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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#211

Post by jampekka »

geriatricguy wrote: post #167
WarmWash wrote: post #4

Can 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?

My guess would be that game prices haven't dramatically changed in 20-30 years and development costs have skyrocketed. Easiest way to save money is on payroll.

Game sales have skyrocketed though. Inflation corrected revenue has increased something like 5x in the past 30 years.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#212

Post by evdubs »

amazingamazing wrote: post #54
HugoTea wrote: post #5

This is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.

Really? American cars suck compared to japanese and chinese which are not unionized. What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?

> What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?

Here's a layup: art. Remember the writer's union strike in 2007-2008? All of the shows whose writers were on strike that still went on were terrible.

Edit: also, the purpose of a union is not to "produce something better". The purpose of a union is to protect workers' rights. They generally serve their purpose very well.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#213

Post by rozab »

chasd00 wrote: post #92

What is the career ladder like for game devs? In a union, the only way up is seniority or, in other words, the amount of money you've paid in dues over the years. A great developer isn't going to get rewarded with higher pay or a better role unless they've spent enough time/money as a union member.

I've never quite understood how unions in the US work or why they have the perception of them that they do. But rest assured, that is not what a union is elsewhere in the world.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#214

Post by jhatemyjob »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #202
jhatemyjob wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?

I've met people whose lives were almost destroyed due to games. This is true. I've also met those whose lives were transformed positively by it (no, not Pokemon.) They run the whole gamut. I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.

That is precisely my point, thank you. Yeah there's a few good ones like Undertale or (early 2010s era) Minecraft or Roblox or Garry's Mod but those are rare. Most of the games out there are the types like Pokemon which are more like a drug addiction.

So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.

Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#215

Post by duckmysick »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #72
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…

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…

Does that mean the companies that develop games with heavy microtransactions pay their developers more?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#216

Post by M2Ys4U »

parineum wrote: post #70
HugoTea wrote: post #5

This is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.

> but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens. Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either inc…

>We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens.

The police aren't allowed to join a union

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#218

Post by zipy124 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #72
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…

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…

Margins are high. The video game market makes twice the combined revenue of all film/music markets combined.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#219

Post by manas96 »

smartties wrote: post #120
fidotron wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply/demand. For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive. I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists. On the art side it's even more extreme.

GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level perf…

I agree, low-level highly specialized technology roles within game companies do pay well.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#220

Post by tpmoney »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #78
parineum wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. We'll see. It's not like police unions are making life better for citizens. Unions are there for one reason, the union members. This will most likely be good for the employees and good on them for acting in their best interest but it seems just as likely that a unionized rockstar is negative for the consumer in either inc…

Police unions aren’t labor unions and are illegal in many countries including Japan. https://theconversation.com/why-police-unions-are-not-part-o... Notably, American police (the country that invented police unions) are a modern invention that largely exist as a output of slave catching and bounty hunting services.

This is a just so story that is trivially and obviously false and I don’t understand why it continues to persist. Paid public police forces in the US appear as early as the 1600s in Boston. The first what we might consider modern police departments were formed in the urban hubs of 1800s America where immigration tensions and the general increases in crime you expect when putting a lot of unconnected people into a concentrated area were driving factors for changes to what laws were made and how they were enforced. And those were modeled off the London police forces, themselves guided in large part by Robert Peele’s principles of policing.

Slave patrols were a form of early organized policing, but only one of many and hardly the first. And certainly this isn’t to say that racial tensions didn’t drive various forms of law enforcement. But this idea that police in general and American Police in particular are some direct descendant of salve patrols or wouldn’t exist without the institution of slavery ignores so much of human history and the long history of organized forms of law enforcement that predates the American colonies.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Due-process-and-indi...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police

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