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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#391

Post by thrance »

matchbok3 wrote: post #96
keybored wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-unionists are here to tell us that consumers might possibly suffer. Higher prices and delays on a video game. Which has not seen a release in this series in half this century so far. For all this consumer cares, great. Make it 20% more expensive. Make it 50% more expensive. A hundred. If that helps the greater union cause I can take more walks in the woods to pass the time instead.

What a luxury you have to spend so much money on things, then. Hint: most people don't live that way.

It's extremely dishonest to frame it as "if workers get good working conditions then consumers suffer". The reality is that Rockstar is extremely profitable. The crunch they impose on their devs with every single release shouldn't be tolerated, and I stand in full support of the unionized workers.

And if a product requires human suffering to be so cheap, then maybe it shouldn't be so cheap.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#392

Post by thrance »

amazingamazing wrote: post #54
HugoTea wrote: post #5

This is great news, unions not only improve working conditions, but also improve the final product by not having underpaid stressed staff with high turn-over. It's a good sign for the future product quality of any company to see workers unionise.

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?

American manufacturers suck because of rampant financialization, not unions. They have prioritized the needs shareholders over those of consumers for a while now.

Your hatred of workers striving for better working conditions is disturbing. Maybe there are more important things in life than conspicuous consumption and filling one's home with cheap garbage?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#393

Post by claysmithr »

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 imagine it is because people who aspire to work in gaming will also aspire to lower pay for the prestige, even if in reality the work is equally boring.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#394

Post by cmpxchg8b »

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…

Former gamedev here. This matches my experience. However, working in the games industry from 2000-2011 did wonders for my ability to thrive in big tech. It is easy mode compared to games.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#395

Post by Auracle »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #389
maccard wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And none of those people are “low skill”.

I never said they are low skill. They just don't have their priorities straight. Those QA teams, automation people, production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists, character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters, etc are doing all that work just to put some pretty pixels on a 14 year old's screen. There's very little value there.

Jesus Christ dude.

First off, adults play video games too. I think they’re actually the leading consumers, though I don’t care to look that up. Second, people like entertainment. Videogames are certainly no less important than movies, TV, or most novels. Entertainment can be important. Personally I find really hard videogames to be meditative and it’s bad for my mental health when I can’t get some time now and again to play some. I also made most of my adult friend group as a teen playing Halo together in a cabin multiple times per week.

I’m guessing you at least consume some sort of entertainment, so to say something like that is incredibly hypocritical.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#396

Post by spopejoy »

socalgal2 wrote: post #337
Insanity wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The games industry is notorious for this, yet far from the only industry working against deadlines. Deadlines are a good way to timebox work, but they need to be set in a realistic way rather than an optimized happy-path. I do understand there are certain periods where games _should_ release to make more sales, and for most games that's probably true. But this is GTA VI, they can miss the launch window by a month and…

GTA6 in isolation is not the issue. Coordination with the entire rest of the ecosystem is. Ads are bought and paid for 6 month before launch for certain time slots. Store shelf space is reserved. Miss the deadlines and those downstream companies suffer. Their promotion time slots / space, is unbooked and it's too late to fill it with something appropriate. So, the company makes the promise "we'll have ready by Novemb…

> Store shelf space is reserved

I thought this would be over by now, I certainly haven't bought physical this decade. Who is buying physical, parents of young kids?

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#397

Post by spopejoy »

shric wrote: post #346
toomuchtodo wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual exit is a short-term solution to a systemic problem. Unions raise the floor, and you have no power otherwise. “Be lucky” is not a strategy that scales. If workers could easily find jobs where employers aren’t maxing extraction at the lowest cost possible, your proposal might be realistic. In this timeline, it is a suboptimal proposal. > Today, the US Treasury Department released a first-of-its-kind report…

You said “Unions are the *only legal way* for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions.” (Emphasis mine) My reply was not to say unions were bad or ineffective at accomplishing the goal, it was simply refuting your blanket statement.

In case you haven't noticed, the era of sw devs being able to leave and find better conditions/pay anytime they want is gone. But even in the good old ZIRP days, leaving for better pay is not an action that can be taken collectively. OP said "workers" not "worker": if you want to improve conditions at a given company, collective bargaining is all you have.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#399

Post by matchbok3 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #200
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!

No, that is not a “complex” position at all. On the contrary, it’s a fairly simple position where you take no strong stance but still want to claim the positive aspects from each side. Are unions universally good? No, because humans are in the loop, and humans can do bad things. Does that change the fact that the concept of a union is one of the greatest innovations in all of human history? No. Can unions today help…

The Samsung deal is exactly what I'm talking about. It is not all entirely good. Everyone at Samsung not working in chips got screwed. And those lucky few union members used their power to extract an unfair amount of money from the company. This will cause the company to lean towards other avenues in the future, potentially harming everyone else.

Why are those people getting a huge check? Not because they worked harder. Because AI came along and made their product more valuable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/world/asia/samsung-ai-pro...

> But a smaller union associated with workers in the consumer electronics division — which boycotted the negotiations and whose 15,000 members were excluded from the vote — accused the lead union of neglecting their interests, and decried the deal as “discriminatory.” Under the agreement, workers in the consumer electronics division are expected to get payouts that are a fraction of those of their semiconductor division peers.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#400

Post by nsagent »

miiiiiike wrote: post #292
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…

> engineering in video gaming is generally more complex than the engineering I've done working in big tech. I always roll my eyes when I hear this from game developers. And my eyes hurt from rolling I've heard it so many times. I've done game dev, systems, backend, frontend, all of it. It's all the same. Maybe you developed low complexity "big tech" projects but, c'mon, you're really going to argue that games are cat…

It certainly depends on what you're working on in games. Not every game pushes the envelope, but the ones that do are seriously complex. They are essentially realtime embedded systems, which push the hardware to the max.

Sometimes you get similar demands at the big companies like Google and Meta, but often you have the opportunity to throw more compute at the problem. That is rarely possible in games.

Having been a game dev before getting my PhD focused on NLP, I can definitely say some of the challenges I ran into developing a first of its kind MMORTS, was seriously challenging. When I took the mandatory grad classes in distributed systems and low level architecture design, I already had first hand experience and aced those classes without any effort. I was familiar with many of the problems and their solutions because I needed to for my work. In addition to working at the lowest level debugging the memory allocators, full networking stack, database layer, you name it all in C++. Being a lead developer on a project of that scope was much more complicated than any work I did later.

My first semester of my PhD I wrote a Transformer from scratch referencing only the original paper (it was soon after the paper came out, there were few resources then). I was the only person who got an implementation that matched the results from the original Transformer (most got much worse performance). I credit the skills and abilities I gained in the game dev industry.

That isn't me throwing shade at others; as I said there are hard problems in industries other than game dev, but the skills required are not compensated at the level you'd expect given the difficulty of the work.

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