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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#151

Post by wahnfrieden »

deanCommie wrote: post #141
yCombLinks wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want it on their resume primarily to make more money and have a better career in terms of getting hired, etc. Very different motivation. They'd only work at a FAANG for free long enough to get that bump. Game devs however would work for many years underpaid because they like what they're creating.

You're not wrong, but it's also so sad. FAANG used to be the _dream_. Change the world. Work on groundbreaking tech. Solve harder problems than anywhere else. Get Paid incredibly well. Then I guess a generation focused exclusively on that last part flooded the zone. I still believe that The Great Resignation of 2021 did more harm to our industry than COVID or any interest rate or VC changes. It polluted the brains of…

Interesting choice to blame FAANG demise on its workers

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#152

Post by tredre3 »

bko wrote: post #62
bwestergard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

Suppose you double their pay, make them more in line with other tech workers. How should you allocate these highly coveted game dev jobs? The supply of jobs won't magically increase (it would likely decrease with higher wages), and the number of people interested in working there would grow as well. Do you just have a lottery? Now rather than being a relatively underpaid worker in an industry you're passionate about,…

We have the same problem in the rest of tech, though? Being unable to get into a AAA studio is as unfair as being unable to get into FAANG.

This just brings game development in line with other code monkeys. Top studios will pay top dollars, Indie studios will pay what they can, often almost nothing.

And I see nothing wrong with that, do you?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#153

Post by smsm42 »

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?

Maybe the skill set in game dev is less portable to other domains? I'm on backend side, and I interviewed a lot of people over my career, with all variety of backgrounds, and I can hardly recall anybody coming from the gaming industry for some reason. It seems to be somehow separate from other tech fields, not sure why. If that's true, then the cause is that the market is smaller, so the gaming studios have more power.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#154

Post by bit-anarchist »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110
amazingamazing wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the benefit of a union for the workers, but your examples seem strange. They do not illustrate that a union somehow results in a better product. If that were self evident how come there has never been a company that started with employees unionized? To get this supposed benefit

They’re called cooperatives Mondragon is a extremely large well structured cooperative that did exactly this and is a hallmark of success for anarchist cooperatives worldwide

It's a bit reversed, labor unions are cooperatives, not the other way around, as cooperatives are more flexible in arrangement than unions.

Don't disagree with the rest of the comment though.

EDIT: also, I wouldn't consider coops an anarchist victory over traditional private companies anymore than democracy over monarchy. The corporation > worker hierarchy is still there, even with the different share distribution. It's a good demonstration of an alternative and underappreciated corporate structure, tho.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#155

Post by fidotron »

smartties wrote: post #120
fidotron wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply/demand. For example, GPU shader programming is something people will practically fight over doing because it's so non obviously utterly addictive. I would say dev roles in tech in general that lack an operational component also lag in pay, and much of gamedev is pure dev in a sense the wider tech industry has since largely forgotten exists. On the art side it's even more extreme.

GPU programming has to be one of the highest paying jobs in the game industry, and it can transition quite easily into other industries as well. Mostly because it’s not an entry-level position. On top of being a solid C++ developer, you need to understand the entire hardware stack and be able to optimize shaders at the instruction level while juggling things like occupancy, memory coalescing, and other low level perf…

My experience of it, which is quite substantial both as dev and overseeing whole teams at it, is people do not pay for GPU programming, they do pay for integrating it into their framework, optimizing what the artists did already, and developing profiling tools, but the only part of that remotely competitive with ops related roles is "We didn't think we needed developers so our art team made an inefficient mess in Unreal and we're desperate to release the game on time and are throwing money around to make sure it actually runs on remotely normal hardware", after which they will sit around complaining about how expensive it was and the amount of damage that was done to their artistic vision in the process.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#156

Post by smsm42 »

bwestergard wrote: post #18
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?

I am a unionized software developer in media, not games. I helped the game workers at Blizzard unionize and they all spoke of the "passion tax". One reason the "passion tax" is possible for employers is that there seems to be a degree of labor monopsony for the kind of development done by AAA game studios. In this respect it's quite a bit like Hollywood film production in its heyday.

I was under impression there were quite a number of independent game studios, is that no longer a case? What is the cause of a monopsony here - the barrier to entry, at least for making a game, doesn't seem too high. Marketing one successfully is probably harder, but that is a common problem not unique to gaming.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#157

Post by wahnfrieden »

charcircuit wrote: post #121
StevenNunez wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or :gasp: take less profit. The game will take in Billions especially if they release new versions like GTA5 over time.

That will negatively affect shareholders which is the opposite of the employees' job. Maximizing the value of the stock to shareholders over time.

I hope you tip your earnings back to corporate and organize your peers to suppress your wages

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#158

Post by psvv »

LPisGood wrote: post #26
moooo99 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because pay is not directly correlated to technical finesse. It is primarily dictated by how much money a company can expect to make. And Advertising (FAANG) is insanely profitable, while doing software in other difficult fields (firmware in automotive or embedded, etc) may be technically challenging, but the margin is is only like 6-10% max

Only 2 of the letters in FAANG are primarily advertising companies.

They're all pretty high margin though.

I think flipping the question like this gets at the heart of the true answer.

The question is not why video game pay has lagged, but why tech pay has jumped ahead.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#159

Post by smsm42 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #144
matchbok3 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an entirely different argument that's not particularly germane to this topic. One can agree that unions, in the past, have helped workers, and also understand that they are not always in the best interest of the general public. It's complex, but possible!

Then that is an argument to reform and innovate on unions, not do away with them altogether.

"Are unions net benefit for the general public" and "whether reforming or abolishing the unions is the best course of action for the general public" are two separate questions. The unions could be beneficial (and still a reform could improve this benefit) or they could be harmful (but a reform could make them beneficial without abolishing them). The original claim was they are beneficial right now, in heir current form, but no actual proof had been provided.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#160

Post by smsm42 »

simonjgreen wrote: post #73
amazingamazing wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? American cars suck compared to japanese and chinese which are not unionized. What’s an example of a unionized vs non unionized group producing the same thing where unionized is better?

The unionised Openreach in UK who are really the de facto layer 1 network provider telco build infrastructure to a staggeringly higher quality than most of the move fast startup alternatives. Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures. Nuclear power is heavily unionised, resulting in a very stable and highly qualified workforce. Unions in film and tv hav…

> Aviation unions force very high standards and represent a lot of the developments in safety and procedures.

Boeing joined the chat.

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