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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#371

Post by gopher_space »

avidiax wrote: post #148
savanaly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. How is the existence of a monopsony necessary or even related to a passion tax existing? Suppose the market were a fully free market with tons of software companies on one side and tons of developers on the other. It would fly in the face of reason, and fa…

> So a passion tax seems like something that should exist and not really be decried. To put it the other way, work that is distasteful in some way, should also pay more, but this is missing the point. I think the point of the unionization is that the monopsony of a small number of AAA game studios gives them excessive market power to reduce compensation and especially to reduce working conditions. A union can acquies…

From my perspective the main difference between "crunch time" and sadism is the existence of a retrospective you don't need to pay to view.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#372

Post by bananaboy »

maccard wrote: post #239
jhatemyjob wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The ignorance in this comment is offensive.

Exactly. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. As if the only two roles are engine programmer and gameplay programmer where gameplay is just scripting. Nope. We have engineering teams dedicated to: UI, physics, rendering, streaming, automation, gameplay (people who write gameplay features that the game designers will access via script), build infra, pipeline (and pipeline is split up into people doing lighting/geometry tools vs tools that package up data for efficient runtime use), level editing tools, asset editing tools. I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty. Then there are the QA teams, automation (not engineers but write test scripts etc), production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists (almost programmers), character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters. This is Activision but I know EA are similar and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most AAA companies are also similar.

There’s a wide range of pay levels there.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#373

Post by maccard »

bananaboy wrote: post #372
maccard wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ignorance in this comment is offensive.

Exactly. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. As if the only two roles are engine programmer and gameplay programmer where gameplay is just scripting. Nope. We have engineering teams dedicated to: UI, physics, rendering, streaming, automation, gameplay (people who write gameplay features that the game designers will access via script), build infra, pipeline (and pipeline is split up into people doing lighting/…

And none of those people are “low skill”.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#375

Post by smsm42 »

Sevii wrote: post #175
smsm42 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are more indie games than ever before. The issue is AAA games have become billion dollar projects. They are funded and structured far more like AAA movies than other software. Making games is easy. Getting the money together to spend $500 million on development and $500 million on marketing isn't easy.

Yes, but I am not sure I understand how all this gives us monopsony. If there are so many indie projects, how doesn't it contradict the claim of monopsony?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#376

Post by abhaynayar »

javier123454321 wrote: post #112
ryandrake wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it as simple as supply/demand? People love games and game-loving developers are willing to take lower compensation to be in the industry? As a former obsessed gamer, I remember in my 20s I almost would have been willing to work at iD Software without pay if they let me.

It is actually quite a common occurrence in the arts and other creative fields, where there is a level of idealization for the work in itself outside of the remuneration. Musicians, architects, illustrators, cinematographers are all dealing with the same thing the more the work resembles their ideal type of artistic work, the less to pay usually.

Reminds me of this [1] article, quoting Seinfeld, "In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me."

I too wanna work on cooler stuff. Sooner rather than later.

[1]: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/05/seinfeld-on-when-mo...

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#377

Post by vitaflo »

dzonga wrote: post #348
sonzohan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie. First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming. From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly eve…

another thing - games are more like a lottery - you've more misses than hits. so economics takes over. whereas your typical saas, adtech - once the business is proven u print money unless u r doing stupid shit n being driven by ego such as having the biggest org or pursuing passion projects such as "a.i"

Also for every game dev working on GTA6, there's another working on Barbie's Horse Adventure. When positions are limited, you take what you can get and most of them are making games that are not at all interesting.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#378

Post by smsm42 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #185
smsm42 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 fo…

If it’s a matter of proof, these are all links already posted on this site: https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/union-effect-in-california-... https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-decline-inequality-ri... https://werd.io/unions-work/ https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-13/unions... https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/19/20727283/u...

> This is a great example of how unions can really work for their members.

I think this is way different claim than "unions work for the society". Surely, there are a lot of organizations that work very well for their members. Not all of them are beneficial for the society though (criminal gangs aren't, for example). In your third link, there is a power struggle between two sets of people - movie studios and writers. One of them has achieved transferring some money from the other, using the power of unions. But how is it good for the rest of the public? Unclear.

The case in Vox starts with "I liked the union" (the same claim as above) and doesn't get more convincing as it goes. The best the author can do is "When you stack up all the research and look at the broader picture, though, the net effect of unions — bad examples included — is good for the typical worker.". But that, again, is not the question we started with - I am not arguing that the union can be good for those who get more money from the deal. I want to see proof it's also good for those who don't. And the best is something like "reduces income inequality" - which frankly is a very weak evidence, since obviously absolute inequality is bad, and absolute equality is bad, but there are a lot of gray in the middle, and how do we know whether a particular union makes us closer to the good side than to the bad side?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#380

Post by nsagent »

sonzohan wrote: post #177
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?

Game dev here, have worked on AAA and indie. First off let me get on my high horse and say the engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. You need a lot more creativity and ingenuity to solve the unusual problems you run into in gaming. From there, as others have said, it's a simple supply and demand issue. Nowadays I am a university professor, nearly eve…

As a former game dev who later got a PhD in CS, I can say I definitely did the equivalent of research as part of my job: I had to solve tough new problems that no one else was and verify they worked better than existing approaches. It's definitely more difficult than anything I worked on in industry and was certainly not paid commensurate with the skill required.

Now I've branched off on my own as I've been disillusioned with academia as well. Can't win'em all.

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