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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#301

Post by tayo42 »

miiiiiike wrote: post #292
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…

> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times. I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are cat…

It probably depends on the level in the stack your at.

At a high level the engines and frameworks don't feel any different.

Work with graphics and models feels more difficult though then most networked application work I've done.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#302

Post by Insanity »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #294
Insanity wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They've missed their launch window by years now.

I mean the ideal sales window within a year, e.g period leading up to Christmas.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#303

Post by RobRivera »

sonzohan wrote: post #258
RobRivera wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was your route to teaching like? I kinda am considering putting my hat in a similar ring on a part time, evening class type basis if I can get away with it.

I graduated in 2011, went straight to work at Blizzard entertainment. At the same time I had gotten accepted into graduate school so I opted for an internship at Blizzard to try both. I went back to Blizzard in 2012, but quickly realized I wanted to do my PhD. So I left Blizzard and went full-time as a student. I didn't have funding so I TAd classes. Eventually my advisor and I scored a big NSF grant, so she used the…

I'll prospect that way, thank you for the insight. I have a unique background AND teaching experience (military leadership for my first career, and then taught as a full time visiting professor for 2 years) but having spent a decade in industry as a software engineer, yes I concur, teaching is not a common skill among the labor force (anecdotal ofc). I hope after I launch my first indie game I could knock on the doors of say Digipen or similar. Will see tho, thats more a 2027 thing.

What kind of PhD research did you do? I considered going back for a PhD program focusing on simulation as it relates to discoverability within AI research, but kept ruling out it was a bad career decision and should be left as a retirement thing

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#304

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#306

Post by LugosFergus »

flohofwoe wrote: post #33
LPisGood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only true in some instances. Do most AAA titles like Call of Duty, GTA, etc use Unity or Unreal?

In the last few years the pendulum has been swinging back from inhouse engine to Unreal Engine. There are a couple of holdouts, but my guess is that the majority of AAA games currently released are back on UE - at least it feels that way ;) And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.

A couple of holdouts? Hardly. Capcom uses the RE Engine. Released ~4 games with it in the past three years. In fact, SF6 went from UE to RE Engine. Death Stranding 2 is Decima. Id still uses IdTech, and that's never changing. Ubisoft still uses Anvil, and Outlaws was Snowdrop. EA still uses Frostbite. Bethesda continues to use their crappy engine, which I forget the name of. FromSoftware will likely never give up their engine, which has been used for Elden Ring and its successors. There's more that I can't be bothered to look up.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#307

Post by jachee »

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.

Easy: No one should do unpaid labor. Period. “Crunch time” has traditionally been deployed by games management as a license to free slave labor from game developers.

Failures of management’s planning are imposed as emergencies on the devs.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#308

Post by ernesto905 »

> An end to crunch

I was unaware of the crunch concept:

"In the video game industry, crunch (or crunch culture) is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours" -- wikipedia

Needless to say this seems extremely predatory.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#309

Post by walthamstow »

Insanity wrote: post #269
jayceedenton wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Movies are just as bad, animation and vfx shops get crunched to hell. Fashion houses ahead of fashion week too.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#310

Post by lesuorac »

lesuorac wrote: post #50
darknavi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monopsony I had to look it up as well. I assumed it was a play on words about Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony (the three big video game console players).

For future people to look it up. Monopoly is a single seller. Monopsony is a single buyer.

Given how popular this has gotten I guess I should point out that it's wrong.

There isn't a single seller so the proper ones are

Oligopoly - Market with few sellers

Oligopsony - Market with few buyers

"few" really meaning that they have pricing power as opposed to 3 companies.

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