your wide sweeping claims don't you? No it is not true for the vast majority of the american workforce. >You said it right, they are provided. In Europe they are not provided: they are your right and it cannot be taken away by your employer. Can we please not move the goal posts, I thought this was…
> that can be done at the legal level. You do not need unions to exist to do that! Unions allow workers to wield political power collectively as well. Union endorsements are valuable, union money, union member donations. Instead of having billionaires like Bezos or the Koch brothers buying up media and giving millions to candidates to push their agenda, ordinary people can be heard. Why do you think so many old schoo…