201–210 of 628 posts
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the current trajectory of AI, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water.
I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container. Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover.
Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished.
I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.
They are moving most of their development to India, where it's pretty easy to find bottom-dollar UE5 dev shops.
Do they make good games though? Idk if game dev is like corporate software where it's already uncreative crap no one really is thrilled about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the current trajectory of looms, I see unionisation efforts dead in the water. - Someone in the early 19th century
Yeah I think the 19th century was a little bit different than today. Unions only work as far as you, the worker, are irreplaceable. Plumbers, electricians, etc. -- all that work has to be done "here and now." You can't just instantly teleport a bunch of Indian plumbers to fix a broken water main in downtown New York. Those tradeworkers have actual leverage. And, to your example, what is feasible to outsource (either…
Software work appearing to be extremely fungible with offshoring and AI is all the more reason to unionize. It doesn't matter to the employer who is doing the work, so the union is the only leverage to truly saying, "hey as the person actually doing the work, I would like to be treated better, and you can't just ignore me, fire me, and replace me".
The race to the bottom already started as soon as companies saw more fungibility where there was less before. Software unions won't kick that into overdrive, they'll slow it down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're framing this as a thing done by a greedy corporation in an evil manner, which maybe it is, but it's also just a sign of the times. For most of the 90s and 00s, your game engine, specifically idTech in this case, was a competitive advantage. Doom and Quake/2/3 all represented massive technological jumps over their predecessors and were way ahead of their competition in terms of looks. Games like Unreal (Tournam…
Man I miss tribes and tribes 2. Sadly the revival was garbage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I firmly believe if software engineering unionization ever starts to take hold, it'll begin with game developers. There's a lot of money in gaming but the workers are treated like shit, as you pointed out.
Its already started, within Blizzard. Communications Workers of America Union across the WoW and Overwatch teams. Also, no union employees at Blizzard were impact by Microsoft's Xbox layoffs/restructuring. Goes to show, Unions are important and work. The best time to unionize was several years ago. The next best time is now.
It might have to do with the unionisation, but I wouldn't be surprised that its just that Blizzard is like one of the like 4 money makers that MS still has in the gaming division and that is why they were spared.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…
This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware. I have seen a number of projects go from 'We're building our own engine' To 'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day' To 'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine' If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine…
Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time. If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.
A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly recommend reading "The Box", about the history of the shipping container. Longshoremen literally retired early and were paid pensions out of corporate profits from container related productivity increases.
I read the book and that's not the first thing that comes to mind. What comes to mind is whole towns made of dockworkers which disappeared, and some places like Manchester lost their port and their industry died too, and it took them decades to recover. Of course, some other like Rotterdam flourished. I do recommend the book, but I think it shows many sides of what happens when a large change happens.