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Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

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Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#371

Post by throw10920 »

sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #263
KittenInABox wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race. I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find i…

Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert. Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable? No. The ea…

It's kinda wild how part of the modern zeitgeist is entitlement to be comfortable, and how irrationally people will defend that entitlement, including to the point of being literally racist and sexist.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#372

Post by throw10920 »

KittenInABox wrote: post #324
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert. Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable? No. The ea…

What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism? Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!

> What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?

Women generally have different interests than men, and different cultures generally have different interests and expectations than others. This is extremely well documented, as is the fact that people have a harder time being comfortable and fitting in around others who are unlike them or don't share their interests.

> wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture

If Valve mostly hires white males, then either you're expecting the employees to not socialize at all (leading to no culture), which is sociopathic, or yes, that's exactly what you would expect.

You're objecting to reality and truth because it offends you, for some reason? There's literally nothing objectionable with any of the above. Being uncomfortable implies zero moral wrongdoing. You should do some reflection and/or research.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#374

Post by throw10920 »

worldfoodgood wrote: post #38
elephanlemon wrote: post #8

As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.

Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such. They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)…

The only thing absurd is this comment.

> They also take an absurd cut of developer income

30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.

In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).

> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%

Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.

> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of

This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?

> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.

Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#375

Post by moneywoes »

fracus wrote: post #171
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #9

Well, there goes GTA 6. Better for my wallet, I guess. Don't want to finance some thugs.

I think the offline gameplay of GTA is becoming dated. Playing GTAV just felt like cut scene, then chores, cut scene, then chores, rinse, repeat. To be fair, I don't understand the purpose of GTA online but it was wildly popular.

how are games today different

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#376

Post by efreak »

whatevaa wrote: post #181
axus wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.

Steam Deck desktop mode is full blown KDE desktop. The only nuance is that system updates are managed by A/B partition scheme, so root is readonly. Can be made writeable but it's an overlay, so changes get lost on system update and need to be reapplied.

It's not an overlay, it just gets mounted separately from root - there's an overlay for /etc and possibly a few other directories, this is to allow user changes to configuration to be kept after upgrades

Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes.

You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#377

Post by jeffwask »

omnimus wrote: post #314
mrguyorama wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them. I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG. I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers rig…

I am not sure why GOG is bad. Then again i am not sure why Cyberpunk is bad - i played it recently for the first time and its pretty fine game.

I played 3 times finished twice.

1.0 was 5/10 (quit after a few days) 1.5 was 7/10 (finished) Phantom Liberty was a 9/10 (finished)

It took 2 full years of additional development for 2077 to be in the amazing state it is in now.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#378

Post by vablings »

mjr00 wrote: post #177
vablings wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam. And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doin…

Some extremely popular games, like all the Hoyoverse stuff (Genshin/ZZZ/etc) or most of Blizzard's games, have their own launchers and aren't on Steam. So gamers are certainly willing to use non-Steam platforms and launchers if there's a reason .

That didn't stop overwatch 2 from eventually making its way over to Steam. They also have the best integration, once your steam account is linked to your Battle.NET account you don't have to even think about the launcher

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#379

Post by mrguyorama »

jeffwask wrote: post #377
omnimus wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure why GOG is bad. Then again i am not sure why Cyberpunk is bad - i played it recently for the first time and its pretty fine game.

I played 3 times finished twice. 1.0 was 5/10 (quit after a few days) 1.5 was 7/10 (finished) Phantom Liberty was a 9/10 (finished) It took 2 full years of additional development for 2077 to be in the amazing state it is in now.

I have qualms with supporting "They purposely released it unfinished and broken to get significant revenue and only then fixed it" though.

It's a terrible incentive for the industry and why I still refuse to buy No Man's Sky.

It's essentially the concept of early access but lying about not being early access.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#380

Post by [deleted] »

worldfoodgood wrote: post #294
thereisnospork wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here? You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'shoul…

I don't think you understand how discourse works? I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman. I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work".…

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