Game Developer Unions

I don’t think that works. Rod’s goals are to reduce friction/overhead and align incentives. Just outsourcing content production doesn’t help with either of those. In fact these things are probably going to get worse, since coordination across company boundaries is going to be a lot more painful than inside a company.

So my guess is that the idea isn’t to outsource bulk asset creation, but to design games that don’t need tens of people working on content. That’s certainly a model that’s worked well for some studios.

My humble opinion:

Maybe the game industry need to addopt the “royalties” system.

User case:
You worked your ass to develop Skyrim, but every time a new Skyrim copy is sell, you will receive a check that month.

Why I think this work:
If you own a bussines, it make sense to work 100 hours a week. On the success of this company depends your entire life.
If you don’t own a bussines, you are a salary men, and the company bankrupt. You just find another job. You can be working for a different company the next week.

If you are going to burn yourself has developer by working 100 hours a week and probably hurt your future. You should be more like the bussines owner, and less like the salary men. Royalties is the capitalism solution to that.

Financial industry has very high demands - often requiring a minimum of 12 hour days, especially in global markets. But definitely at the end of the year, there is the expectation of bonuses in line with both the company’s profits and that you “played the game” correctly (worked all those hours).These bonuses for the good companies are quite substantial. But man does that work grind you to a nub.

Eh, that’s just the minimum that’s legally required to be an exempt employee. I don’t know that’s the “bulk” of them.
No software engineer is making that. They’re making $50k, the first year out of school, easy… no matter where they’re working. In a bigger metro area, they’re going to be making way more.

Again, maybe not “rockstar money”, but it’s definitely a very comfortable living.

Honestly, if you want to look into exploitation, I’d first look at the diploma mills that are non-accredited schools handing out useless game design degrees, with ads on TV telling kids that making games involves just sitting around playing games.

Uhmmmm. No. Haven’t done anything like a hard crunch since I left the Game Industry a decade and a half ago, and have spent the time in big tech.

100 hour weeks seems extreme to me, but I can say that crunch time definitely exists outside the game industry.

It’s definitely not the norm though. It’s a rare thing that happens when a project is due and things have gone a bit awry.

It’s more than 5x18 hour days, or 7x14 hour days.

So this is what is happening. I read somewhere that the average age people leave the game industry is 27.

As someone who has made a career in the industry and wants it to be healthy and to excel at what it does, I want that to stop because I’ve seen too many great creative people leave games. And it’s incredibly demanding work, so we need those experienced folks.

Also, don’t assume that most video game developers are software engineers. Not by a long shot. On a team of 55, we have 8 engineers and a couple of QA engineers who might be able to jump quickly into another tech job.

Also also, you can be insouciant about switching jobs, but it’s disruptive and stressful. I know it’s fashionable to promote fluidity of labor in our modern economy, but the reality is that those are people leaving their homes to find jobs, maybe never even having the opportunity to create a home for themselves because they’re chasing jobs from one city to another. That takes a psychological toll on people that I think we’ve barely started to take an accounting of.

It’s been fun and enlightening. I am out. All salient issues have been “solved”.

1.) This thread should be titled “Unions in the Game Industry”. The issue is inexorably tied to unionization in the tech industry, and to a lesser extent getting some specialties representation in specific pre-existing guilds and unions.

2.) The people who work there need to unionize; owners and Corporate entities exist to make profits/accomplish goals not set up unions, it is not in their interest to do so. It never will be. This means reaching out and organizing.

Fun note!

The organization I work for hired me as an exempt employee with no access to overtime and the possibility of unlimited working hours (and during our major institutes and interview periods, that comes to fruition heavily; a week of 12-hour days isn’t at all uncommon at that point).

I got hired at $35,000. Less 6% for the mandatory retirement plan.

Just a fun thought for those who labor under the assumption that folks with potentially shitty work contracts are always well-compensated in return!

Vs. the figures that @Timex linked a little later.

Timex’s link actually lists a ton of duties that I do not in any way have. I’m in no way managerial. I’m a glorified secretary + actual events planner + de facto tech support guy in a small nonprofit. Per my own organization’s hiring standards I don’t meet the bar for exempt. . . and yet here I am!

. . . I should really try to leave.

Haha, yup. I’ve mentioned several times around here I’m a chef. The pay in this industry is abysmally low and you’re expected to work 60+ hours/week in most kitchens. At a minimum. I mean sure, you’re making more than your cooks make on paper, but you make the same or less hourly, for sure. If you don’t accept that, you get told ‘you’re just not passionate enough about the food’. Hahaha.

Oh, yeah, i realize that most of the game development community isn’t actually engineers. So that’s fair. My experience is just from the tech side, and encountering those guys.

And honestly, for those guys, there’s a good market outside the game community.

Actually, even for the artists, there’s a growing market in the modeling and simulation community. We need 3D artists. It’s just that they aren’t making cool looking characters and crap. They’re making boring stuff. But the pay’s good, and they don’t need to work 100 hour weeks.

Note, executive duties are just one of the different types of exemption groups.

It sounds like you’d fall into the “Administrative” exemption.

Exempt Administrative job duties.

The most elusive and imprecise of the definitions of exempt job duties is for exempt “administrative” job duties.

The Regulatory definition provides that exempt administrative job duties are

(a) office or nonmanual work, which is
(b) directly related to management or general business operations of the employer or the employer’s customers, and
(c) a primary component of which involves the exercise of independent judgment and discretion about
(d) matters of significance.

It’s an odd feeling knowing my employer’s short-sighted cheapness in switching a bunch of analysts over to hourly so they don’t have to pay out the exempt level benefits (and insistence on no overtime) is the only thing keeping me from 50-60 hour weeks.

I was pretty pissed at first but now that we’re ~50% staffed should really be thanking them.

I assure you, I have very little opportunity to exercise independent judgment or make decisions on matters of consequence.

Not in California.

How are they paying 23k when the law is:

California Labor Code Section 515.5 provides that certain computer software employees are exempt from overtime pay if particular criteria are met. One of the required criteria is that the employee’s rate of pay not be less than a certain threshold dollar amount. Effective Jan. 1, 2018, an employer can choose to pay an exempt computer software employee an hourly rate of at least $43.58 per hour or a salary of at least $7,565.85 per month ($90,790.07 annually).

Is there a section of law in CA that has an asterisks that allows them to just… ignore this but only for gaming?

Here’s another one that words it differently too:

California labor laws require most employers to follow certain rules—like paying overtime, tracking hours, or providing rest breaks. Some types of jobs, however, are exempt from these requirements. An exempt employee is someone whose job is not subject to one or more sets of wage and hour laws.

In most cases, there are three simple requirements to determine whether a worker is an exempt employee under California law:

  • Minimum Salary. The employee must be paid a salary that is at least twice the state minimum wage for full-time employment.
  • White Collar Duties. The employee’s primary duties must consist of administrative, executive, or professional tasks.
  • Independent Judgment. The employee’s job duties must involve the use of discretion and independent judgment.

Source: https://wrklyrs.com/Exempt

Which is not tech specific.

A bit of both. In part as @jsnell accurately surmises a large part of the game is creating things vs playing through content. However everyone on the team is also a generalist who can take on multiple roles. Most people on the team have either been solo indies or lead programmers on major projects so we are very programmer heavy. We have one person currently who is not a programmer and she is studio COO who also doubles as external director and many other roles.

We are not a fixed story based game but if we were then for sure the team make up would be different.

For our art we deliberately have not hired an art director yet, simply because I have been on many projects where an art director’s style did not match the work, which led to real problems so we are establishing our art style with external partners before an art director comes in. When we do, that person ideally will also be a programmer but at a minimum will need to be able to set up and manage all the production pipelines for our asset needs.

Finally all this is happening within a larger publisher (we are internal) who has taken the bold step of giving us HBO like freedom to make our game any way we want, we have money and a date with business goals. Beyond that we have complete creative freedom which is nice.

The studio model is tailored for this specific project but ideally if we are a success then perhaps there maybe something other colleagues can steal ideas from. Of course if we fail then all this thinking about structure will be wasted, I do hope we dont :)

Well, diploma mills in general. It’s one of the reasons I hate the whole “STEM” campaign, which seems to be designed to push people into low-grade tech training so they can be good drones rather than actually get people to go to real schools to learn, say, actual engineering or science. I’d say there are more general tech school diploma mills than game focused ones.

I also think the conversation gets skewed talking about engineers. Making games is a technical field but it is also a creative and artistic field. There are tons of designers and artists in the business, and they do not have anywhere near the leverage or compensation opportunities, overall, that programmers have.

It has one. Devs (the company) acquire royalties based on sales of a game. How much of that money makes it into the hands of programmers, artists, etc is not something I can speak to. But publisher contracts are typically heavily skewed in favor of the publisher, and devs often have to trade off future royalties for more development money up front (since contract negotiations are usually very one-sided). Or, they miss on royalties based on absurd contract provisions (which again come from one party having so much power it can often dictate these things).

Royalties, for a variety of reasons, often never manifest.

I am in tech and I have no reason whatsoever to unionize. Because I’m sane, I choose not to pursue a “traditional” career in game development. I make very good money. I frequently work at very flexible, very friendly companies that do things like unlimited vacation (which is not just a startup thing, and actually works great given a couple of conditions are met). I’ve worked at companies that sold enterprise software to Banks and Hospitals virtually everyone here will have heard of, and smaller companies. And some of the big(ger) ones still did the things I talked about that made the jobs good.

I’ve barely done any crunch in my years of development. You throw crunch at me, I walk. It’s simple and it’s an easy rule to follow given the prevalence of developer jobs. Most of the companies I worked for fucking gave a shit (strange how that ends up working, and it’s always amazing to watch businesses get this wrong over and over and then fail and wonder why), and when I needed to be on call to e.g. monitor an install or upgrade I was frequently ordered not to be at work once everything was running smoothly for comparable, if not more, time. They didn’t all do that, but more have than not.

While unionization could help with some of the abuse that goes on in gaming and in some parts of of tech, it won’t fix the actual problems so those benefits are not appealing to me (those problems have to do with traditional corporate leadership being fucking dumb). As more and more firms look to remote employment, and as many firms simply don’t go down the road of forcing crunch, my need to unionize does not appear to be set to grow. There’s actually some sort of union I can join in the state I live in but no thanks.

Game developers unfortunately have it very bad. The industry is inflicting horrible amounts of self-harm (to say nothing of the harm it inflicts on it’s workers) because it’s not developing enough senior tech people (since many of them - at least those doing coding/qa/etc - burn out and leave). If they need to unionize to get that fixed more power. But they’re not going to get direct unionized help from the tech industry at large, I suspect.