Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GTA 6 Developers Unionize

rockstarintel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 561 posts

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#471

Post by Capricorn2481 »

matchbok3 wrote: post #124
ionwake wrote: post #101

Isnt management at Rockstar the same poeple who: A) Allowed a bug in the code make all GTA5 Load times on every single copy on every platform take exponential times longer to load, for YEARS, unchecked or investigated, until some random kid FIXED IT by reverse engineering compiled code? B) The bug was a simple and unneeded look up for SHOP items C) The never rewarded the kid, with say a job or something worthwhile fo…

If this "management" is so incompetent and ineffective, the workers shouldn't need them, right? They should just start their own company. Didn't think so. This simplistic view of "management" is detrimental to a productive conversation and doesn't reflect reality.

This is a puzzling comment. Are you asking why the famously underpaid game developers don't bootstrap their own company? Because the answer seems fairly obvious, and it says nothing about the quality of Rockstar's management.

Does the concept of redundant middle management scandalize you? It's a relatively common experience, even if it's sometimes exaggerated. It actually takes a lot to be a good manager, and most people are not self aware enough to be good at it.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#472

Post by kelnos »

miiiiiike wrote: post #460
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.

Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.

Complex in the way you're using it (a sea of technologies that looks daunting) doesn't automatically mean "hard". I've worked in big tech on distributed systems, with most of the things in your list, and worked on some difficult problems, but I could absolutely believe that cutting-edge game dev is harder, even significantly so.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#473

Post by baobabKoodaa »

miiiiiike wrote: post #460
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in big tech but dabbled in games. Games are much harder. Lots of math and you have to process 8 million pixels in 16 milliseconds, in addition to running your physics and NPC AIs. Big tech is 90% CRUD and 90% squabbling over variable names and we somehow think pushing a bit of HTML in 500ms is both hard and acceptable performance.

Is it harder because you’re less experienced with games. Your big tech job really requires no creativity? Modern sites are extremely complex. BASH, Docker, Kubernetes, Python, Varnish, NGINX, Postgres, Cassandra, Elastic, Redis, Celery, CSS/Sass, Typescript. Observability, logging, build systems, testing, backups, CI, and a consistent design system. That’s all just to get to HTTP 200 “hello world”.

Games often have inherent technical complexity. Big tech has mountains of unnecessary complexity just to get to "hello world", as you said. These are different things in nature.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#474

Post by kelnos »

jayceedenton wrote: post #264
__natty__ wrote: post #237

> Together, we are organising around the things we want to change. Starting with: Pay transparency Flexible working An end to crunch That’s a lot of demands, what next? Competitive salary?! /sarcasm I hope more people will start fighting together for better work conditions. Company owners have money and lawyers so workers must unite to fight them back. I’m saying this as employer.

How do you end crunch? Teams always work at a more relaxed pace when the deadlines are years out. You can't beat Parkinson's law no matter how generous you are with the estimates. We've all tried methodologies to counter this problem and create a continuous, sustainable pace. Unfortunately there's something deep in human nature that prevents us spreading that effort out evenly from day one.

> How do you end crunch?

You (as an employer) accept one of two things: either 1) scope is reduced when you get closer to the deadline and find that you are behind, or 2) deadlines will have to be moved.

It's not like other industries, or even other software companies don't have deadlines and feature sets they want. And some of them do have a form of crunch that I equally rebel against. (I've never worked at a company where we had several months of crunch, though; at most it was a couple weeks.) They end up doing fine, dropping features from the first release, or pushing the release date out if they have to.

These are video games. No one should be ruining their mental health or getting burned out because a corporation decided they need to ship exactly their vision on a particular date.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#475

Post by kelnos »

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…

The downstream stakeholders (ad networks, retailers, etc.) need to be more flexible and tolerant of these events. If they had to deal with them regularly, they already would be. There's no law of nature that says things have to work exactly this way.

Meanwhile we have software devs and artists and product people damaging their mental health and suffering burnout for this. It's a video game. It's not worth it.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#476

Post by kelnos »

Xunjin wrote: post #440
jayd16 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hourly pay rate with OT. That'll clear up the crunch or at least compensate the workers.

The world is not that simple, let's say you do pay overtimes, the salary in this industry is already low, will that be worth it to the employee?

I mean, that's what collective bargaining is for, no? Get the hourly rate and overtime terms to a level that the employees are happy with.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#477

Post by kelnos »

Jach wrote: post #404
jayd16 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who?

EA was famously sued ~20 years ago for not paying overtime. They lost and had to reclassify roles to non-exempt and paid up. It impacted hiring decisions for non-exempt/hourly roles (especially QA), encouraged more outsourcing, but this didn't eliminate crunch then, and it hasn't eliminated it since. That's really my point: overtime-paid crunch is still found all over the place. EA, Activision-Blizzard, Sony's studio…

At least in this case non-exempt employees are getting compensated for their extra hours. That seems more fair; the company gets what it needs, but has to pay for it.

Reclassifying people as exempt in order to eliminate OT pay is a garbage move, though. Something unionization presumably could fix.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#478

Post by kelnos »

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.

I don't think that blanket statement is false if you interpret "workers" as "workers as a whole" (as I did when I first read it). Certainly an individual worker can quit and (try to) find a better-paying/better-hours job, but as GP notes, that method does not scale very far.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#479

Post by merlindru »

apeescape wrote: post #470
ernesto905 wrote: post #308

> An end to crunch I was unaware of the crunch concept: "In the video game industry, crunch (or crunch culture) is compulsory overtime during the development of a game. Crunch is common in the industry and can lead to work weeks of 65–80 hours for extended periods of time, often uncompensated beyond the normal working hours" -- wikipedia Needless to say this seems extremely predatory.

I'm just a regular web dev outside the gaming industry, but crunch is a concept that's occasionally present in any project work; I'm sure many HN readers are familiar with it from their own work too. When you have a deadline to meet, sometimes you need to go into crunch mode to get things done. Of course the crunch mode should last no more than a week or maybe two, otherwise you risk burning out. After crunch mode th…

yes but the compensation part is the problem

An 80h week should not be compensated the same as two 40h weeks

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#480

Post by kelnos »

matchbok3 wrote: post #399
Cyph0n wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hard…

> And those lucky few union members used their power to extract an unfair amount of money from the company.

Why is it an unfair amount, though? Who gets to decide what compensation is fair and what isn't?

Post reply on HN