This is why we need to have 90 dollar games! /s
This is why we need copyright laws
In a sensible world we would not allow our society to steal the work of artists and then throw away the artist.
I think at this points it’s better to not join up with a large developer or publisher. The indie market has better job security.
Or better yet, organize like the Hollywood actors have WGA.
Apex legends? The fully online battle Royale style competitive shooter? Can anyone tell me why a game like this needs a “character writer” anyway? I’ve never played it so maybe there’s some grand story I don’t know about, but to me this sounds like writing a character for Counter Strike which I think we all agree would be completely pointless.
I’ll try to explain, I’m not a specialist in the lore of Apex legends. But the game is based in the world of Titanfall. It released in 2019 with a few characters. Each 1 or 2 season bringing a new characters with new abilities and background in the story. They have done a pretty good job so far and I really enjoy each characters.
CS at least back in the day didn’t have a class based gameplay, each characters had the same abilities. So I guess it doesn’t really compare.
It’s more like asking why you need a writer for an Overwatch character than CS. The characterization is half of the point and, more importantly, sales on cosmetics, compared to CS/Halo/MW/Whatever
My question is when workers in game studios start to make unions. It’s a massive industry and the people actually making the games are constantly fucked over.
It will be used to justify raises AAA prices even more. Not that i care but it will be interesting to see.
Recent and huge progress on that front. It’s an industry wide union, and apparently even recently laid-off workers can join.
Many years ago. But as you said, it’s a big industry, and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.
and the US is not an easy place to unionize in.
Moreso now than ever before.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is right now.
But I don’t think that advice includes people staring at a fast approaching wildfire…
Funny thing about wildfires: the ashes allow a new generation of flora to take root. It will suck for us, but the children of tomorrow might have unions, vacations, and universal healthcare by default.
I can dream of a future, even if it won’t be mine to enjoy.
That’s how I feel when I watch Star Trek. I won’t be alive to see the Phoenix warp into space but I’m hopeful future generations get there.
Now can be both the second-best-time to plant a tree and the first-best-time to grab a bucket of water!
Remember everyone, the forest is on fire and there’s not many places to run. The fires of climate change affects the entire world, and this administration and the wealthy that back them will gleefully pour fuel on the flames and let your house burn.
You can stand around begging for rain, asking why the landlord didn’t fix the sprinklers or why he never checked the fire extinguishers or why he’s hiding under his desk clutching the cash register for dear life…
Or you can grab a bucket.
Yes, but there are also European developers. Such as Ubisoft, which previously had major issues with harassment, and probably still does. If they have a union, it certainly isn’t a powerful one.
in my head its because its an industry where going solo is viable and if they arent working at a company thats their goal so they have full contol over the vision and make all the money and one day they want to exert the same creative control over others and get overtime/overwork out of them
The irony is that becoming a solo dev is rarely feasible and even more rarely leads to a product that pays up more than just working elsewhere.
That immediately makes people point to success stories, like Stardew Valley. Dunno about others, but I don’t have a family + girlfriend to sustain me for 4+ years, nor am I blinded by the dream possibility of reaching millions of sales when so many games struggle to reach 10k sales.
That’s sad and disgusting.
We should pay way more attention to other industries.
And then they feed the documents to a LLM and iterate over it
This is why they need to unionize.
This isn’t unique to the gaming industry, this is capitalism writ large
I cannot wrap my head around why the game industry hasn’t already unionised massively—I hear horror story after horror story and everyone working in the industry seems to have convinced themselves they’re special and it won’t happen to them
To be in the entertainment industry you got to really really really want it. And when you want something that bad you learn to eat a lot of shit because the people with the money that can make it happen know how badly you want to be there.
I am in entertainment too and right now i pretty much work for free because that’s just how it is.
It’s not that hard to understand. The whole gaming industry is filled with people who are super passionate about games, like passionate to a fault. This makes it very, very difficult to unionize as there’s almost always some other game dev out there who would take the job for less pay and more hours.
I actually know a friend like that. He was job jumping a lot, looking for game dev roles almost exclusively. He finally landed such a role. Far as I heard, he’s working overtime a lot (voluntarily) and he earns less than half of what I earn as a “regular” software developer.
Yeah, like the music or movie industry, it’s rife with abuse because there are so many young people who dream of working in it that there’s always fresh meat for the grinder.
And selection pressure means the industry veterans in charge are people who somehow thrived in this environment, so they’re unlikely to change things.
I have a friend who worked in vfx on some very high-profile movies and shows, stuff you have definitely seen. And that industry actually seems even worse! Everyone is a contractor, so you work on one project, and then you don’t have a job anymore, and you better make the bosses happy if you want to get another contract ever again. Everything is stunningly poorly planned, with deadlines that are impossible to meet without working all night, constant last-minute changes from fickle directors and incredible amounts of nitpicking and demands of perfectionism.
This is likely exactly the type of industry they are turning game development into. Because it’s maximum profit with minimum responsibility. Hire the best in the world, squeeze the most work in the shortest time you can out of them, and then toss them to the wind when they’re spent.
AAA dev here; it’s not that. It’s that attempting to standardize development in a highly fluid and innovative sector can kill your competitiveness as a studio if you’re not careful. That being said, unionization is also desperately needed. Blizzard recently unionized across their while studio, which is probably the best model out there right now; allow companies of a certain scale to unionize so that positive and competitive aspects of company culture/organizational structure can be maintained/improved while ensuring worker’s rights against exploitation from the top-down and abused of shareholders/management. Games, and by extension their studios, are intended to be things greater than the sum of their parts, and this is reflected by each company’s unique internal culture; every studio operates differently, and this is directly reflected in the games they end up putting out (OG Valve is a great example). How many big studios have you seen shed a sizeable amount of senior devs, after which they no longer seem to be able to make the same quality games as before? Happens all the time, and this is why; the internal culture and proprietary knowledge-base has had a paradigm shift wherein a lot of the studio’s previous identity has been lost. That’s the magic of gamedev studio culture and the people that create it, and that needs to be protected while also upholding workers’ rights simultaneously. The best way to do that is to allow all members of said culture to create their own rules of union governance from within, not necessarily to have standards that maybe disrupt said culture from without. This is obviously a generalization, as you could additionally have a looser external unionization framework protecting and binding/collectively bargaining on behalf of gamedevs as a class of worker; there is more than one way to skin the cat here. Obviously there’s a “who watches the watchmen” situation that arises here, so this needs to be done in accordance with reforms in worker advocacy laws holistically, because I don’t even need remind anybody of the deluge of “toxic company culture” Kotaku exposés over the years; we certainly need an external and legal framework to push back against that. It’s a tough nut to crack, and it’s why things seem to be moving so slowly. We’re pushing a boulder up a massive hill here while fighting bad actors and neoliberal capitalism at the same time.
so yea, they should unionize.
There are actually quite a few “Hollywood” unions, but unionization rates have fallen dramatically over the past few decades.
- SAG-AFTRA
- IATSE
- Writers Guild of America
- American Society of Cinematographers
- Art Directors Guild
- Costume Designers Guild
- Director’s Guild of America
- Location Managers Guild International
- Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild
- Motion Picture Editors Guild
- Motion Picture Sound Editors
- Producer’s Guild of America
- Production Sound and Video Engineers Guild
- Set Decorators Society of America
- Society of Camera Operators
- Stuntmen’s Association & United Stuntwomen’s Association
Sorry for not engaging with the content, but please add paragraph breaks. kthx
No.
It’s called “a decades long campaign to erode trust and even awareness of unions by corporate business interests”.
We (large European gaming companies employees) have been trying to get a CBA for a year and a half now, sometimes it takes time.
I’m sure it will get a lot worst with AI bs.
Not just unionizing, but getting legislation put forward and passed that protects workers’ rights.
Yeah this would be completely illegal in a lot of countries.
You need to either make the position redundant and then you cant hire anyone for 9months or you show 3 separates instances where they failed to meet the job requirements and were notified. You can’t just fire people for the fuck of it.
TL,DR: Company fires hundreds of workers. CEO makes $25.6 million.
TIL Apex had writing behind it
It’s set in the Titanfall universe, there’s lots of lore scattered around. People work hard to integrate a narrative into the level and character designs, to imply plot in incidental dialogue or cinematics, or just literally write text entries that the majority of gamers will never read because only shooting and rare skins trigger their dopamine.
Honestly developer are making great work with how legends talk to each other during game. It’s always really cool
Nobody asked to have some pointless story injected into their online shooters. I’m pretty sure the people that want world-building and narrative and lore in their games aren’t playing online shooters. I know I’m not.
Ok, well, I am. It’s not “pointless story” it’s entertainment and I’m struggling to come up with a game that has zero plot or setting or characterization. Rocket League maybe.
Had over a thousand hours in Apex, while I quit way back because of different reasons, their actions definitely are not going to bring me back
Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.
I mean, if you want to emulate a corporate ethos, I don’t think Japan should be the benchmark, either…
Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.
They can’t lay people off, so they just put them in a room with no work to do until they get so bored that they quit. It’s the same thing but different.
I’ll take my chances with the boredom room.
forreal I write as a hobby and I spend as much free time at work sticking it to the boss by writing lol. if they literally handed me a room with little stimuli and let me bring my notebook in I’d be living
Just making sure you realize the company would have the copyright for anything you create while on the clock…
“Fuck, well, publish it as another light novel. I’m sure they’ll quit soon.”
You wouldn’t have a notebook. Any and all stimuli would be banned as the purpose is making your experience horrible.
Also, you get incredibly mundane tasks as well. Maybe you’ll get a couple sheets of random symbols and are tasked to count a certain letter. And if you don’t do this task you can be laid off for underperforming.
Exactly, I would start taking naps and watch movies. You can’t bore or shame me into quitting, the second I know it’s a game, I will be breaking a b**** lol
Why would I quit my dream job? Getting paid so sit doing nothing is my life long goal.
Whatever you do, please don’t throw me in the
briar patchboredom room!
In Japan, the barrier to firing workers is much higher than in many other places. Even layoffs for financial reasons are tough and can be challenged. This is one reason companies sit on hordes of cash here is to weather financial issues, but it also has negative economic impacts as well. That said, Nintendo are a bunch of greedy cunts IMO, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut).
In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).
I think a lot of what comes out of Japan is better than the West because they haven’t given up their idea of the company man.
Like it or not, having to switch jobs every few years is going to impact your performance.
Most of you have no idea how much easier it is to process information when you accept that you’ll be doing it the same way for decades.
at least the west is starting to acknowledge the torturous monotony of doing the same job for decades.
Lots of people prefer the comfort of familiarity.
I hope these CEO’s get their reckoning some way some day.
They seem to think it’s all just business and cruelly wielding power is no issue, but I think they overestimate how isolated they are.
If we want them to receive a reckoning, it’s on us, the working class, to force it to happen.
They won’t get any kind of reckoning that we’ll understand. They’re rich, powerful, and insulated from pain. They’ve all got golden parachutes via their weaselly networks. There will be no karma, unfortunately.
I don’t think they will receive a reckoning, but their children might.
It’s especially disgusting when we realize rich people are setting their children up to inherit a world where everyone hates them for being rich from exploitation.
On the one hand it sucks that a writer lost their job. And it’ll never not suck. On the other hand I love when Apex Legends looks bad. I lost Titanfall 3 for that?
In a better universe apex and tf3 could have existed at the same time
Unfortunately we live in the universe where games as a live service is the only model that big companies run on, which means all resources must go to just that one game
I was gonna get snooty about being an indie game buyer, then I remembered that I bought a Larian game developed in partnership with Hasbro, so my snootiness will have to wait for another day.
Hasbro is a requirement for the D&D license, no?
Larian at least went against the grain of the AAAAA Industry and delivered something truly wonderful.
Sure, but they’re still a AAA studio since BG3 is a AAA game. AAA studios can absolutely create wonderful games.
