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GTA 6 Developers Unionize

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Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#481

Post by kelnos »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #194
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.

Not true at all. They protect the weakest employees at expense of the strongest and in game crunch at the end when the vision has materialized is good and makes the product better

> game crunch at the end when the vision has materialized is good and makes the product better

At the expense of the mental health of everyone involved. It's a video game, not a life-saving new medicine. Not worth it.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#482

Post by rowanG077 »

Xirdus wrote: post #322
rowanG077 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buggy games have destroyed franchises. Gothic 3 being a prime example. Contrary to the memes skyrim is not even close to the worst offenders in terms of bugs. Besides bad code does not only lead to bugs. It can lead to bad gameplay, bad performance, missing features, slipped deadlines. A things users care a lot about.

Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles. Sure it did have bugs, but so did G1 and G2. And that one AssCreed game where people's heads dis…

> Gothic has always been a niche franchise, and G3 was poorly received not because of bugs, but because of bad worldbuilding (orcs speaking human language, magic runes disappearing, a powerful kingdom getting wholly conquered in basically no time, pretty small open world) and uninteresting story compared to previous titles.

This is just not true. Gothic 3 is still pretty alive in terms of modding and improvement precisely because the base underneath the bugginess was good. You don't have a good community after 20 years if you have bad bodybuilding and uninteresting story.

> Most players care about performance even less than they care about bugs. Basically every AAA game nowadays is criticized for piss poor performance and not having the looks to justify it. They're still massive successes.

You equal success meaning that players don't get care about bad things in a game. That's just a way to reductive view. You can literally read everywhere how people complain about the bad performance of games. Performance is a standard staple in game reviews.

> Usually, it's good code that leads to missed deadlines, not bad code. It literally takes more time and effort to write good code. Gamedev lives on 3-year cycle, that's not enough time for code debt to start causing problems.

Nice trying to put words in my mouth. This is about good and bad developers. Good developers write better code in the same or less time it would take bad developers. that's literally why they are good developers. Bad developers compound on bad code making progress exponentially slower compared to if you had good developers from the start. The question was never the same developer writing good vs bad code.

> Bad gameplay... yes, that can be actual problem. But it's rarely due to a single bad line of code, or even ten thousand bad lines of code. In most games, gameplay is bad because it was designed to be bad. As in, they had a certain way of playing in mind, and they made the game exactly how they wanted, it's just most players don't find that way of playing fun. No amount of code quality can fix that.

I think you really underestimate how much a gameplay programmer can influence the gameplay. Not every millisecond of latency is specified in game design docs. Most of gameplay is designed by feeling. If your developer is not capable of producing good gameplay your game designers can do nothing.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#483

Post by well_ackshually »

ux266478 wrote: post #272
well_ackshually wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Rendering, tooling, audio, core engine... None of these pay particularly well. More than just gameplay programmer, sure, but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department. >there's a large pool of juniors/interns that will accept these low wages just because they want to be a part of something popular. That's an unbelievably…

> but because many engines have moved to a visual node style of programming, it's also less and less programming in the gameplay department. He's talking about the people who make those tools, and he's right. Engine developers are paid pretty well, especially at Epic and Unity. You don't think Tim Sweeney snagged SPJ because he's really into Fortnite, do you?

Epic has over 4000 employees. For 1 SPJ (that might be really well paid, but you don't even know that), there's a hundred good engineers that are underpaid (compared to what they could make selling AI slop and advertisement).

If your goal is to get rich, you make more money as an L3 at Google doing absolutely fuck all than an L5 at Epic does bearing the entire responsibility of an entire subsystem on your shoulders.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#484

Post by flohofwoe »

garaetjjte wrote: post #288
flohofwoe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last few years the pendulum has been swinging back from inhouse engine to Unreal Engine. There are a couple of holdouts, but my guess is that the majority of AAA games currently released are back on UE - at least it feels that way ;) And Unity always ruled supreme for AA and mobile games.

Swinging back? Was UE used more widely in the past than it is now?

When the Xbox360 was released, a lot of game companies moved from inhouse to UE3. In the next generation the pendulum has swung back to inhouse, and now its swinging back to UE5. Seems to be a 10 year cycle or so...

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#485

Post by j1elo »

maccard wrote: post #405
j1elo wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprising how Wild West it gets out there. In the EU that would strictly fall into unlawful working conditions; I kid you not, in Spain the law doesn't allow to work overtime for more than 80 total hours per year .

And if you believe that nobody in Spain breaks that law I have a bridge to sell you.

I just didn't want to get into that angle in my comment. Of course there is widespread abuse. But precisely, having this practice explicitly ruled out makes a huge difference and allows calling it "abuse" instead of "just another Tuesday", which is the stepping stone on being able to defend against it.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#486

Post by pawelduda »

flohofwoe wrote: post #76
pawelduda wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many studios with their own engines that rival or exceed UE5 - which seems overhyped, because at this point they caught up with graphics fidelity without terrible performance that dread a lot of UE5 titles. Recent notable example is Crimson Desert, they spent years building their own engine for this game and IMO they raised the bar when it comes to creating a huge realistic world. Others that come to my min…

The main point of using a 3rd-party engine like Unity or UE is not to buy technical excellence, but to get a 'good enough' asset pipeline, authoring tools and engine runtime cheaper than building and nurturing your own inhouse engine and tools team ... especially when the best programmers on those teams are then poached by Epic or Unity anyway ;)

I agree and that's why I'm happy not all studios not going this route. It usually means they game will be unique above average because one of the reasons would be needing the engine to work for something else than a "typical game template".

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#487

Post by oreally »

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”.

Sure they're complex but tbh they don't need to be. Sorry to bruise your professional ego but you should understand that there's a lot of decisions in bigtech/corporate that equates to 'buy it don't build it, it'll be cheaper, and (secretly) I can show it off on my resume'. And then when you use it, usually it isn't catered for the business' purposes because the tech is meant to cover a large amount of use cases. At that point they move on and the inefficiencies become the norm.

And these require none of the deep math that the lower levels of gamedev stack require. It's tedious, not hard to string all of these web components.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#488

Post by neonstatic »

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…

> There's an absolute over supply of students who want to make video games.

To be fair, you don't have to be a teacher / lecturer to notice this. One trip to an AI reddit thread asking what people are working on will reveal that it's either porn, role-play, or game development.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#489

Post by vouwfietsman »

oreally wrote: post #455
vouwfietsman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although this is possibly true, at any time the dev team could've gone: "loading is slow man, can we just profile it and see if there's anything obvious?". To someone with access to the source code and a debugger, that's probably less than 30 minutes of time to go from zero to hero. I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when…

The dev team is usually under immense pressure to deliver. This probably slipped under the radar to let all the other features get through. The maintenance team probably maintains other games as well. Then you add in the knowledge loss through the churning of developers and over time the organization forgets how things should be.

Again, you're not wrong, but none of those things are insurmountable. If the team is really so stressed it cannot spend 30 minutes, over the many year of the existence of that bug, that seems like a development environment close to hell.

Knowledge loss is precisely my point: there is very little a-priori knowledge needed to solve this, the guy who found the bug proves that.

Re: GTA 6 Developers Unionize

#490

Post by estetlinus »

merlindru wrote: post #479
apeescape wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, one hour of overtime should cost twice as much, if not more. When I worked on movie sets, hour 1-8 was ordinary pay. Hour 8-12 was 1/5 of the daily pay an hour, hour 12-15 1/3 of daily pay an hour and so on. This forced production companies to front load effort on planning.
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