Game Developer Unions

Games
143

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.

144

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.

145

Ya, I admit that this is my own bias, just because I’ve dealt with the engineers most.

That being said, there’s also a growing market for the artists in the greater modeling and simulation community. There are increasing numbers of positions for 3D artists in the M&S industry… they’re just making a lot less interesting stuff than game characters and levels.

I suspect that there actually may be an increasing market for the gameplay designers as well, although they may need to tweak their skills to fit training more than just games. As it stands, in a lot of training simulations, you have folks who are “instructional designers”, but the problem is that they have no idea how games work.

So, you end up with “serious games” which aren’t really games at all. They’re lame, boring, training systems with some superficial “gamisms” slapped onto the front of them, because the designers never played games and didn’t understand what made games fun.

I can see an opening for game designers in this kind of role for industrial training applications.

Again, maybe not as glamorous as games, but good pay and normal hours.

146

So, let me answer this from an outside perspective, as someone working as a software engineer in Sweden, where work conditions are “slightly different” from what I see described in this thread. Here, unions are (or have been) a Big Thing for about the last 100 years. In recent years, especially among the younger generation, people aren’t joining the unions anymore.

What’s it like? It’s pretty much non-obtrusive. I pay a membership fee, and they leave me pretty much alone. In software development, it’s easy to find work and the benefits are generally very good, although there was one year back in '08 or '09 where the only reason I got a raise was because of the minimum raise negotiated by the union (non-union people got nothing). But in general as far as salary goes, the biggest gains come from changing employers, not from collective bargaining.

Bit of both really. And of course a lot of the difference comes from political philosophy with the right generally hating on the unions, and the left liking them. Some unions are viewed as creating problems for small business owners, and there’s a perception that the bigger ones can be corrupt and more interested in power than working for their members. So, mixed.

Here’s where it gets interesting in the comparison. A century of strong unions combined with pretty much half a century of social democratic political hegemony has left us with strong worker protection laws. For example, while we have a similar thing as “exempt salaried worker” (no fixed hours of work), there’s a basic law that says that a person must only work 40 hours a week, averaged over 4 weeks. There’s a provision for overtime to exceed that, but it’s capped at like 200 hours over a whole year, so you’d be maxed out after 2-3 weeks of Rockstar crunch. No employer can ask you to work more, nor should it be in any way expected. Couple that with a pretty strong “casus belli” requirement to actually fire someone, you’re pretty safe in refusing excessive overtime.

Crunch would be further combatted by the daily and weekly rest rules, saying that you must be allowed 11 hours of continuous rest out of every 24 hours, and 36 hours of continuous rest every 7 days. Oh, and of course you are also mandated by law five weeks of vacation every year.

None of this are things that employers would have granted out of the goodness of their hearts, they are rights that have been fought for and won by unions. Granted, today, with these protections made law, they might not provide me with much individual benefit, but I consider being unionised almost as important as I consider being vaccinated. It’s herd immunity for workers against exploitation by employers. I might not ever suffer it even had I not been a member, but my membership might just help someone else in a bad spot.

147

OMG I have to steal that. The right has always been banging on about unions stifling business, but unionisation is the only historically proven way to stop worker exploitation. There is so much power imbalance in the typical employment relation (1 job for what, 20 candidates?), the only way employees can tip the balance is to band together.

Sure there are bad union apples out there (the most cases I see are incompetence, i.e. can’t help members, rather than corruption). But as long as there is power imbalance, and unless you can get worker protection magically sign into law and have robust enforcement (again labour law breach here is all too often go unreported, so I have some idea on what @Juan_Raigada is saying), you still need to band together in a union and fight for your rights.

So if the game industry can come up with innovative solution other than union to stop worker exploitation, then by all means go for it. But all the horror stories suggest the industry can’t, especially in US with that exempt BS. As a gamer, I want people making games to be happy people making games that make me happy. I am not so selfish as to wanting the creators to suffer unnecessarily just so I can play a mere game.

148

Reading through all the comments, by @ArmandoPenblade, @Timex and @Nightgaunt makes apparent that recommendations or guidelines aren’t very effective at tempering the impulse to squeeze as much productivity (?) from junior staff as they can get away with. Here in Australia, junior positions are paid on the basis of hourly rates…

Want to come to Australia to develop games? It used to be a cool thing to do!

149

I have nothing to say here. But I get confort to be in the same place so awesome people, so I will post stuff from my favorite thinker, Nietzshe. Perhaps somebody will find something useful from this. I will quote things from this website:

Because people hate philosophers, I am going to post something else for the eyes only.

Somebody allocating 100 hours a week for their developers is probably CMMI level 1.

Woops, maybe I said too much.

150

I’ve seen better uses of Nietzsche to justify psicopathy, so I’ll keep waiting for my own reading to know what he meant.

151

2K closed down their Australian studio didn’t they, a few years ago? I bet when they realise there is no way to skirt overtime pay, they don’t see the economic sense. SAD!

There are also game industry jobs in New Zealand, the industry just isn’t big. I personally know someone who is working in mobile games, so there is that. And if you want “real” game jobs, Grinding Gear Games, who make Path of Exile in West Auckland, is hiring in all positions. They are all local outfits. GGG may have a new Chinese overlord though (bought out by Tencent recently). And there is the DayZ mod creator Dean Hall (or at least he is one of the creators…) and his outfit Rocketwerkz way down in Dunedin, who is also hiring. (Dean Hall used the money he cashed out from DayZ to start that. DayZ so far hasn’t shipped, so take it whatever way you want…)

http://i.imgur.com/aTCTq40.gif

The problem with moving for jobs is that if you are an unattached 20-30 year old, it is completely doable. But as you get older you get friends, boy/girlfriend, family and all that kind of attachments, it is not so easy to uproot to another part of the country/world and start over. Attachments keep you sane, so I’m not saying they are bad. It is just hard moving.

152

Another story of Rockstar and crunch. I’d argue that games should probably fire a good 90% of their project managers if crunch is this prevalent but…

  1. It’s obviously a cultural expectation, driven from the upper leadership
  2. Young people are easy to exploit, especially when games is their “dream job”.

It’s a feature, not a bug. The hard part is going to be convincing a bunch of people in their dream job that it’s in their best interest to unionize. There’s no shortage of kids graduating high school or college that think they want to make video games for a living.

153

Good memory. It was never clear to me why they did that. The exchange rate was reasonable in 2014, and these days oz ass is very cheap (in USD).

154

There’s already a shift in the game industry to use cheaper talent in other countries. Very often programming and art are farmed out to contractors in China and Russia. Unionizing employees would likely accelerate this trend and result in net job losses domestically.

155

Well, a net loss of crappy jobs.
Sometimes I wonder, if that happens, when the job works you to the bone and pays you pittance, do we really care that we lose it? Actually, shouldn’t we be grateful that the job no longer exists?

I had the same argument with a conversative friend who argued that high minimum wage would mean the the automatization of fast food jobs. I thought, is that a problem? Is it awful if these jobs good away? We, the people of America, already subsidize these jobs, since many employees get paid so little and require food stamps and other assistance. Why should the American people pick up the tab where the Company failed to.

The counter argument would always be that these jobs are for kids, and so we could pay them less. Which seems silly. If two people do a job, and both have the same output, than shouldn’t both get paid the same, regardless of the wage? And if the adult does a better job, than don’t hire the teenager. They shouldn’t have a job anyway. They should be in school, or studying or taking SAT prep, or volunteer at a homeless shelter, or perhaps read a book. All of these are better uses of they time then some minimum wage job were they learn to flip burgers.

So, outsourcing sucks, but it’s not a persuasive argument about why people shouldn’t be treated better and get paid better at their job.

156

Nietzsche only provide the tools to create meaning. He don’t offer a meaning because people is lazy and they would use the offered one, instead of creating their own.

Binding this to the topic of the thread:

If working 100 hours a week is the right thing for you*, for all that is holy, go and burn yourself with it. #YOLO

I like this anime and talk about going above and beyond the accepted norms, to achieve a goal that is beyond the imaginable reach.

https://.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes

157

God, please no. Philosophers are just little bitches who didn’t understand the scientific method. Let’s just move away from them. Next you’ll be citing Freud and my god, that just isn’t healthy.

if you want some interesting reading, I suggest “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain”, by Damasio. It’s an easy read. In fact, Damasio has a few books on interesting topics and looking back at what Philosophers got wrong and right.

158

God, please no. Philosophers are just little bitches who didn’t understand the scientific method. Let’s just move away from them. Next you’ll be citing Freud and my god, that just isn’t healthy.

I think they’re fine in moderation. I took a 301 Philosophy class in college, and it taught me more enduring and useful ideas than the majority of my engineering classes. There’s this cliche that you go to college to “learn how to learn”, but the Phil classes were the only ones that actually tried to do that and get you thinking about your own thinking. You could probably get similar results from extensive CBT, or reading a long list of carefully curated books, but the Philosophy classes aren’t a bad avenue either.

That being said, I’d be extremely wary about handing Nietzsche to anyone under 40 years old.

159

I’m left with the impression that you’ve not had much exposure to philosophy.

Philosophical questions cannot simply be answered by the scientific method. The universe doesn’t really care about issues of morality and ethics. Science can’t tell you how to understand your own personal experiences. It’s merely a framework for ordering them after the fact.

Philosophy is more about how to think.

160

LOL - science can’t understand your personal experiences? I laugh at that! One day, Neuroscience will be able to do that, and so much more! We are just a walking chemical reaction at all!
Today, we have research showing that your political leanings are all biological prejudices at work! The science is out there. We have tests to see how sensitive you are to rewards, punishments, fun and novelty. One day, one day we’ll know it all!

Seriously though, one should study philosophy for the same reason one studies history. It’s important to know where the ideas came from and how they evolved. These days, the world of philosophy isn’t made up of philosophers though. It’s made up of people with the titles “Behavioral Economist”, “Cognitive Psychologist”, “Neuroscientist” “Physicist” and “Sociologist”.

Probably the most cited person in the 21st century, Noam Chomsky, majored in Linguistics and is considered a Cognitive Scientists as well as a modern philosopher. As the times move on, and the tools open up, good philosophers become great scientists. Few people strive to be a philosopher anymore because science takes over.

The field of philosophy no longer stands on its own because it doesn’t need to. People still ponder great questions about the human experience (I believe they are called Literature Majors) but now we are at a point were some tools have been available. The Scientific Method and Statistical Analysis has given us the means to test these ideas. fMRI’s allow us to see the brain in action (although still up to interpretation). Real life gives us the chance to see people react.

There is a reason that Assimov made up the term “Psychohistory” rather than plain old philosophy and that is because as more tools become available, more of the field of philosophy will be co opted by other fields.

Before Chomsky, we had Isaac Newton, considered a physicist today, but at the time he was a natural philosopher. As we know more, people’s titles and roles change. You start out as a philosopher one day, and the next, you are considered the founder of genetics.

Currently, Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology has co-opted many philosophers as we find new ways to answer the questions that they used to ponder.

So for me, citing philosophers is like citing Jesus. Very cool and probably correct, but I wouldn’t bring it up as an argument without other supporting facts (unless it was with other Christians but that’s different. What would Jesus do? is a loaded question, especially with how the far right seems to answer it. Literately, a loaded question. As in, “Jesus would want me to load my guns and shot people I disagree with” sort of answer, which is not what I think Jesus would do!)

161

One of the neat habits that my college class encouraged was to state your argument, and then think about the best counter argument to your argument, and so on, before actually taking a position. It encourages self examination and testing of your ideas as much as is feasible with the human mind. It’s similar to how in programming, you don’t want to just code for the main expected case, you also want to flip things around and think how things might break and how you can write tests for that. So with that in mind, can you think of any flaws in what you wrote? :D

162

What, that without philosophy there would be no science? Sure, but you don’t have to learn how the Warwolf was built to understand how a level can be used to throw a projectile.

I’m not going to bother reading 17th century agriculture practices before starting my garden either.

Personally, I’d love to know how are the philosophers of the 21st century? Where are they today?

Besides Chomsky. He is a cognitive scientist.