At this point, we get everything before GTA6. Unions, AGI, Life on Mars.
GTA 6 Developers Unionize
171–180 of 561 posts
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's just a natural progression. When the company is a startup working on a new exciting tech it's chasing the dream and changing the world. When it's a behemoth employing 200k people, it's impossible for all of them to be chasing the dream. Probably like 90% of them would be doing extremely boring "keeping the lights on" tasks and ensuring this gargantuan machine does not go to pieces under it's own weight. It still can pay incredibly well, but it won't be exciting frontier work anymore. It just can't be, 200k people company can't move with the agility of 200 people company.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The unionised Openreach in UK who are really the de facto layer 1 network provider telco build infrastructure to a staggeringly higher quality than most of the move fast startup alternatives. Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures. Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce. Unions in film and tv hav…
> Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures. Boeing joined the chat.
The company that does union busting to cut labour costs?
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customers don't care about the code. They just care that the gameplay is fun.
Are you implying the only differentiator between good and bad developers is the aesthetic of the code itself? And not the actual computation the code does? Wild take honestly.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, it turns out video game consumers don't care much about the actual computation either. Most games are riddled with bugs, and it has next to no impact on sales. Rather, having weird, even embarrassing bugs can make players look at the game more fondly. Skyrim is one of the best selling games ever. Ostensibly it's about fighting dragons. But "Skyrim moment" does not mean an epic battle with a dragon. It means said dragon flying through a goddamn castle, then getting stuck on a single tree and disappearing into the ground, and still hitting you with fire breath somehow.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#175Earlier 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.
I was under impression there were quite a number of independent game studios, is that no longer a case? What is the cause of a monopsony here - the barrier to entry, at least for making a game, doesn't seem too high. Marketing one successfully is probably harder, but that is a common problem not unique to gaming.
There are more indie games than ever before. The issue is AAA games have become billion dollar projects. They are funded and structured far more like AAA movies than other software. Making games is easy. Getting the money together to spend $500 million on development and $500 million on marketing isn't easy.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Your hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't accord with the reasons these workers organized. They did not conceive of the issue as primarily about multiplying all worker compensation by some large factor (e.g. 2x). While they were certainly fighting for higher pay, it was as much about the arbitrariness of career paths as anything. Sexual harassment, crunch time, and layoff cycles were all problems they sought t…
Regardless of whether it's pay or conditions, the changes would make it a more desirable place to work, which would increase the amount of people that want to work in that field.
> The solution there was to create a less arbitrary system that allowed actors to work their way into the union and get a degree of income stability and protection from (previously horrendous) employer abuse
Less arbitrary sounds good, but you need discretion. A lot of unionized jobs rely or pretty arbitrary rules, like how long the person had worked there. Why should someone doing the same job as me get paid more just because he was there longer? That seems more arbitrary to me than my manager's opinion of my work. You end up having an underclass of younger employees and all the benefits accruing to people that have been there longer. This could sink an entire industry or company as they would be stuck with more expensive labor they can't get rid of while a new company can just hire younger people at the bottom of the scale for the same work
> You should look into the economics of these game studios a bit more. The unit economics are not like those of producing bricks which an essentially linear (capital, labor) -> bricks production function. The distributive effects between the employers, workers, and consumers would be very difficult to model. You can't really figure out the marginal contribution of the factors of production. To use a Hollywood analogy: Do we know how much less one of George Clooney's films would net if a different actor were cast instead of him? If we can't be sure, can we know what his marginal contribution was?
I agree, but that's exactly why you don't want some union to do it that doesn't have the insights. The Hollywood analogy is exactly right, how much would George Clooney films net if they used a different actor. Movie studios have a direct incentive to find out. They can pay someone a lot less and if its comparable, they would. But the idea that a union can have a matrix that can capture George Clooney's worth and pay (how long have you been an actor for?) is unrealistic.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#177Can anyone comment on why "big video game" dev pay has lagged "big tech" pay so badly? Ostensibly they are doing remarkably similar engineering problem solving, so why is there such a disparity?
Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie.
First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming.
From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly every student who comes in wants to pursue one of the three fields: cybersecurity, video gaming, or recently ML/AI.
This shouldn't come as a surprise, they want to work on the things that influenced them and shaped their experiences so far. There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.
Gaming, like most of entertainment, is a passion-driven industry. You trade good salary for your name in the credits. You trade nights, hobbies, marriages, and your health for this opportunity. That is unless you reach that lofty 1% of developers who are too valuable to be fired.
Not all areas of gaming are like this. Gambling, like working on slot/pachinko machines, pays very well and has pretty realistic work-life balance. However every student I've talked to about this has universally said "no I don't want to make slot machines. I only want to work on GTA/Stardew Valley/Hollow Knight/Fortnite."
There's seriously no shortage of starry-eyed students who are willing to accept minimum wage to solve SDE3 level problems. I was one of them once.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is usually framed in terms of greedy corporations cynically exploiting young workers, but having interviewed for a Sony studio myself a few years ago (and ultimately going back to my native robotics field for almost exactly double the pay), I think there is something tangible about the compensation that is working on something normal people encounter, especially in the leisure spaces of their lives.
It may not pay the rent or put food on the table, but seeing your name in the credits of a movie your friends watched or a game they played is a perk that has real value. Writing a technical book rarely pays the bills either but it's the same story of getting to see your name on the shelf, and maaaybe it leads to getting on a conference panel or something at some point but really you're doing a lot of labour for far below minimum wage just to be able to say you did (as I did for Apress when I was 20 years old... and it landed me an internship at Google, so there you go).
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
We have the same problem in the rest of tech, though? Being unable to get into a AAA studio is as unfair as being unable to get into FAANG. This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing. And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?
Why are so many engineers unable to get into FAANG? Their hiring seems pretty straight forward. Cram leetcode. Most people can't get into it because they don't want to dedicate 100+ hours cramming these tests. But if you do and you're reasonably smart, you'll get in. Much better chance than something like banking/consulting (hire right out of school) or lawyers (must go through lots of schools). Out of the high paid jobs, it's extremely open and transparent.
Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize
#180Earlier 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.
To a lesser extent the same has been said about Apple's low pay relative to peer (far less profitable) companies -- the mere honor of working at Apple is an implied part of the compensation package.