Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

gtaforums.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 383 posts

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#141

Post by wlesieutre »

jsheard wrote: post #41
elephanlemon wrote: post #8

As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.

Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#142

Post by hueho »

rayiner wrote: post #15
metadat wrote: post #2

This makes me sad, R* has made some of my most favorite games, especially Red Dead Redemption 2. They make so much money, why can't they play nice and treat their employees like human beings? I don't recall reports of Valve (Steam, also super profitable) stooping. Is Rockstar a genetic relative of GAFA, because this is more like what I've come to expect from Amazon.

[flagged]

The affected employees are in the UK and Canada branches, with their own local unions.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#143

Post by physarum_salad »

t-writescode wrote: post #122
physarum_salad wrote: post #109

I love GTA/Red Dead but Rockstar really is just another monopoly (in terms of creativity) at this stage. More mid sized studios, like Rockstar when it started/midway, would be better. Also the narrative and dialogue is ever so slightly overated in Rockstar games because the competition is quite nerdy/square in that department as are most of the audience. The ending of Red Dead II was actually quite trite, especially…

“Monopoly” has a particular meaning. Would you describe how Rockstar is one? Or is even one of a small list of “big dogs” / defacto choices in a specific industry?

Yes, that's vague. I specifically mean a creative monopoly. Compare the writing and dialogue of a Paul Thomas Anderson or Tarantino movie to Rockstar. Most of their games don't come close. Because it's a game the standard for storyline and dialogue is slightly lower because you are like "wow I am almost literally a cowboy/Nico". I wonder if we will see a mix of games with genuinely Tarantino style writing and narrative + technical / design implementation. Small studios doing this faster and more ethically would be better. People who quit Rockstar are very talented with something to prove too.

I genuinely cringed at the end of RDII due to the dialogue just feel the need to mention that again...

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#144

Post by vablings »

mjr00 wrote: post #89
gruez wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "stea…

That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?

There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.

And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#145

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

umvi wrote: post #62
worldfoodgood wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such. They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)…

I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#146

Post by ineptech »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #72
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no amount of profit is ever enough for the stock market, everything must perpetually grow.

This is also true if humans in general, at all stations in life, including union members and union leaders. Is there any offer a union would refuse on the grounds that’s too much?

People like getting more money, but they don't die without it. You can get a job that pays just enough to pay your bills and work at it until you die. Companies can't do that under capitalism. They take on debt and require growth to pay back their investors, or they don't take on debt and get undercut by a competitor who does.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#147

Post by wahnfrieden »

m0llusk wrote: post #129
saubeidl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if capitalism was a deeply messed up system that brings out and celebrates the very worst in humanity.

Systems need to be managed. If you cook with high temperatures and let your attention wander then the food burns. If you drive fast with bald tires then you may fly off the road. We know that strong regulation on industry, especially monopolies, high taxes on the wealthy, and powerful unions can keep Capitalism in balance, but we have chosen not to use these mechanisms. Is that Capitalism being flawed or is it us as…

Crony capitalism is capitalism. How do you know it can be kept in balance if it is not?

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#148

Post by jsheard »

wlesieutre wrote: post #141
jsheard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.

Didn't Valve just deliberately tank the Counter Strike cosmetics market?

They tanked ultra-high-value items, which were primarily traded off-the-books because their value exceeded the official Steam marketplaces $1800 price cap. Bringing those prices down is good for Valve because it means more trading activity will happen on the official market, where Valve gets a cut of every transaction, rather than on third-party exchanges, where Valve gets nothing.

Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#149

Post by jsheard »

vablings wrote: post #135
jsheard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alyx is a bit of an edge case because they needed a VR showcase, and it's unlikely that a PC VR game (even a Valve one) could have sustained a healthy multiplayer population. Regardless of the reasons why it happened, it's the one and only singleplayer title they've released in the last 14 years, which neatly aligns with them discovering the joy of lootboxes 15 years ago.

To say Alyx was just an "VR demo" is pretty sad and reductive. Even today it's the one of the best VR games to be released in both fidelity and performance and as VR tech continues to improve its truly aged like fine wine

I called it a showcase, not a demo. I know it's a full-blown game in its own right.

Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts

#150

Post by jamie_ca »

axus wrote: post #98
immibis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gabe is the Apple of PC gaming, taking a 30% tax on all transactions. It's not this particular kind of evil, but it is a different kind of evil.

Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.

It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
Post reply on HN