Could have kept the Rockstar Games in the title for clarity
Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
91–100 of 383 posts
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#92Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it. In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinbur…
> their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it. Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh as you say, why wouldn't English be at a high level?
Even discounting this, and despite everyone bleating on about its (very real) flaws, ChatGPT and other LLMs do quite a good job of proofreading and suggesting improvements to written English text[0]. I find it works best if you keep them on quite a tight leash but it's certainly within the compass of their capabilities to take badly written English and turn it into well written English, and even adopting a particular style to do so.
[0] Performance in other languages... well, I suspect it's still going to be quite variable, which is another valid criticism that has been levelled at the more popular mainstream models over the past year or two.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#93[flagged]
When your industry is notorious for insane hours, low pay, disgusting crunch, and covering up sexual abuse, a union seems reasonable.
Cherry picking examples to paint broad brush/strokes doesn't work. There are game companies all over the world, and have varying levels of work/life balance. Your crude caricature is just that; crude.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#94* I want to keep liking GTA, and to keep giving Rockstar more money, for each new chapter and new console/device. If it turns out that Rockstar was union-busting and defaming, then I really hope that they soon have a we-messed-up moment, and genuine corrective action for whatever went wrong. * Has anyone heard of game-buying consumers voting en masse with their pocketbooks over ethical/social concerns about a game/pu…
Rockstar has historically always had anti-worker practices baked in, with crunch culture being the obvious one. They aren't your or their workers friend.
They're in it to make boatloads of cash and will do whatever to whoever is needed.
And no, consumers have never really cared in the gaming space. They won't do anything differently because of this.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#95As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such. They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)…
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Source?
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#96Very brave of them to speak out, but TBH I'm not sure I'd do it if I were worried about anonymity - their written English is flawless, which is very uncommon. Unless they took considerable care to imitate a different writing style, it's probably trivial to identify who wrote it. In any case, a longtime friend of mine was senior graphics programmer on GTA5, and I was very close to interviewing with Rockstar in Edinbur…
If they were careful, which I'm sure they were, the flawless English is the result of a round of LLM proofreading.
That's what I am thinking.
I'd use a local LLM too to make sure the original prompt does not leak and can't be connected to the published output.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#97As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
> Valve is basically the only one that didn’t They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
HL3 is under active development though. If that's a success I'm sure they'd try a Portal 3 as well.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#98As a kid I always lamented that every studio seemed to sell out as soon as they had the chance. Valve is basically the only one that didn’t… clearly it’s paid off very well for Gabe and the employees. Wish more people would resist the payday and keep what’s theirs.
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.
Can a Steam Deck install games without using Steam? If so, big advantage over Google Play and the App Store.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#99Every union I've been a part of has been more of a pain than its worth, or has tried to keep individuals from become any more successful that others. I don't understand the obsession with them on HN.
Re: Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
#100Wouldn't have happened under Dan Houser. R* made too much money for its own good. On another note, heard on Bloomberg today that they've been working on GTA 6 for 10 years at this point. Considering the size of their development teams it's possible that more manhours may have gone into this single title than all video games that were made until the PS1 era combined.
What makes you think Dan would've handled it any differently? Rockstars got a long well known track record of being in crunch mode with obscene hours, that didn't suddenly start after Dan left.