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

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

#301

Post by throwuxiytayq »

worldfoodgood wrote: post #285
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to assume that while shopping on Epic you alt-tab to Steam to read reviews and to find out what the game is actually like.

I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, autom…

I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.

The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.

In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.

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

#302

Post by pixelpoet »

righthand wrote: post #162
pixelpoet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably end up buying GTA 6, once it's on sale or something; good people worked on it too I would imagine, and helped make it a good game. Also, with apologies for the whataboutism, we unfortunately finance thugs all day every day (my internet provider, German government and pension, Deutsche Bahn, etc are massive extortionists); it's not really black and white.

It’s so nice to be guilted into supporting awful people, because a bunch of nice people were abused by the awful people but at least the art will keep one entertained and the corpos keep on abusing.

It's so easy to forget or ignore the good people whose great work was overshadowed by random controversy out of their hands. It's not the fault of the programmers who wrote the animation systems, or the artists who styled the characters' hair, that some random dickface manager pulled a random dickface move.

I write this out of pure sympathy for the incredible work that I know gamedevs do, I'm not associated with Rockstar at all.

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

#303

Post by liquid_thyme »

8note wrote: post #266
liquid_thyme wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rational person would agree that unions, like anything else, have pros and cons. They can do good, but also can do harm. It's the commenters here seem to fly off on emotional rants that derail the conversations. The thinking is capital takes less risk than labor; and that model of thinking makes it easy to ascribe faults to capital, but not to labor. You can't argue your way out of that. When you have to manage a b…

I'll believe you that capital is the bigger risk taker when limited liability is revoked. or if we change bankruptcy such that labour is paid out rather than creditors. laws are setup to reduce and limit the risk for capital, and capital can hedge its risks where labour cannot. Generally nobody is able to work to full time jobs

Um, Capital sits at the bottom of the payment waterfall, labor, suppliers, lenders, creditors all have priority claims. Capital returns are vastly more volatile than labor compensation. Most startups burn and die, but employees still get paid (keeping illegal practices aside). Capital bears most of the uncertainty that labor doesn't.

To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.

And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).

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

#304

Post by Brybry »

dmitrygr wrote: post #262
ElevenLathe wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't join. Closed shops are already illegal in the US so nobody can make you.

> Closed shops are already illegal in the US I do wonder what country American Airlines operates in then… https://viewfromthewing.com/american-airlines-fired-two-flig...

Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.

They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).

[1] https://americanairlines.gcs-web.com/node/42651/html#:~:text...

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

#305

Post by dontlaugh »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #186

I would encourage anyone in tech that is interested in forming a union at their workplace to sign up for CWA's CODE (Campaign to Organize Digital Employees) training: https://code-cwa.org/ CWA is a big, traditional, national union (think phone company employees, health care workers, flight attendants) that has voted to set aside a portion of their dues to help organize us, their fellow workers in the tech sector, whi…

And if you are in the UK working in the games industry, join the union currently fighting for these workers: https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/

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

#306

Post by array_key_first »

guywithahat wrote: post #161
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.

But union "busting" isn't selling out, if anything it's keeping to their true cause. Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them, and companies don't start out with unions. Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.

> Companies don't function well with adversarial units within them

This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.

Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.

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

#307

Post by array_key_first »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #84
stego-tech wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a Union thing, that’s a system thing. Anyone fiercely on either extreme of the spectrum is missing the forest for the trees and proudly waving their willful ignorance of the dynamics of power. In an ideal scenario, Unions and Shareholders would cooperate to achieve suitable outcomes for both parties; in reality, the amount of power needed to even get a Union off the ground and keep it sustained against the…

Those power dynamics are part of the human psyche. The will persist and be present under any alternative you care to impose.

This is just a belief. A belief that allows you to do anything, and can absolve anyone of any evil.

Why stop there? Why have systems or government at all? Why even bother making murder illegal? After all, it's human nature. After all, it's just how life works. After all, the strong win, and the weak get eaten. Everyone knows that.

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

#308

Post by xinayder »

jimbokun wrote: post #236
worldfoodgood wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional allegations of discrimination: https://discriminationandsexualharassmentlawyers.com/valve-c... Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...

Did the plaintiff win that suit? (A quick Google didn't find the outcome.) As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.

I was a member of STS and I can say crowdsourced translations were a million times better than the now-paid translation teams Valve hires.

And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.

The next year they gave us Artifact keys...

and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin

they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.

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

#309

Post by jjulius »

vlovich123 wrote: post #264
jjulius wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes... One of these things is not like the other.

No but one step further than OP went making unsubstantiated claims that actually contradicts the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.

>... the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.

Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.

If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.

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

#310

Post by xinayder »

worldfoodgood wrote: post #220
o11c wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second link is paywalled, but from the various sources I looked at, the diversity problems with Valve seem limited to "Valve refuses to spend company time/effort to support my cause". I have not seen any concrete claims of misbehavior, in direct contrast to some other video game companies. Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the number…

Additional allegations of discrimination: https://discriminationandsexualharassmentlawyers.com/valve-c... Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...

Allegations of unpaid labor are for crowdsourced translations and have nothing to do with Valve as a workplace.

This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).

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