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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#441

Post by ZenoArrow »

bouncing_bolete wrote: post #338
ZenoArrow wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely predatory. Perhaps if you're a company founder you can try to glamourise this level of personal sacrifice, but for standard employees it's clearly an unhealthy level of work, and would have been seen so by most normal people 10/15 years ago too. Also, nobody is going to do their best work when they're having to work so many hours, it's highly likely you're not getting a lot of good work done if you pu…

Imo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on. The issue is trying to apply that logic to normal employees. The calculation of time v payoff is worlds different

> Imo it's fine to glorify the 65+ hour grind a founder takes on.

While you're right that it's easier to try to justify this level of work for founders, the reality is that this level of work is not sustainable by anybody, and founders would risk damaging their physical and mental health and reducing the quality of their work the longer this went on just as much as anyone else.

I'd also argue that it's largely unnecessary. There may be some periods of time when there are too many competing demands on your time and you just have to accept extended working hours to get through a week or two or even a month, but more often than not this situation comes about due to poor planning and/or poor working processes. Effective delegation and automation can greatly reduce the likelihood of having to work 65+ hour weeks, even for founders.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#442

Post by Flere-Imsaho »

j1elo wrote: post #386
ernesto905 wrote: post #308

> 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.

It's surprising how Wild West it gets out there. In the EU that would strictly fall into unlawful working conditions; I kid you not, in Spain the law doesn't allow to work overtime for more than 80 total hours per year .

I worked in the games industry from 2000 to 2010 in the UK... We very much did crunch.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#443

Post by somedude895 »

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?

Most industries or companies that have a brand or make something people are passionate about, get away with paying lower salaries since they'll attract workers who want to work specifically at that company or in that industry. Companies that do boring things have to compete harder for workers.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#444

Post by oreally »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #69
DrBenCarson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video game development is largely grunt work outside of the engine

This, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained. I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone…

> The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives.

You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#445

Post by oreally »

saadn92 wrote: post #89
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 is: the ENGINEERING problems they solve are harder, but they're still just video games at the end of the day, compared to something that solves an actual business need.

This is correct. Market economics doesn't care how hard/deep you worked on something, just how much value it can get for cheap.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#446

Post by kaibee »

justinhj wrote: post #416
abcde666777 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of things you're trying to simulate within the the performance contraints (games push computers to their absolute limits). An example - a 3d humanoid character. You need code to manage the mesh, the animation (probably skeletal), the animations themselves, all the blending logic, probably specialised code and data for facial animations, and then you need to make sure all of that can mesh with both input dr…

And many a game developer doesn't have to write any of this because it already is commodity software.

AHahahahah.

Yeah that's other part. What was PhD level computer graphics becomes table stakes a few years later and not only do you have to do that, but you have to top it a few years later.

Oh and all of these systems have to be aware of each other, because the higher fidelity they become, the harder it is to keep the seams hidden, because the seam between them become more jarring.

Sure, you have skeletal bone animation and all that stuff in 2003, but do your characters adapt their footstep placement to the terrain height? Does the run animation blend smoothly between states? Oh it blends smoothly but now player inputs feel unresponsive because you had the clever idea to make it inertial? Oh now do it all over a network at minimum latency because esports are a hundred million dollar industry.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#447

Post by oreally »

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…

I think the differentiator is the amount of deep Math that goes into it.

A simple card game is on par with standard app development.

But if you're working at lower levels of a world simulation engine that require linear algebra, computer graphics knowledge? Camera and joint manipulation? Animation? Navmeshes? Physics? That's a notch harder than a REST app and microservices infrastructure. Some robotics, ML areas touch on this too.

The only tough topics at these adtechs that might match would be graph manipulation, or currently ML knowledge. I suspect leetcode isn't very applicable in everyday usage.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#448

Post by zamadatix »

dude250711 wrote: post #47

If companies do not like this, paying a percent of profit instead of salaries is always an option. (ah s** here we go again by the way).

"Pay transparency" is only 1 of the 3 main initial changes the workers mention, and the amount they take home is only part of that. Besides, with schemes like % of profit there is a peculiar tendency for profit to disappear as revenue goes up (e.g. "hollywood accounting" type things).

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#449

Post by zamadatix »

jpttsn wrote: post #428

This is a funny self-own, what am I missing? Timing v. trends: - big game studios are already reviled as lazy, bloated - nimble indies are hitting a lot of records - gen. AI coming for many studio roles - employees have lower friction to be entrepreneurial It’s like if home cooking and self checkout were going really strong and then the restaurants workers picked that time to riot for higher wages

If things are really on the downtrend for the business while the industry is in various uptrends (in reality, GTA V is doing as great as ever and the anticipation around the GTA VI release dominates the industry) it still makes sense to push for quality working conditions for however long it makes sense for the business to be hiring people the same as it does when the business is doing well.

Pay related items also seem to be a small portion of what's being pushed for change.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#450

Post by [deleted] »

sonzohan wrote: post #177
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?

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…

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