You don't have to be a star in order to collectively bargain, you just need to organize with your colleagues.
If the Weinstein scandal is any indication, no it hasn't. Unions are not without their problems, while more widespread awareness about the actual working conditions in any given industry (be it acting or game development) is highly effective, one way or the other. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Issues in getting jobs have to do with the limited supply of capitalized projects, high project transactional costs (including fairly high financial, equipment and professional costs), restrictions upon actor country of origin on the basis of bilateral entertainment tax treaties and a number of other structural issues. All of these issues mean that there's a substantial amount of activation energy required to get an entertainment product off the ground, which limits the amount of product projects in motion at any given time.
Feel free to look up the various guild pay grades. The minimums are very low, and they're designed to prevent the 'be in this motion picture for free for exposure' race to the bottom, not to price small projects out of the market.
It takes some fighting and searching to get all three, the last seeming most hard. But it is possible and not really hard.
Collective bargaining would not yield Tom Cruise-like returns or even exceptional returns.
The reason is that devs are ultimately a commodity.
Actors, by the way - even good ones - are even more of a commodity. There are tons of spectacular actors who would work cheap.
What brings in the audience is not the quality of the acting, it's the familiarity of the person, or the 'living brand'.
The 'human being Tom Cruise' obviously has the most amazing, unbreakable IP protection on the 'brand Tom Cruise'.
And it's the 'brand Tom Cruise' that has value. (And He only has to be a decent actor, not a even a great one)
Unions might help with some things ... but generally that's not going to be it.
The other thing to consider is the hugely risky and hit-driven nature of the business. Any 'investor' in games is risking so much, that the returns may be a little biased.
Consider that even for a game that 'made a lot of money' - it still may not be rational to have invested in that game! It still maybe overall a 'bad investment' to invest in such things.
A union could do a lot for those who work in the game industry. Game developers work such insane hours during crunch time when there's really no need for it. With a union mandating a standard work week, the onus would be put on the producers of the game to plan effectively in order to meet a deadline.
Game producers would have us all believe that games are uniquely complicated in a way that sets them apart from films and requires such ridiculous time commitments. That's rubbish. The vast majority of the work that goes into a triple A game is asset creation (graphics and sound). This makes games extremely similar to films which are dominated by CG and post-production work these days.
Some games, especially follow ons of well established 'game brands' I can see as being less risky ... but for new titles?
But yes, there's no reason for the countless hours, that's basically just taking advantage of creatives no doubt and admittedly unions may help in some way.
People caught onto this in comic books, however. There are savvy readers who follow writers and artists, not characters. There are savvy fans of Anime who do this as well. There are even people who do this with books and movies. There are some gamers who do this with games.
Same old story. There are those fooled by surfaces, and those who try to see beneath them.
Yes, but game developers aren't the ones doing the art, or writing, for games.
If somebody thinks they can get more money with less effort then we want them to try working that way instead.
In other words, corporations make a cost/benefit calculation. In the case of software developers and lead software developers, my experience is that most corporations can concretely read the dollar amount as cost, but often drastically underestimate the potential cost of bad software.
There are situations where many people are valued below market for a long, long time. Markets aren't omniscient and infinitely fast.
Funds flowing to proven creators, successful entrepreneurs and shrewd investors is a good thing because those are exactly the people who know how to deploy those assets productively.
Having said all that, I've no idea specifically about Carmack.
How to link investors up with startups and growth opportunities in businesses is an old problem that ideally needs multiple solutions available.
[rant]I think the success of capitalism has partially been the reward mechanism, but it's also been that it allows and encourages multiple mechanisms for capital to link up with investment opportunities. The alternatives have all offered grand ideal, theoretically perfect mechanisms for the distribution and allocation of assets. It's not that those mechanisms are necessarily all useless, I do think a degree of state capitalism and central planning for really big, long term or essential projects have their place, but they can't be the only solution. At it's core capitalism is about individual freedom, and that includes the freedom to own your own small business, or to aggregate together into large group enterprises like banks and corporations, or to vote for governments that fund essential services. These are not natural opposites IMHO, and ideologies on the left or the right that force them into opposition do so only because they themselves are flawed.[/rant]
Even games released by superstars like Edmund Mcmillen have flops. The culture around game designers isn't to this point YET.
Sid Meyer Christy Marx Richard Garriott
Well at least i did anyway. Maybe i am alone in this.