381–390 of 513 posts
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I was pointing out that the claim this sort of thing is new is complete and total bullshit.
Nobody claimed it was new. The majority of this is recent.
Not new. Not recent.
I would strongly consider supporting a video game union, if only to help formalize the things that the good shops do and bring those practices industry wide. Personally I haven't done a day of overtime in seven years and I feel reasonably compensated but there are clearly other places out there that are still exploiting their workers. Improving worker input into production schedules and creating clear guidelines arou…
I don't really understand this obsession with credits in the game dev industry. There's no credit list in GMail for example, and yet everyone is fine with it?
This is something open source gets right that companies don't -- in open source, there is a credits list. Both in the contributors listing and in the actual publicly accessible history of commits itself (which in turn auto-generates contributor lists e.g. on GitHub).
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1. Using revenue comparison is incorrect. Profit is more complicated because you have to add back in compensation (and if necessary be able to know when r&d comp is capitalized and be able to break out r&d versus sg&a if you only talking about comp for particular groups of employees) but it is the correct per-employee stat to compare. 2. Median employee salary is wrong, you should look at average salary if you are co…
All in employee costs don’t rise nearly as fast as wages when wages go up.
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Those people don't generate $1,620,000 with their labor once they leave Facebook. That number comes from being plugged into the Facebook machine, part of its system. Which is why Facebook gets the revenue and the employee gets a salary.
But that system is made of employees. It's not the office building or the computers. It's not the copy machine or the coffee maker. It's other workers. If all I needed to do was make the same capital investments as facebook to get the same returns wouldn't that be wonderful?
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Unpopular opinion: Large segments of the american population don't even real realize they have foolishly internalized decades of anti-union propaganda. They just think they are smarter/better/more rational. I disagree. I think you have just eaten up the propaganda pushed by billionaires. There is an entire industry that is dedicated to pushing anti-union propaganda.
The union bosses do it to themselves: Misuse of union funds and a union boss passing over union workers for private workers because they cost less for the job. Utopian unions don't happen. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...
I read all of this as "Major union seeks to extract rent from an additional sector". I agree that putting developers on death marches is antithetical to everything that is human, but it's not like you don't have options in this industry... Tech work isn't like coal mining where your health is legitimately at risk on a daily basis, and where the number of alternative options available to the average worker is low to n…
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If there's something wrong with the statistics given in the source, point it out. If you've got statistics that you think are more accurate, give sources, and say why you think they're more accurate. But this drive-by snide comment is pretty worthless. You can be better than that.
It's an equally high effort response to posting unemployment rates in the first place.
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>> Why should they get 40% margins? Form a union, demand more money. Why should they pay you more? Form the next FB and pay your employees 3x what they currently pay. Pretty ridiculous response, right?
Because if they don't then the union has the capability to severely harm the company. This is why we need unions.
Early in my career I was interested in game development because I had dabbled in graphics programming personally and it seemed like more fun than other types of development. A cursory look into opportunities showed that the schedules were grueling and driven by the market, which expects new flashy titles quite often but the demand for the new titles tails off relatively quickly. Worse, it's not like a spreadsheet whe…
I don't know of anyone who is rewriting everything between releases and even new games at new companies are built on top of existing tech 99% of the time.
The market has also changed, the big money games are almost all games-as-a-service with multi-year lifespans. For better or worse there is a lot of 'fix bugs, add some features, charge people for upgrades'.
The schedules are definitely getting better as the (remaining) industry talent matures and games are less driven by putting something in a box and moving on to the next title. I'm not saying it is perfect (by any means, and some things are worse) but it is not the same industry as it was 10 years ago.
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Who is waiting? Most people I know that didn't like the conditions got better jobs in other industries. Finance pays well and is cushy in comparison. Architecture visualizations, media jobs, programming roles are easier to find after obtaining the ability to outperform the norms for other industries. For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal. Do you unionize every fledgling in…
> For most of gaming's history it has been a niche product without mainstream appeal Really? So the Atari boom was niche? 500,000 arcade machines sold in 1982 was niche? 30 million Nintendo Entertainment systems in American homes was niche? It hasn't been a fledgling industry by any reasonable measure for at least 25 years if not much longer. How many artists, testers and game designers do you know that moved into fi…
Games is not in a position of minimizing all risk. What industry is? If you want a safe job get into defense contracting. Go back to university and retrain like everybody else does.
It's baffling to see this attitude on Hackernews, famous for tech entrepreneurs who have more pivots in their career than a pirouetting ice skater.
Are comic books mainstream? They sold millions of copies, they are still a niche interest. Not until the Wii did games open up to a 'casual' market. With phones it's truly everywhere now.