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Video Games Are a Labor Disaster

Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Video game industry output reflects the people who work in it. Weak, flabby, and effeminate.
 

whydoibother

Arcane
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bulgaristan
Codex Year of the Donut
This article talks about that gamedev union that organized a mass walkout and refusal to work at Riot Games. Did this actually get anything done, or did these people just get fined/fired?
As far as I am aware, this is the single biggest union activity in game development ever, and I can't find any article explaining the eventual outcome of it.

Video game industry output reflects the people who work in it. Weak, flabby, and effeminate.

I think you suffer from that modern equivalent of the survival bias fallacy: shock value bias. You only remember the game developers that outraged you enough to be memorable. You archive all the pink hairs and nose rings in your brain, to forever house them sans rent, but ignore all the normal or cool people.
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
I'm sure artists at big companies charge as much money as they can off a single model because they know they could get fired at the end of the project. Might as well make as much bank as they can before then. The asset sellers, on the other hand, would never get a sale if they charged that much, so they charge what will get them sales. Plus, its not like they need to recoup their loss on one buyer.
 

Poseidon00

Arcane
Joined
Dec 11, 2018
Messages
2,039
This article talks about that gamedev union that organized a mass walkout and refusal to work at Riot Games. Did this actually get anything done, or did these people just get fined/fired?
As far as I am aware, this is the single biggest union activity in game development ever, and I can't find any article explaining the eventual outcome of it.

The one thing game journos could be useful for and they blew it.
 

lycanwarrior

Scholar
Joined
Jan 1, 2021
Messages
1,173
I remember being super hyped for Kingdoms of Amalur. Meanwhile Dragon's Dogma wasn't even on my radar. Holy fuckin shit I was stoopid.

Kingdoms of Amalur was an awesome game, only got around to playing it this year. A great hidden gem, surprised I hadn't heard of this game before last year.
 

whydoibother

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Codex Year of the Donut
I need to pick up Kingdoms of Amalur, I've heard nothing but great things about it.
I've seen Dragon Age: Inquisition's first zone called "single player MMORPG", and Kingdoms of Amalur is a whole game that feels like that. It is very obviously an MMORPG that was recycled into a SP game to recoup some of the investment.
It still had nice visuals and some cool combat mechanics, but I didn't finish it.
 

Azdul

Magister
Joined
Nov 3, 2011
Messages
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Location
Langley, Virginia
Project managers are just doing their job which is making sure you stay on schedule. It's not their fault if the project is bad in conception. They just tell you your trajectories based on your agreed upon estimates. Usually, they do this fine.
Movie director job description is to make sure that movie production stays on budget and on schedule.

I guess it is marketing department responsibility to come up with great movie idea. Great shots - that's camera operator responsibility. If actors hired by studio cannot play their parts - though shit - studio should have hired better actors. If people are calling the movie unwatchable - studio should have hired better advertising agency and prepare better advertising campaign.

The truth is - video games are part of showbusiness. 10% of projects bring 99% of revenue. That's why movie studios hire chaotic egomaniac control freaks who drink on the job to direct the movies rather than someone who is professional, but wants maximum control, minimum responsibility and zero risks, and is not emotionally invested in the project success.
 

whydoibother

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Movie director job description

A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design and all the creative aspects of filmmaking.[1] Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.[2]

Literally first result in Google. Similar with game director, by the way. Kojima is a game director, and very heavily involved with the games creatively. A game director is the AUTHOR of the game, and very much responsible for its quality.
 

copebot

Learned
Joined
Dec 27, 2020
Messages
387
This article talks about that gamedev union that organized a mass walkout and refusal to work at Riot Games. Did this actually get anything done, or did these people just get fined/fired?
As far as I am aware, this is the single biggest union activity in game development ever, and I can't find any article explaining the eventual outcome of it.

That should give you a clue that it failed at accomplishing its objectives. Organized labor was at its peak when it was a terrorist movement. Unless you are killing or credibly threatening to kill the boss, his wife, and his kids, you are not really a union. The other thing is that in the US, federal regulation has essentially strangled private sector unions. They just do not have the bargaining flexibility that they used to have. Bargaining is now a highly regimented and regulated process conducted by attorneys on both sides. It is no longer something driven by bottom up union democracy. None of these programmer union organizations have been much more than academically driven LARPs that are not all that related to the original conception of the labor union as a collective bargaining entity representing very large numbers of semi-skilled workers. None of them have attempted to perform the role of those historic unions in terms of defining roles, certifying skill levels / seniority, and so on despite the many existing entities within the IT industry that could conceivably be coopted into such a union. To add to the difficulty, globalization is essentially a giant union breaking mechanism, especially when considering how easy it is to import software from overseas by running the software dev shops overseas.

To summarize:

1. Unions, historically in the US, were militant groups, meaning they cultivated the ability to kill people and sabotage equipment in furtherance of their political ends. These programmer groups are not militant and make no attempt to cultivate militancy. They have not even sent a single bomb or assassinated a single boss. They have not firebombed a single shareholder's Menlo Park house. That unions in general don't do this as often as they used to is one of the reasons why they have decayed as a political force in the US. In places where they are still in control of various things (such as locked up government construction contracts) they don't need to go to the trouble of whacking people anymore because the local politicos tend not to try to challenge their authority anyway.

2. Federal regulation makes running a real union a high legal overhead enterprise. The lawyers who know a lot about collective bargaining are already working for big unions and the government, which bid their fees far higher than any homosexual fake union of programmers could afford. "Grassroots unions" are unions with no capacity to bargain in a
legally recognized fashion. This makes them toothless, illegitimate, and intrinsically easy to ignore.

3. These programmer unions have not even attempted to perform even the barest functions of unions such as certifying seniority levels, training regimes, defining pay grades ,and so on and so forth. All the articles about "Game Workers Unite" tend to emphasize grassroots demonstrations or internet events rather than real things that unions do that have serious legal teeth. They probably do not try to form real unions because they would be defeated and would not be able to collect sufficient dues to support a real organization.

4. Therefore, these 'unions' are all fake and cannot accomplish their ostensible goals.
 

Azdul

Magister
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Movie director job description

A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay (or script) while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design and all the creative aspects of filmmaking.[1] Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.[2]

Literally first result in Google. Similar with game director, by the way. Kojima is a game director, and very heavily involved with the games creatively. A game director is the AUTHOR of the game, and very much responsible for its quality.
Feargus Urquhart was a game director for Fallout 1 and 2. I remember playing those games - he seems like pretty talented guy, with elaborate artistic taste and deep understanding of role-playing games.

And Kojima must have insane management skills to have hands-on control while usually being abroad and spending 8 hours a day talking to journalists and promoting 'his' current or previous games.

The most jarring example is Keiji Inafune - who was 'father of MegaMan' - which was really news to people who actually worked on MegaMan games.

What I'm trying to say that video games are not like European artistic film projects, and more like Hollywood mega productions. Credit goes to whoever holds most power within the company. But everyone in power will gladly shake any responsibility and blame when project seems to go in wrong direction.
 

whydoibother

Arcane
Patron
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bulgaristan
Codex Year of the Donut
Organized labor was at its peak when it was a terrorist movement. Unless you are killing or credibly threatening to kill the boss, his wife, and his kids, you are not really a union
But then the state has good cause to kill you, and to do so without being accused of just being hitmen for corporate bosses.
As for programmer unions, the issue with these big firms is that capital is much more mobile today than labour is. If you threaten to do some economic damage to a corporation, the investors can just move their money elsewhere, starve you out, and then move their money back in when you agree to negotiate down to their level. The fact is that even Riot Games, which is a big brand with a big product and not just an investor, can afford to simply "not work" for longer than its employees can afford to "not get paid".

The most jarring example is Keiji Inafune - who was 'father of MegaMan' - which was really news to people who actually worked on MegaMan games.
The real hard hitter. Maybe the peons were following his plan, even if they weren't aware of it. Or maybe you are right, and he was about as involved as Bobby Kotick is with World of Warcraft.
 

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,236
The most jarring example is Keiji Inafune - who was 'father of MegaMan' - which was really news to people who actually worked on MegaMan games.
The real hard hitter. Maybe the peons were following his plan, even if they weren't aware of it. Or maybe you are right, and he was about as involved as Bobby Kotick is with World of Warcraft.
Inafune was the producer, he didn't direct the games.
 

Deflowerer

Arcane
Joined
May 22, 2013
Messages
2,052
I don't get it, why don't they just reuse assets more? EA's a big ass company with lots of IPs, why not just reuse a lot of the assets, maybe touch them up a bit on a per-game basis? You'd think that would save a lot of time and money; or do they already do this? If so, wtf, why are games that expensive then?

Because autists on RPG Codex will start screeching and complaining.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I don't see anyone calculating these costs correctly. Some have mentioned the iteration process, but there's way more to it.

You have to also factor in the costs of things like hiring process, training, hardware, software licenses, health insurance, taxes, bonuses, office space, air conditioning, electricity, meetings of debatable value, team events, a proportional amount of the manager's costs all the way up the reporting chain, and more.
 

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