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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#141

Post by deanCommie »

yCombLinks wrote: post #37
agentgt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is mostly just margins. Sure there are lots of people willing to work for no very little money for game dev but I would say there are tons of people willing to work for very little money for FAANG companies because they want that on their resume. In fact since we are on hackernews that is kind of thing people wanting to be entrepreneurs do. Work at recognizable big tech company for a few years. Leave to be…

They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.

You're not wrong, but it's also so sad.

FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well.

Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes.

It polluted the brains of most of the people in our industry from a missionary mindset to a mercenary, and it decimated big company's established cultural memory all to prop up a bunch of unicorns who will probably all slowly die over the next decade.

So now half of the people can't get a job, and the half that can are miserable. This was true BEFORE AI.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#142

Post by [deleted] »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110
amazingamazing wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the benefit of a union for the workers, but your examples seem strange. They do not illustrate that a union somehow results in a better product. If that were self evident how come there has never been a company that started with employees unionized? To get this supposed benefit

They’re called cooperatives Mondragon is a extremely large well structured cooperative that did exactly this and is a hallmark of success for anarchist cooperatives worldwide

[deleted]

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#143

Post by fodkodrasz »

matchbok3 wrote: post #96
keybored wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-unionists are here to tell us that consumers might possibly suffer. Higher prices and delays on a video game. Which has not seen a release in this series in half this century so far. For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.

What a luxury you have to spend so much money on things, then. Hint: most people don't live that way.

Well, given that computer games are not essential goods, most people could survive perfectly well without these so-called luxuries. Or is it only fairly produced luxury goods that are considered a luxury, while exploitatively produced luxury goods are simply treated as the standard way people live?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#144

Post by Apocryphon »

matchbok3 wrote: post #137
qmmmur wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested to understand more about what you think unions and organisation have done for working rights over the last 100 years.

That is an entirely different argument that's not particularly germane to this topic. One can agree that unions, in the past, have helped workers, and also understand that they are not always in the best interest of the general public. It's complex, but possible!

Then that is an argument to reform and innovate on unions, not do away with them altogether.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#145

Post by EliRivers »

bko wrote: post #62
bwestergard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

Suppose you double their pay, make them more in line with other tech workers. How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs? The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages), and the number of people interested in working there would grow as well. Do you just have a lottery? Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about,…

How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs?

Would the company not conduct interviews and pick out whoever seems like the best candidates?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#146

Post by tadfisher »

tpmoney wrote: post #99
Negitivefrags wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People haven’t responded to your very first point, and I want to really stress it because I don’t think most people really get it. Margins. Game development doesn’t pay more because game development companies can’t afford to pay more. Sure, an individual game dev company may make a lot due to the hit driven nature of the field, but the totality of the market simply makes less money per developer than big tech does. I…

> In order for that to change, the market has to increase in size by appealing to a more casual audience, or existing gamers have to pay more. Not something I think most gamers would like. To really drive this point home, the gaming community recently lost their minds when it became clear that this generation of video games were going to retail for ~$90 per game. Never mind that even in the early 90’s an average game…

There's a cool 1990s magazine scan that breaks down the margins for an SNES cartridge: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11140t0/pricebreakd...

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#147

Post by vouwfietsman »

flohofwoe wrote: post #111
ionwake wrote: post #101

Isnt management at Rockstar the same poeple who: A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code? B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile fo…

This JSON-parsing problem is the least of Rockstars problems I think. But I bet it happened like this: - when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow - game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years - over time more and more items are add…

Although this is possibly true, at any time the dev team could've gone: "loading is slow man, can we just profile it and see if there's anything obvious?". To someone with access to the source code and a debugger, that's probably less than 30 minutes of time to go from zero to hero.

I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#148

Post by avidiax »

savanaly wrote: post #65
bwestergard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

>One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fa…

> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried.

To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point.

I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions.

A union can acquiesce to the passion tax and say that top developers at a AAA should make $150k/year (a bit low), while simultaneously saying that that developer should be able to see their children on nights and weekends. The project management that leads to "perma-crunch" is something that ought to be resolved on the employer's side, not by the employees.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#149

Post by JadoJodo »

javier123454321 wrote: post #112
ryandrake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsessed gamer, I remember in my 20s I almost would have been willing to work at iD Software without pay if they let me.

It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.

I would guess a big part of this is because the art _itself_ is a form of compensation: Artists have a passion for the end result in a way that organizations (e.g., corporations, collectives, movements, etc.) harness and take advantage of in lieu of financial compensation.
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