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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

#331

Post by dymk »

blasphemers wrote: post #241
dymk wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What power do they have too much of?

Besides a complete stranglehold on labor markets in a number of industries where the government is required to use union labor for infrastructure projects and they limit the number of laborers to drive up price. Or how about the Plumbers union that forced the city of Chicago to continue installing lead pipes until the federal government had to force them to stop. Beyond that, the power to promote good workers or make…

That’s a lot of words that don’t establish a connection to unions

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

#332

Post by blub »

omnimus wrote: post #314
mrguyorama wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most importantly, the moment they show any indication of doing otherwise, I will happily drop them. I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG. I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers rig…

I am not sure why GOG is bad. Then again i am not sure why Cyberpunk is bad - i played it recently for the first time and its pretty fine game.

It’s an amazing game. They released buggy because of management pressure, but fixed it.

GOG is also amazing.

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

#333

Post by Shacklz »

rcxdude wrote: post #180
bigyabai wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are both still too high. You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.

Valve's price is still very strongly predicated on network effects which make it very hard to avoid.

They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.

Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.

I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.

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

#334

Post by Ekaros »

worldfoodgood wrote: post #215
DaSHacka wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays? Yes

Of course now it does, but it was bootstrapped off the back of commercial success. The parent poster was suggesting Epic could only finance a game store off the commercial success of Fortnite. Which seemed to be the exact same path Valve took, so I was curious to explore why the parent felt they were different.

Difference is that Valve made a platform to support their own products. And run it fiscally responsibly from start. Where as well Epic is dumping. Trying to gain market share by giving out free stuff and possibly undercharging. Now thinking whole license model for their engine might also be harmful for any bigger competing engines...

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

#335

Post by Ekaros »

Loughla wrote: post #179
roggenilsson wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?

I think it would be smaller. While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think. Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were…

Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.

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

#336

Post by immibis »

acedTrex wrote: post #24
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.

This is in no way true because there is no requirement to use steam for PC releases. Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.

No requirement to use an apple phone either

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

#337

Post by immibis »

zer00eyz wrote: post #19
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.

Uhhh.... 11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent. Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform. Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money. M…

There are many ways to get people to pay you 30%. Steam and AWS use different strategies. Also AWS's margin should be way higher than 30% if they're not lighting money on fire

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

#338

Post by Ekaros »

pera wrote: post #43
sonu27 wrote: post #6

Definitely one for the courts

There is a fundraising for that organised by their union (IWGB Game Workers): https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-rockstar-worke...

Why does this look horribly wrong to me. Why does a union need a fundraiser? Shouldn't they have hold tight belt and have significant war chest for this? Or take extra fees from the new members?

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

#339

Post by dontlaugh »

annexrichmond wrote: post #238
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…

Are you aware of any resources for how to combat colleagues aiming to start a union? I am personally opposed to being part of a union.

[flagged]

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

#340

Post by skotobaza »

gruez wrote: post #151
skotobaza wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) and some user feedback (like Steam reviews or Steam community discussions). Yes, most of Steam's features are half-baked, and Valve doesn't really want to improve them (curators, user tags, guides etc.), but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.

>In 2025 I expect an online store to have at least some cataloging option (like Steam's tags) To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this". > but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though…

I think directly reducing the games' prices will not have the same effect as with traveling, since games are digital and non-mandatory goods, so less people will be swayed by reduced price; unless we are talking about 50% less, of course, which is why people use key reselling sites, because there it is noticeable (and people don't care about legality in that case).

That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.

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