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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#261

Post by toomuchtodo »

__natty__ wrote: post #237

> Together, we are organising around the things we want to change. Starting with: Pay transparency Flexible working An end to crunch That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.

Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions. Support for them is at a historical high, especially amongst younger cohorts.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/27/majoritie...

https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#262

Post by zipy124 »

antiframe wrote: post #233
zipy124 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does revenue have to do with margins. You didn't mention costs anywhere in your statement.

See my further reply, margin of 20% give or take 10% depending on scale (on average, some products obviously have incredibly high or low margins as is typical in the creative industry).

My point about revenue was that games are pulling in more money than film and TV and we all know they cost less to make, and film and TV has good pay so therefore the games industry can afford similar rates, if not more.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#263

Post by spike021 »

ryandrake wrote: post #10
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?

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.

as a student back in 2012, the CS program i was in was mostly people who wanted to make games. that's just one person's POV but most people i knew at the time weren't really into anything else in software.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#264

Post by jayceedenton »

__natty__ wrote: post #237

> Together, we are organising around the things we want to change. Starting with: Pay transparency Flexible working An end to crunch That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.

How do you end crunch? Teams always work at a more relaxed pace when the deadlines are years out. You can't beat Parkinson's law no matter how generous you are with the estimates.

We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#266

Post by sonzohan »

al_borland wrote: post #230
sonzohan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

Do you tend to see a high drop out rate or general dissatisfaction from graduates when they come to the realization that making a game is a very different experience than playing the games?

Dissatisfaction yes, although it doesn't manifest how you'd expect.

It comes in the form not so much in dropouts, but in bad course feedback and bad professor reviews.

"The professor made the class unfun."

"The professor said she's made games but clearly has never done that before with how she taught the class"

I'm a woman so, unsurprisingly, I experience a fair amount of misogyny from students in the class who have never made a game nor have they worked in industry but believe they know how it works.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#267

Post by ux266478 »

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…

It's also amortized over a much longer period of time too. Those 23 people would scratch build that $40 game in 2 years. These days it's more like 8 years, and you're rarely building from scratch.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#269

Post by Insanity »

jayceedenton wrote: post #264
__natty__ wrote: post #237

> Together, we are organising around the things we want to change. Starting with: Pay transparency Flexible working An end to crunch That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.

How do you end crunch? Teams always work at a more relaxed pace when the deadlines are years out. You can't beat Parkinson's law no matter how generous you are with the estimates. We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.

The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path.

I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and it'd probably hardly impact their sales.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#270

Post by dcrazy »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #224
matchbok3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs. Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.

> Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality) Certainly you can quantify this poor quality and show it's due to unions and not, say, lack of resources? > Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc) 2 drivers per subway car sounds like (at least with old tech) a good thing for everyone's safety. > Auto industry fighting EVs. Sounds like this was more the companies themselves, bu…

Anecdotally, if increasing resources improved outcomes, California would have fantastic education results, as would every purely economic intervention in low-median-income school districts.

Teachers may be underpaid on a time/effort basis compared to other jobs, but paying them more doesn’t actually improve outcomes. I am no expert—not even a parent—but my understanding is that curriculum choice and implementation are really, really important. (Can’t say how important relative to, say, family situation.)

According to one news report I read, 50% of the public school teachers in California are actively ignoring the state’s recent switch back to a phonics-based language curriculum, and the union itself is anti-phonics. Is the union just representing the will of those 50% of law-defying teachers, or are the teachers inferring their behavior from a politicized union?

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